A holiday park near Newquay in Cornwall has had planning permission for an expansion blocked after a local resident successfully challenged a planning officer’s report.
The case, heard at the High Court in London, is significant because it is relatively rare for judges to overturn permission based on a planning officer’s report.
In fact, in a ruling last year, Court of Appeal judge Lord Justice Lindblom stated that errors made by a planning inspector should only be taken into account if they are “seriously misleading … in a material way”.
In this case, Cornwall Council had granted permission to the Sun Haven Holiday Park to expand into a neighbouring field. The park is a kilometre away from the village of Mawgan Porth, and the expansion was opposed by the local parish council.
The legal challenge to the decision was brought by William Corbett, the leader of the parish council’s planning group.
Corbett points to so-called “saved policy” incorporated into the council’s development plan that recommended that developments that cause harm to Cornish “areas of great landscape value” should be refused. The “saved policies” are older planning policies that had been incorporated into the development plan.
The council’s lawyers argued that, when looking at all of the policies as a whole, it was entitled to permit the development, and suggested that the saved policy might have been contradicted by other policies.
But in a ruling this week judge Mr C M G Ockelton disagreed.
“It seems to me that the officer’s report should have made it plain to the committee that the plan was in opposition to the saved policy,” he said.
The planning committee, he added, could still have approved the plan, but needed the full information to make an informed decision.
“I am satisfied that those making the decision under challenge did not appreciate that they were making a decision which did not accord with the development plan, and did not identify or asses any relevant material considerations for departing from the plan,” he said.
“For those reasons the decision under challenge was unlawful.”
William Corbett v Cornwall Council
Planning Court (Mr C M G Ockelton) 1 May 2019
