Respondent council granting planning permission for disposal of waste at site – Local residents objecting to grant of permission – Whether council failing to give lawful effect to relevant objectives for disposal of waste – Status of environmental objectives – Schedule 4 to Waste Management Licensing Regulations 1994 – Application dismissed
The applicant company was formed by residents of the village of Blackfordby and the hamlet of Boothorpe. They sought to challenge the decision of the first respondents, Leicestershire County Council, to grant planning permission for the extraction of coal and clay and the disposal of 3.9 million tonnes of putrescible waste on a site close to their homes. The second respondents were parties to the joint application for planning permission.
The applicant’s central ground of challenge was that the council had failed to give lawful effect to the relevant objectives contained in Schedule 4 to the Waste Management Licensing Regulations 1994, which implemented the material provisions of the Waste Framework Directive (75/442/EEC, as amended). Para 2(1) of Schedule 4 to the regulations provided: “the competent authorities shall discharge their specified functions, insofar as they relate to the recovery or disposal of waste, with the relevant objectives”. Relevant objectives were set out in para 4 of Schedule 4 and included “ensuring that waste is recovered or disposed of without endangering human health and without using processes which could harm the environment”.
The applicant submitted that the council were obliged to go further than simply taking account of the relevant objectives as material considerations; it contended that they were required to avoid or minimise such risks. It was submitted that the council should have analysed the impact of different options and chosen those with the lowest impact, and that, in failing to do so, they misapplied the objectives or misdirected themselves as to their legal effect. The applicant accepted that the objectives were not absolute requirements, in the sense that the council were obliged to achieve the result pursued by the objectives.
Held: The application was dismissed.
What mattered was that the objectives should be taken into consideration as objectives and ends at which to aim. If a local planning authority understood the status of the objectives and took them into account as such when reaching their decision, then the authority could properly be said to have reached the decision “with” those objectives. The decision did not cease to have been reached “with” those objectives merely because a large number of other considerations had also been taken into account, some of which militated against the achievement of the objectives. The council properly took the objectives into account as material considerations. The application for planning permission was considered with great care and thoroughness, within the framework of the correct legal principles: R v Bolton Metropolitan Borough Council, ex parte Kirkman [1998] JPL 787; [1997] PLSCS 353 considered.
David Wolfe (instructed by Public Interest Lawyers, of Birmingham) appeared for the applicant; Robert Griffiths QC and James Strachan (instructed by the solicitor to Leicestershire County Council) appeared for the first respondents; Andrew Gilbart QC (instructed by Dibb Lupton Alsop) appeared for the second respondents.
Sarah Addenbrooke, barrister
