Town and country planning – Development plan – Rural exception site policy – Appellant’s planning inspector granting planning permission for affordable homes in green belt – Permission subsequently quashed – Whether inspector misinterpreting rural exception site policy – Appeal dismissed
In December 2014, the appellant’s planning inspector granted planning permission on appeal for a development of affordable housing on 0.5 ha of agricultural greenfield land on the southern edge of the village of Old Hunstanton. The site was within the administrative boundary of the respondent parish council. The main issue was whether the development should be permitted under a rural exception site policy in the core strategy for the area, by which residential development on a greenfield site could be justified by reference to local housing need. The developer sought to justify the development by reference to housing needs in the adjacent town of Hunstanton and the large village of Heacham.
The local planning authority had earlier refused planning permission on the grounds that it would result in a reduction in the separation between Old Hunstanton and Hunstanton, causing unacceptable levels of harm to the character of each settlement and of the countryside. Reversing that decision, the inspector found that the benefits of the scheme, in terms of delivering affordable housing for local residents, outweighed the limited harm to the character and appearance of the area.
The inspector’s decision was subsequently quashed in proceedings brought by the respondent under section 288 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. The respondent’s complaint was that the inspector had wrongly assumed that the requirement for local housing need to justify the development could be met by reference to housing need in the town of Hunstanton, whereas, on a proper interpretation of the development plan, local housing needs had to be established in the immediate settlement and other nearby rural villages or hamlets.
Allowing the claim, the judge held that the purpose of the rural exception site policy was to meet the needs of small rural settlements and did not permit towns to export their housing needs to greenfield sites in rural villages. She found that the inspector had ministerpreted the policy and had given inadequate reasons for her decision: see [2015] EWHC 1958 (Admin); [2015] PLSCS 221. The appellant appealed.
Held: The appeal was dismissed.
(1) Read as a whole, the language of the rural exception site policy and its supporting text, referring to the “needs of the local community” and local need “in the rural villages, smaller villages and hamlets”, and placing emphasis on “small rural communities”, indicated that the correct interpretation was the narrower one adopted by the judge rather than the wider approach of the inspector and the developer. The policy required there to be a nexus between the location of rural exception site development and the location of the need for such development. That nexus reflected the overall policy rationale, which was the protection of the countryside. To deploy the policy as a means of alleviating the shortage of affordable housing in non‑rural areas such as Hunstanton town was entirely at odds with the overall thrust of the core strategy.
While some flexibility was important, and there might be individual cases where people living in a town had a specific connection with the rural location of the proposed development site and could be accommodated under the core strategy, a general alleviation of housing need in a conurbation was not to be achieved under that strategy. The term “local needs” had a greater nuance than mere proximity.
(2) Although the inspector had misinterpreted the rural exception site policy, she had not failed to give sufficient reasons for her decision. She had clearly taken the view that the core strategy allowed for a rural exception on facts such as those in the present case and had considered that the requirements of the policy were met.
(3) There was not sufficiently clear evidence of local housing need to show that the inspector’s decision would have been the same even on the narrower approach to the rural exception site policy. The primary material relating to housing need was not in evidence and the context in which it disclosed, or might have disclosed, housing need had not been tested by the inspector. It followed that the inspector’s decision had to be quashed.
Richard Honey (instructed by the Government Legal Department) appeared for the appellant; Luke Wilcox (instructed by Humphries Kerstetter LLP) appeared for the respondents.
Sally Dobson, barrister