Respondent council granting conditional planning consent for construction of access road – Environmental statement not required of or provided by developer – Whether respondents’ decision unlawful – Application allowed
In May 1997 Greene King Brewery plc applied for planning permission for the construction of an access road over water meadows in Bury St Edmunds. In June 1997 a council planning officer made a decision, under regulation 9 of the Town and Country Planning (Assessment of Environmental Effects) Regulations 1988, not to require Greene King to submit an environmental statement. The respondents granted conditional planning consent for the construction of the road in January 1998. There was no dispute that the proposed development fell within Schedule 2 to the 1988 Regulations. By virtue of regulation 4(2), “the local planning authority . . . shall not grant planning permission pursuant to an application to which this regulation applies unless they have first taken the environmental information into consideration and state in their decision that they have done so”.
The applicant, a local resident, sought to quash both the decision of the planning officer and of the respondents’ planning committee on the ground that the respondents had failed to carry out the necessary environmental impact assessment. The respondents submitted that the planning committee would have reached the same conclusion as the planning officer. Furthermore, had an environmental statement been required, the local authority would have granted permission in any event.
Held: The application was allowed.
The decision of whether or not to require an applicant to submit an environmental statement was an important one. If a local authority wished to delegate that decision to an officer, they had to do so formally. The respondents had not done so and, therefore, the planning officer’s decision was quashed. The decision not to require an environmental statement could not be said to be Wednesbury unreasonable. A planning authority acting reasonably and applying the correct test to the facts, would be entitled to conclude that it was not likely that the effects on the environment of the proposed road would be significant. However, if an environment assessment had been made, the result of the planning application would not necessarily have been the same. The planning committee did not have the same “environmental information” as they would have had, had a statement been submitted. Thus, this was not a case for the court to exercise its discretion not to quash the decision.
Robert McCraken (instructed by Richard Buxton, of Cambridge) appeared for the applicant; Neil King (instructed by the solicitor to St Edmundsbury Borough Council) appeared for the respondents.
Sarah Addenbrooke, barrister