Architecture conservation group Save Britain’s heritage (SAVE) has lost a court case over plans to build a 19-storey tower, called The Cube, opposite London’s Paddington Station.
At a hearing earlier this month lawyers representing SAVE asked planning judge Mrs Justice Lang for a court order quashing permission for the development granted last year by Westminster Council.
They said that secretary of state for communities and local government Sajid Javid erred when he refused to intervene in the planning process because he didn’t give reasons.
However, in a judgment today Lang J rejected their argument, saying that the secretary of state was under no obligation to give reasons for refusing to call in a planning application.
She said in her ruling that “the factors relied upon” by SAVE “are neither exceptional nor unusual among call-in applications, which frequently raise controversial planning issues in major projects”.
She said that “the truth of the matter” was that SAVE was attempting to “use a successful reasons challenge as an indirect means” of quashing the decision to allow planning permission for the development.
She said in her ruling that the development, which will replace an Edwardian post office, was “controversial and widely opposed by a number of organisations and individuals”.
In December, Westminster council gave the project preliminary planning permission. SAVE and the Victorian Society wrote to Javid asking him to call in the plans.
In February, Javid’s office made a directive stopping the council from making any further decisions while he considered the request. Then in March his office said it had decided not to intervene, and decision making was handed back to the council. No reasons were given for the secretary of state’s decision.
At the hearing on November 1, SAVE’s barrister Richard Harwood QC said that this was a mistake. Javid “was under a duty to give reason for his decision not to ‘call in’”, he said.
This failure to give reasons made the decision contrary to public law, he said.
However, at the hearing lawyers for the secretary of state argued that there was no such duty, and the decision was therefore sound.
“Since February 2014, the department has issued non intervention letters without specific reasons, similar to the decision letter in this case, in some 1,600 planning applications” the judge wrote in her ruling today, citing research presented by the defendant lawyers.
“Prior to this case, no one has argued that there was an entitlement to reasons,” she said.
Although the department had given reasons in some past planning applications “by the date of the claimant’s application to the defendant in December 2016, and the defendant’s decision in March 2017, there was no longer an established practice that reasons would be given for a decision not to call in an application,” she said.
Save Britain’s Heritage v SofS for Communities and Local Government Planning Court (Lang J) 29 November 2017
