A disabled Romani gypsy, who felt forced to leave a rented property where she and her family slept in a caravan on the driveway for 12 years, has triumphed in a challenge to refusal of planning permission for her to go on living with her three children on a site near woodland in Sevenoaks.
Charmaine Moore left the Housing Association property at 29 Homefield Rise, Orpington, which the family effectively used only as a day room, after she was ordered to remove the caravan where they slept and a horsebox from the front drive.
In July 2010, she and her three children, now aged 14, 13 and 7, moved onto the site at Archies Stables, Cudham Lane North, Cudham, Sevenoaks, where she keeps a horse.
However, Ms Moore – who suffers from joint laxity, a condition which means her bones come out of their sockets very easily – was refused planning permission to live on the site first by the London Borough of Bromley, then a government planning inspector.
Now Cox J has ruled that the inspector’s decision to refuse her a temporary permission was “irrational” and cannot stand.
The judge ordered the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Communities to have Ms Moore’s case reconsidered in the light of her judgment, which is likely to result in the family being granted planning consent to stay there temporarily.
She said: “The question is whether in this case the inspector’s conclusion, in relation to temporary planning permission, that ‘in view of the amount of harm and all the other circumstances … I do not consider that the balance would be tipped sufficiently for the material considerations to clearly outweigh the harm’ was irrational and unreasonable.
“In the particular circumstances of this case, in my judgment, it was.”
She said that the probability that the family would have to leave the site and face a roadside existence, which would have a negative impact on Ms Moore’s health, constituted “very special circumstances” that should have justified a temporary permission.
She said: “In circumstances where no alternative sites were available, or likely to become available in the foreseeable future; where injunction proceedings for immediate eviction had already been started; where the inspector found that the claimant and her children would probably have to leave the site if permission were refused; where there was a recognised risk that the claimant and her children, once evicted, would have to resort to roadside existence, which would harm the claimant’s health and cause serious harm to the quality of life of the claimant and her children; and where there was no evidence that the claimant, once evicted, would in fact be offered a pitch on one of the council-run sites or indeed anywhere else in the area, the decision that the other material considerations in this case were not sufficient to clearly outweigh the identified harm and to justify the grant of temporary permission was, in my judgment, irrational.”
She said that Ms Moore, who also suffers from depression, clearly has an “aversion to living in bricks and mortar”
Ms Moore argued that the harm to the character and appearance of the area could be overcome by landscaping, if her caravan site was given time to blend in.
Moore v Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government and another Administrative (Cox J) 16 November 2012
Stephen Cottle (instructed by Community Law Partnership) for the claimant
Stephen Whale (instructed by Treasury Solicitors) for the defendant
