There is no requirement in law that an applicant for planning permission should own any interest in the land the subject of the application. However, the effect of section 65 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and Article 11 of the Development Management Procedure Order 2010 is that where the applicant is not the sole owner of every part of the land, he must give notice in a prescribed form to owners of other interests in the land. Article 12 then obliges the applicant to certify, again in a prescribed form, that he has satisfied the notification requirements. Finally, section 65(5) provides that a local planning authority “shall not entertain” a planning application unless these requirements have been complied with.
Inevitably, the question will arise from time to time whether an inaccuracy in the certificate impacts on the validity of the ensuing planning permission, given that the jurisdiction of a local planning authority hinges upon the existence of a valid certificate. The Court of Appeal in Main v Swansea City Council [1985] 49 P&CR 26 laid down a number of principles, holding that the court in considering the statutory requirements had to look not only at the nature of the flaw but also at such matters as the identity of the claimant seeking relief, the lapse of time before proceedings were taken and the effect on other parties and the public.
In R (on the application of O’Brien) v West Lancashire Borough Council [2012] EWHC 2376 (Admin) the court applied those principles and refused relief in circumstances where no deliberate bad faith was involved, the claimant owned no part of the land in question, the landowners affected did not consider themselves to have suffered any prejudice and there had been delay in filing the claim. Accordingly, the court upheld the planning permission.
By way of footnote, the judge’s attention was drawn to section 327A of the 1990 Act, which was inserted by the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004. By use of the expression “must not entertain” in a similar context to section 65(5), this now appears to make compliance with such requirements mandatory. Despite this, the judge considered that the court still retained a discretion as to the granting of a remedy, and so adopted the same approach as that taken in Main.
John Martin is a freelance writer.
