The owner of a Barking retail park has triumphed in a challenge to the local council’s decision to grant permission for an extension to a nearby Tesco superstore, which it claimed threatened its own plans for expansion.
Estates and Agency Properties Ltd, owner of the Abbey Retail Park, won a ruling quashing the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham’s grant of planning permission to Tesco on 15 September 2011.
Estates and Agency claimed that the extension of the Tesco store in Highbridge Road would damage the future chances of a comprehensive re-development of the Abbey Retail Park (ARP), and that the planning permission was issued in breach of the Area Action Plan (AAP) policy for the retail park that included a requirement for a retail superstore.
Tesco had argued that the AAP did not require a superstore to be provided on the retail park, and that there remains no prospect of any comprehensive proposal for the retail park coming forward in the foreseeable future.
However, the judge ruled that Estates and Agency had made out its complaint, and that the argument which it sought to put forward to the Council about prejudice to the redevelopment of ARP was a relevant one.
He said: “There was a question whethe, given the positions of the claimant and Tesco, granting this permission would act as a disincentive to Tesco coming forward as a co-developer of the ARP as envisaged in the AAP policies.
“That was a matter upon which the members should have been invited to come to a view and, having come to a view one way or the other, then, to determine whether or not, as a matter of planning judgment, planning permission should be granted.
“In my judgment, the officers failed properly or fairly to identify that issue for the members because they misunderstood or misapplied the relevant planning policies and their impact upon the application.”
He said that, if the officers had placed the issue properly and fairly before the members, but permission had still been granted, Estates and Agency would have had no ground of complaint.
Estates and Agency Properties Ltd v The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham Administrative (Wilkie J)
Natalie Lieven QC (instructed by Clyde & Co) for the claimant
Martin Edwards (instructed by the London Borough of Barking)
Rupert Warren QC (instructed by Berwin Leighton Paisner) for the interested party (Tesco Stores)