The decision in MacArthur v Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government [2013] EWHC 3 (Admin); [2013] PLSCS 11 highlights the somewhat unusual position of an inspector when determining a planning appeal. While decision-makers are as a general rule required to explain, in summary form at least, why they prefer the evidence of one expert over another the authorities suggest that there is no such obligation on the part of an inspector.
The baseline in this respect would appear to be simply that the inspector’s decision letter must not leave the reader with “a substantial doubt” as to whether the inspector had erred in law, for example by misunderstanding some relevant policy or some other important matter. Furthermore, the courts have stated that such an adverse inference will not be readily drawn.
(It has been suggested that the rationale for this seemingly generous approach is that the inspector has a unique role in which he exercises his own planning judgment, and he is not confined to evaluating evidence placed before him, as a judge is. Furthermore, his conclusions will invariably be based not merely upon that evidence – whatever the means by which the appeal is determined – but also upon the impressions formed on the site visit.)
In MacArthur, one of the claimants’ grounds of challenge to an inspector’s decision, following an inquiry, to grant planning permission for two wind farms was that the inspector had failed to give adequate reasons in that he had stated that he agreed with the evidence of the developer’s expert without addressing an alleged difference between the written and the oral evidence given by that expert.
The court rejected that ground of challenge, and held that the inspector had given adequate reasons for his decision. He had been entitled to set out his conclusions on the issues that the experts had addressed without explaining why he rejected the evidence of one expert or preferred that of another. Those reasons indicated that he agreed with the written evidence given by the developer’s expert. It was therefore reasonable to infer that the inspector did not consider that the expert had resiled from his written conclusions when giving oral evidence. On a straightforward reading – the recommended approach – of the inspector’s decision letter, there was no genuine doubt as to what he had decided and why.
John Martin
