Council owning site – Villagers offering to buy site and applying for planning permission – Developer offering to buy site for higher price subject to planning permission – Planning committee granting development company planning permission – Villagers seeking judicial review of committee’s decision – Whether application predetermined by committee preventing proper exercise of discretion – Application dismissed
The applications related to the site of a 200-year old unused mill standing on the River Allen between Wimborne and Cranbourne about 1 km from Witchampton Village, Dorset. The site comprised approximately 2.8 ha and was located within a designated area of outstanding natural beauty. The mill and the buildings were in varying states of disrepair. In 1983 the then district council purchased the site. However the plans for its restoration failed. It was agreed that the part of the site should be demolished and funds for clearance were to be generated by permitting a limited form of residential development on the site. The local villagers formed a committee, of which the applicant was the secretary, which proposed to purchase the site for £250,000 from the council and to build four new houses. Accordingly they submitted a planning application. Subsequently a developer, Y, entered into a contract to purchase the site for £600,000 conditional upon being granted planning permission. Although planning permission for a development on the site was granted, Y did not purchase the site. The council then accepted an offer of £520,000 from P, conditional upon acceptable planning permission being granted. The council as vendors agreed not to object or obstruct any proposed application, to co-operate with the buyer and to submit a letter of support to the local planning authority. A meeting of the planning committee took place in January 1997 in order to considered P’s plan for the site. At the meeting councillor N was noted as saying, “Our duty is to realise the best price but I worry about the scale of this”. The committee decided to grant P planning permission. The applicant applied for judicial review of the decision to grant permission to P and sought leave to apply for judicial review of the decision to grant permission to Y. The applicant contended that it was an inevitable inference that the best price which could be obtained was the planning committee’s over-riding criterion which was an irrelevant consideration for the committee to take into account. It was submitted that accordingly the committee’s subsequent decision to approve P’s application was invalid.
Held The application was dismissed.
1. The tests adopted to establish whether a planning committee had been biased in determining a planning application were not relevant because the complaint was not of bias in the sense of any member of the decision-making body having a pecuniary interest in the outcome. The complaint was the jurisprudentially different one of predetermination or predisposition, and the appropriate test was whether the council acting in their capacity as the local planning authority had predetermined the matter before them with the effect of preventing them from exercising a proper discretion.
2. There was nothing which showed that the council had been prevented from exercising a proper discretion and when N’s remark was put into proper context there was nothing sinister which could or should have been read into it, and therefore there were no grounds on which the applications could be granted.
Ian Glen QC and Ewan Paton (instructed by Preston & Redman, of Bournemouth) appeared for the applicant; Richard Humphreys (instructed by Sharpe Pritchard, London agents for East Dorset District Council) appeared for the local authority.
