South Bucks District Council have succeeded in their appeal against a ruling that upheld a grant of planning permission enabling a gypsy to site a mobile home on green-belt land at Iver.
The court was told that, in breach of planning control, Linda Porter, the registered owner of land at Willow Tree Farm, Love Lane, Iver, had lived in a mobile home at the site since 1985.
Various attempts by the council to force her to vacate the site culminated a planning inspector’s decision, in February 2002, to grant Porter permission to remain on the site for the rest of her life. Permission was given on the basis that “the status of the appellant as a gypsy, the lack of alternative site for her to go to in the area and her chronic ill health constitute very special circumstances, which are, in this case, sufficient to override national and statutory development green-belt policies”.
Judge Rich QC upheld that decision in the High Court, but Pill, Mance and Longmore LJJ have now quashed it following the council’s appeal. The matter will be returned for reconsideration by another inspector.
Pill LJ said: “Conspicuously absent from the decision letter is a consideration of the unlawfulness of the applicant’s occupation, which has been in persistent breach of planning control. That of itself requires the decision to be quashed.
“The applicant has not, until recently, applied for an alternative site, although sites have, in the recent past, been available. This is not a case where, on the inspector’s findings, a lack of reasonable provision in the district of gypsy sites can be relied on to justify a grant current hardship is the only factor present.
“The council were entitled to have the case for hardship considered in a broader context and with fuller reasoning. Merely to set out a list of hardships was not a sufficient way to deal with what was essentially a land-use question.”
South Bucks District Council v Secretary of State for Transport, Local Government and the Regions and another Court of Appeal (Pill, Mance and Longmore LJJ) 19 May 2003.
Timothy Straker QC and Ian Albutt (instructed by Sharpe Pritchard) appeared for the appellants; Charles George QC and Stephen Cottle (instructed by Community Law Partnership) appeared for the second respondent, Mrs Porter; the first defendant did not appear and was not represented.
References: PLS News 19/5/03
