Compulsory purchase order – Publication of order – Right to challenge order within six weeks – Meaning of within six weeks – Application by Secretary of State to strike out refused – Appeal allowed
Kingston-upon-Hull City Council made a compulsory purchase order upon property owned by the applicant. In due course the order was confirmed. As required by section 18 of the Acquisition of Land Act 1981 the council published notice of the making of the order in the local newspapers. By section 23(1) and (2) a person aggrieved by a compulsory purchase order may apply to the court to determine the validity of an order. Section 23(4) of the Act provided that time for an application to the court was to be “within six weeks from the date on which notice of the confirmation or making of an order was first published”. It was agreed that the day of publication was to be left out of the calculation and that therefore the six weeks ran from Tuesday , June 18 1996. The applicant’s notice of originating motion was issued on Tuesday, July 30 1996. The Secretary of State for the Environment submitted that it was one day out of time. The question was whether an application made to the court on the sixth Tuesday after the Tuesday on which time began to run had been “made within six weeks”. The Secretary of State contended that time expired on midnight, Monday, July 29 when six full weeks of 7 days had run. The applicant contended that if on Tuesday one is asked to do something “within a week”, it can be done at any time up to and including the following Tuesday and likewise where the period was of six weeks. The judge, dismissing the application to strike out, concluded that six weeks beginning on a Tuesday ended six Tuesdays later, and that an act done on the final Tuesday was therefore an act done “within” six weeks and dismissed the application. The Secretary of State appealed.
Held The appeal was allowed.
1. As a matter of first impression and commonsense, if a notice under section 23(4) of the Act was published on a Monday and six weeks was given to challenge it, that six weeks ended by midnight on the Monday six weeks later. The application to challenge the order had therefore been made out of time and would be struck out.
2. The court would bear in mind that the statute prescribed a six-week time-limit for making the application to the High Court which the courts had no power to extend. Such an application was the only means by which such an order could be challenged. The time-limit and the limited scope of appeal provided indicated that Parliament intended such application to be dealt with expeditiously: see Burton v Secretary of State for Transport [1988] 2 EGLR 35 per Woolf LJ .
John Litton (instructed by the Treasury Solicitor) appeared for the Secretary of State for the Environment; Prashant Popat (instructed by Leigh Williams, of Bromley) appeared for the respondent.
