A senior judge in the Court of Appeal has said oil and natural gas exploration and commercial extraction should be treated as different in planning law.
The comments come in a ruling written by Sir Keith Lindblom, the senior president of tribunals, in a dispute between a local residents’ association in Sussex and extractor Angus Energy.
Frack Free Balcombe Residents Association has been opposing plans by Cuadrilla and Angus to drill for oil and gas since 2013 “by any legal means available”, according to its website.
Since 2023 it has been fighting a decision by a planning inspector to give Argus temporary planning permission to explore a nearby geological formation for hydrocarbons. The permission lasts for 30 months and stipulates the site must be restored after tests are completed.
FFBRA challenged the ruling as far as the Court of Appeal and the case was heard in January this year in front of a three-judge panel. The ruling was handed down last week.
At the hearing, FFBRA’s lawyer, David Wolfe KC, argued the planning inspector who approved the project made a mistake in law because he didn’t consider the damaging effects of commercial production.
However, in his judgment, Lindblom LJ rejected the argument.
“In this case… there was never any doubt about the nature and extent of the development proposed. It was solely a development of hydrocarbon ‘exploration and appraisal’,” he said.
“It was not a development of commercial production. This was clear in the application for planning permission itself” and through the appeals process.
The difference between “exploration and appraisal” and “production” as separate operations is clear in national planning policy, he said.
“As the inspector clearly understood, the benefits of the proposed development of exploration and appraisal on this site came not from the assumed benefits of a possible future development of commercial production, but from the opportunity to discover whether there existed here a commercially viable resource of hydrocarbons capable of contributing to energy security” he said.
“Whether the benefits – and the harm – attributable to a development of commercial production would ever come about was, at this stage, a matter of speculation. They depended on the outcome of some future proposal, which might never be made. But the benefits of exploration and appraisal did not depend on a future proposal. They depended, as the inspector knew, on the proposal now before him.”
He said there was no error in public law and dismissed the appeal.
Frack Free Balcombe Residents Association v Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government and others
Court of Appeal (Lindblom LJ, Singh LJ, Holgate LJ) 16 April 2025
