Town and country planning – Planning permission – Judicial review – Defendant local authority granting planning permission for development – Claimant applying for judicial review – Whether defendant being under duty to give reasons for distinguishing earlier relevant planning decisions – Application dismissed
The claimant lived in the hamlet of Lopen in South Somerset. The defendant granted planning permission to the interested party for the erection of a building for office, light industrial and warehouse uses at a former nursery site, most of which was allocated for employment uses in the South Somerset Local Plan which was part of the statutory development plan. Four buildings had been erected on the site, two of which were owned and occupied by the interested party. On the part not allocated for employment uses were substantial but unused nursery greenhouses.
There had been an earlier decision by the defendants to grant planning permission on the identical application. That was successfully challenged by the claimant when the court quashed the decision on the single ground that a planning condition limiting occupation to the interested party was invalid: see [2013] EWHC 4000 (Admin).
The claimant applied for judicial review of the present decision to grant permission contending, amongst other things, that the defendants had been inconsistent in their decision–making in the application of development plan policies and had ignored earlier relevant planning decisions. In North Wiltshire District Council v Secretary of State for the Environment (1993) 65 P & CR 137, Mann LJ had held that a previous planning decision was a material consideration if it was legally indistinguishable. If the decision-maker was to depart from it, reasons had to be given. In R (on the application of Midcounties Co-Operative Ltd) v Forest of Dean District Council [2014] EWHC 3059 (Admin), the court applied that approach to a judicial review of the local planning authority.
Held: The application was dismissed.
The court in the Midcounties case had been wrong to apply the approach in the North Wiltshire case, to the effect that reasons had to be given, to a judicial review of the decision of a local planning authority. The North Wiltshire case had been a statutory challenge to a planning inspector’s decision, to which the statutory duty to give reasons applied. That case, and other which referred to such a duty, were those dealing with decisions of the secretary of state to whom an explicit duty applied. No such duty existed for local planning authorities. There was a risk that, absent reasons, a court would more readily conclude that a material consideration had been ignored or that an arbitrary decision had been reached; but that did not create a duty to give reasons for any conclusion reached on earlier decisions as considerations material to the later decision.
Gregory Jones QC and Jeremy Pike (instructed by James Smith (Planning Services) Ltd) appeared for the claimant; Stephen Whale (instructed by South Somerset District Council) appeared for the defendants; the interested party did not appear and was not represented.
Eileen O’Grady, barrister
Read a transcript of R (on the application of Sienkiewicz) v South Somerset District Council here
