Local authority — Conservation area — Delegation of functions to individual officer — Officer granting planning permission — Appellant objecting to grant of permission –Whether officer acting within scope of delegated powers — Appeal dismissed
The appellant owned and occupied a detached house in the Twickenham Riverside Conservation Area. The owner of an adjacent property applied for planning permission to demolish an existing dwelling and to replace it with a single-storey building.
Because the site came within a conservation area and the existing house was of townscape importance, the local supplementary planning guidance contained a presumption against demolition. The appellant notified the respondent local planning authority of his objection to the proposed development and was supplied with a guidance note as to the procedure to be followed. The note failed to point out that the appellant should reserve the right to have his objections considered by the respondents’ planning committee. Consequently, he did not ask for the matter to go before the committee. The development control manager (DCM), purporting to act under the respondents’ scheme of delegation, granted permission.
Under the scheme, functions were delegated to the DCM but matters were reserved to the planning committee “where officers recommended a decision contrary to the… written views of interested third parties”, except where applications accorded with any supplementary planning guidance and where third parties that had expressed a view did not indicate a wish to address the committee.
The appellant applied for judicial review of the grant of permission, contending that the respondents had acted ultra vires in granting permission under the powers delegated to the DCM since the matter did not accord with supplementary planning guidance. The application was dismissed on the basis that the planning officer had been reasonably entitled to conclude that the proposal was consistent with planning guidance and that that conclusion was a matter of planning judgment, with which the court should not interfere unless it was proven to be unreasonable: see [2005] EWHC 52 (Admin); [2005] PLSCS 4. The appellant appealed.
Held: The appeal was dismissed.
A planning officer was not required to refer an application to the planning committee where, as in the present case, there was no uncertainty about the applicable planning policies and the facts to which they had to be applied and where it was plain that the officer had both in mind when determining whether to decide the matter himself and to grant approval: R (on the application of Carlton-Conway) v Harrow London Borough Council [2002] EWCA Civ 927, [2002] 3 PLR 77 distinguished.
Unless the decision maker attached a meaning to the words of a planning policy that they could not reasonably bear, it was not for a court to substitute its own interpretation of the policy. The application of such policy to the facts of any particular case was a matter of planning judgment for the decision maker, subject only to considerations of illegality or irrationality: Tesco Stores Ltd v Secretary of State for the Environment [1995] 2 EGLR 47; [1995] 27 EG 154 and R v Derbyshire County Council, ex parte Woods [1997] JPL 958 applied.
Parliament had, by section 101 of the Local Government Act 1973, left it to local planning authorities to determine the policy or basis of their schemes of delegation. It was not for courts to impose fetters according to their perception of how the decision making should be allocated as between a planning committee and an officer.
Meyric Lewis (instructed by Rees & Freres) appeared for the appellant; Daniel Kolinsky (instructed by the legal department of Richmond upon Thames London Borough Council) appeared for the respondents.
Eileen O’Grady, barrister
