A judge has quashed the planning permission for a new crematorium in Aylesbury, upholding a challenge brought by a rival developer waiting in the wings to fill the town’s need with its own scheme.
With an acknowledged need for a single crematorium to serve north Aylesbury, two sites have been put forward. One, backed by a consortium of three local authorities, was granted planning permission by one of them, Aylesbury Vale district council, last October.
The other, championed by national crematoria operators the Westerleigh Group, has been recommended for approval, but the formal grant of consent has been delayed by a referral to the Secretary of State, who has now elected not to call it in.
Westerleigh took the matter to court, claiming that the council had been wrong to grant permission for the rival site at Bierton, which is in the open countryside and is a potential habitat for great crested newts, a European protected species.
Now Patterson J has found that council erred in its decision, as, when they were turning their minds to ecological considerations, council members were not properly referred to Westerleigh’s own proposal for previously developed land at Watermead.
She said that great crested newts are a European protected species and that works which would destroy or damage their resting place would require a licence from Natural England.
However, she said that the council had before it information that made it unlikely, in the absence of any input from Natural England, that the application site would be licensed under derogation powers.
She continued: “There was not and there has not been any evidence of European protected species on the Watermead site. In those circumstances the information on the Watermead site should have been brought to the attention of the committee in this context.
“The committee may have decided to defer its decision on the application to seek further information from Natural England or from the applicants and would then have further reached a view about the likelihood of licensing the application site. Whichever, to close off consideration of the Watermead site on this aspect as the advice to committee did, significantly misled the members and the matter was not corrected orally.”
The council had argued that the error was not material and so the permission should not be quashed, taking the view that the job of policing European protected species licences falls to Natural England and that the council’s error will have no impact upon whether such a licence will ultimately be granted.
However, the judge said that she would quash the decision, in what was not a normal case.
She said: “To have two applications for crematoria development running in parallel on two alternative sites to meet the need in a defined area would seem to me to be unusual. But, even if it were not, the fact that there was an alternative site which did not require derogation from the duty to safeguard the protected species was a material consideration.
“It may be that further information could and would have been sought from Natural England which affected that position but it was not. In the absence of that I cannot find that the decision on the part of the committee would have been the same even if the error was corrected.”
R (on the application of Westerleigh Group Ltd) v Aylesbury Vale District Council Planning Court (Patterson J) 30 March 2015
Alex Goodman (instructed by Clarke Willmott LLP) for the claimant
Clare Parry (instructed by Aylesbury Vale District Council) for the defendant
