Town and country planning – Planning permission – Judicial review – Claimants owning strip of land beside proposed development site – Local authority granting outline planning permission for residential development – Claimants opposing grant of permission – Whether claimants having standing to seek judicial review as “aggrieved person” under section 288 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 – Application dismissed
The claimants owned a strip of land, just under a metre wide, next to the south-west boundary of a plot of land comprising a residential plot and adjacent farm land (the appeal site). By a transfer dated 22 October 1999, a company, of which the second defendant was a director, sold land to the south-west of the appeal site to a developer. The transfer contained a covenant requiring the creation of an access way from the highway up to the strip of land that had been retained by the vendor. The second defendant local authority committed themselves to performing the access way covenant in the transfer.
In August 2011, the third defendant company applied for outline planning permission for residential development on the appeal site. The second defendant failed to decide that application within the requisite time period and the third defendant appealed to the first defendant secretary of state. In October 2012, an inspector instructed by the first defendant allowed the appeal. The claimants applied for an order quashing the inspector’s decision under section 288 of the Town and County Planning Act 1990.
An issue arose whether the claimants had standing under section 288 as a “person aggrieved”. The claimants argued that they clearly had such standing as a person whose property rights had been harmed by an unlawful decision. By not including a condition requiring the provision of a pedestrian link, the planning permission had devalued their property. The defendants contended that none of the claimants were a “person aggrieved” because their motive in pursuing the proceedings had been to exploit their ownership of the strip of land and use it to ransom the development. A “person aggrieved” had to have taken part in the appeal against the refusal of planning permission by making objections to, or representations on, the proposed development, unless they had some reasonable explanation for not having done so. In the present case, the claimants had offered no such explanation and the development would not have any physical effect on their land or its amenity. The claimants had simply lost the chance to profit by holding the development to ransom.
Held: The application was dismissed.
(1) Deciding whether someone qualified as a “person aggrieved” under the relevant statutory scheme required the court to look at the circumstances of the case in hand. In the present case, the facts were unusual in that an objector to a proposed development had made detailed representations objecting to the planning permission when the application was before the local planning authority, and repeated those representations in opposition to the ensuing appeal, only to withdraw them before the appeal hearing, asking the inspector to pay no attention to them, but then, when the appeal succeeded, made an application to the court seeking an order to quash the decision.
A “person aggrieved” in section 288, as in other statutory contexts, was somebody who had a particular grievance about a particular decision. One had to start by acknowledging that the concept was of wide import and not to be subjected to a restrictive interpretation. The person who would never be a “person aggrieved” was the mere busybody who was interfering in things which did not concern him. A person who had a genuine grievance because an order had been made which prejudicially affected his interests was not excluded. Since the meaning of “aggrieved person” would vary according to the particular context, it was necessary to have regard to the particular legislation involved, and the nature of the grounds on which the appellant claimed to be aggrieved: Ashton v Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government [2010] PLSCS 143, Walton v Scottish Ministers [2012] UKSC 44, R (on the application of the Noble Organisation) v Thanet District Council [2005] PLSCS 123 applied; Lardner v Renfrew District Council 1997 SC 104 considered.
(2) A person who had taken part in an application or appeal process and then not merely stopped taking part but also withdrew the representations he had put in, and asked the decision-maker to ignore them, was effectively in the same position as he would have been had he chosen to make no representations at all. By his own actions he had shown that he had understood both the development and the process. By the time the decision was made, not only had he ceased to be an objector to the development but had also made it clear that he had no objection.
In the present case, by withdrawing their objection to the proposed development and their representations, the claimants had left nothing before the inspector to show either that they had any relevant concern for the environment or for the proper planning of the area, or about the way in which the development might affect any property or commercial interest they sought to protect or promote. It was not for the court to speculate about the real reason for the withdrawal. However, it was clear that the claimants’ purpose now was to realise a ransom value for their strip of land. They could only have managed that in the appeal if planning permission had been granted subject to a condition that would have left the third defendant with no choice but to negotiate a deal with them, or if permission had been refused because the inspector was not prepared to grant it subject to such a condition.
The claimants’ only source of grievance lay in the fact that they had hoped for a ransom and that their expectation of gain had turned out to be false. It had no planning significance. In the particular circumstances of this case, the claimants were a “person aggrieved” within section 288.
Satnam Choongh and Victoria Hutton (instructed by K & L Gates LLP) appeared for the claimants; Justine Thornton (instructed by the Treasury Solicitor) appeared for the first defendant; The second defendants did not appear and were not represented; John Pugh-Smith (instructed by LSR Solicitors & Planning Consultants) appeared for the third defendant.
Eileen O’Grady, barrister
