A High Court judge has attacked the growing trend towards what he branded “legalistic and nit-picking” planning challenges.
He said that those who wanted to take such cases to court should “think long and hard”.
Mr Justice Sullivan made the comments as he rejected moves to rescue plans for additional staff car parking on a site near Truro in Cornwall.
Newton Abbot-based Excalibur Management Services had sought to quash a planning inspectors decision and to have the matter reconsidered.
The inspector backed Carrick councils refusal of planning permission for the scheme, holding that it would have a significant impact upon the rural location.
Mr Justice Sullivan rejected Excalibur’s challenge to that decision on the grounds that the inspector’s reasons were “perfectly plain”.
He said applicants seeking to challenge inspectors decisions should always stand back and ask if there is something odd about the decision as a whole.
If the answer was that there was nothing odd, then, he said, “the applicant should think long and hard about mounting a challenge”.
He said that inspectors were not required to rehearse every scrap of reasoning in their decision letters, and were not obliged to repeat in each paragraph the points they had made in the preceding paragraphs.
If they were, he said, “that would lead to decision letters of inordinate length”.
EGi News 25/10/02
