A long-running series of disputes between the residents of a picturesque village in the heart of Constable country and the local planning authority reached the High Court in London again today.
The case, East Bergholt Parish Council v Babergh District Council, spotlights the importance of localism in the planning system, pitting a motivated community and its parish council against its higher planning authority.
The parish council is challenging the district council’s decision to approve three planning applications to build more than 200 homes in the village.
Action East Bergholt, a residents’ association supporting the challenge, says the permissions neither satisfy the requirements of the National Planning Policy Framework nor accord with the district council’s local plan and the parish council’s neighbourhood plan.
The parties are no strangers to the High Court. In 2016 the parish council won a judicial review against the district council’s permission to build 10 homes in the village.
In that case, the judge agreed that the district council had failed to properly interpret “local housing needs” in the context of the local plan. The parish council thought its victory would block a far larger development of more than 140 homes that was also being considered.
Housing supply doubts
However, at today’s hearing, Sasha Blackmore, lawyer for the parish council, said that, soon after that court case and a meeting with a property developer, the district council began to doubt it could defend that it had a five-year supply of housing.
“The five-year trajectory should be reasonable, not certain,” Blackmore said. Later reports to the planning committee had failed to make it clear that “the five-year housing supply was in dispute”.
Blackmore is arguing that the decisions to grant planning permission should be quashed because the planning officer’s reports were “severely misleading” by not giving the committee members enough information to decide for themselves whether there was a five-year supply.
“This is not in any way a standard nimbyish challenge,” she said.
She added: “My client is also a planning authority,” pointing out it was “keen” to maintain “good relations” with the district council. However, it was the “single most important” planning issue facing the community.
However, Michael Bedford QC, for Babergh District Council, said that the parish council’s case was “an impermissible attack on planning judgment”.
The relevant date for assessing a five-year housing land supply in this case is 31 March 2017, he said in written arguments.
The parish council argues, he wrote, that there was not a five-year supply on 31 March 2016, and also not a five-year supply on 31 March 2018. They are using this as evidence, he wrote, that there “must be some error of law” in the council’s conclusion that it did not have a five-year supply on 31 March 2017.
This, he said, is not the case.
“It is an unremarkable fact that, with annual monitoring, the [five year housing land supply] may vary from year to year,” he wrote.
In addition, “a further illustration of the impermissible nature of the challenge is the difficulty of isolating in the claimant’s skeleton argument the actual errors of law that are alleged,” he wrote.
“The claimant’s chronology also includes a series of post-decision events which have no legal relevance to the lawfulness of the decisions made, precisely because they are events occurring after the date of the decisions,” he added.
The district council “does not accept therefore that any claim to unfairness is made out on the facts”.
He said that the claim should be dismissed.
East Bergholt Parish Council v Babergh District Council, Planning Court (Sir Ross Cranston sitting as a judge of the High Court), 31 October 2018.
