There is a need for consistency in decision making in order to secure public confidence in the development control system. This goes some way to explaining why an earlier planning appeal decision is capable of being a material consideration in the determination of a planning application. (This can be so whether the appeal decision in question relates to the application site, or to some other site.) The decision maker must, of course, first determine that the earlier case is alike and not distinguishable in some relevant respect. If it is, then the decision-maker must not only have regard to it but must also give reasons if his decision departs from it. A failure to give reasons can lead to his decision being quashed.
In Fox Strategic Land and Property Limited v Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government [2012] EWHC 444 (Admin); [2012] PLSCS 56, the claimant applied to quash the decision of the Secretary of State (SoS) to dismiss its appeal against the refusal of the local planning authority to grant planning permission for 280 dwellings on agricultural land in Sandbach, Cheshire. Another developer had around the same time applied unsuccessfully for planning permission for a similar development on a greenfield site in Sandbach, and this also had led to an appeal being dismissed by the SoS.
One of the claimant’s grounds of challenge before the High Court was this. Both appeals raised similar issues. The conclusions of the SoS in the decision letter in the case of the other developer’s appeal could not be reconciled with the conclusions in the decision letter in the case of the claimant’s appeal. The inspector had failed to give reasons for attaching no weight to the decision in the other developer’s appeal.
The court allowed the application, holding that what the SoS could not do, unless he gave clear reasons, was to determine one appeal in a way that was contradictory to the other. In so doing, he had erred in law. The judge was also critical of the refusal of the SoS to determine the two appeals together, as the claimant had originally requested. He acknowledged that the SoS had a discretion in that respect, but had he done so he would have run a much reduced risk of these problems occurring.
John Martin is a freelance writer
