The decision in R (on the application of Buglife – The Invertebrate Conservation Trust) v Medway Council [2011] EWHC 746 (Admin); [2011] PLSCS 148 – see PP 2011/85 – also provides a useful illustration of a staged application of the environmental impact assessment (EIA) process.
Following a ruling of the European Court of Justice, the House of Lords in R (on the application of Barker) v Bromley London Borough Council [2006] UKHL 52; [2006] 3 WLR 1209 confirmed that where a development cannot be carried out until details relating to reserved matters are approved, the decision to grant outline planning permission and to approve reserved matters must be considered to constitute, as a whole, a multi-stage development consent for the purposes of the EIA Directive 85/337/EEC. Accordingly, an EIA could be required at the reserved matters stage.
As a consequence, the Town and Country Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment)(
In Buglife, the claimants sought permission to apply for judicial review of the grant of outline planning permission for a major business park to be constructed over 10 years in at least four stages in accordance with a demand-led business plan. They contended that the EIA that had been carried out was defective in a number of respects, with the consequence that the outline planning permission failed to provide sufficient compensatory and ameliorative measures to counteract the effect of the development on the invertebrate population of the application site.
The court refused permission, but only on the ground that the outline planning permission did in fact provide for a staged EIA in which an interim or outline EIA was undertaken at the outline application stage and separate EIAs were carried out for each subsequent detailed reserved matters application. The mechanics for securing this were a number of Grampian-style conditions that prohibited the start of each phase until those steps had been taken.
John Martin is a freelance writer
