Planning permission for 129 homes and more than 1,500 sq m of offices at a business park in Thame, Oxfordshire, has survived a High Court challenge brought by the local parish council.
The redevelopment of the DAF Trucks site at Kingsmead Business Park, which also includes a 68-bed care home, was approved by a planning inspector in March 2020, after it was initially rejected by South Oxfordshire District Council.
Thame Town Council took the matter to court, claiming that the inspector had misunderstood or misapplied policies in the development plan for the area, failed to take into account material considerations and reached a decision that was “irrational”.
It objected to the loss of employment land through partial residential redevelopment, but in his decision the inspector found that a warehouse on the site was no longer commercially viable, and that the existing office building benefited from an extant prior approval for conversion to flats, which formed the fallback position against which the new scheme should be measured.
Dismissing all of the parish council’s grounds of challenge and upholding the planning permission, Mrs Justice Lang said: “In my judgment, the inspector’s reasoning was both logical and rational. The decision to grant permission for the proposed development was, in my view, a legitimate exercise of planning judgment by the inspector.”
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