Samuel Smith’s Old Brewery, the iconic brewer based outside of Tadcaster, North Yorkshire, won a planning battle with a local quarry that was planning a major development in the green belt.
The case examines the circumstances in which mineral extraction can take place in the green belt.
In the ruling, which was handed down last week but only just made available, a two-judge panel at the Court of Appeal in London quashed planning permission granted by North Yorkshire County Council to Darrington Quarries.
The judges ruled the planning officer erred when she recommended the development wouldn’t have a visual impact of the green belt. They said that it was for the planning authority to come to their own conclusion.
Darrington, which has been quarrying in the area since 1948, planned to extend its 25ha site by six hectares, and expected to extract about 2m tonnes of crushed rock over a period of seven years.
According to paragraph 90 of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), mineral extraction in the green belt is “not inappropriate” as long as it “preserve[s] the openness of the green belt and do[es] not conflict with the purposes of including land in the green belt.”
However, according to the judgment, the planning officer that recommended approval of the plan to the planning authority stated that “screening could protect the environment and residential receptors from potential landscape and visual impacts”.
She therefore concluded that the development “doesn’t conflict with the aims of the green belt”.
According to the judgment, this was an error. She should instead have told the committee that they could take the visual impact of the planned new quarry into account when exercising the planning judgment.
Lawyers for the brewery had argued the council had to “confront the question of whether the proposed development would, in visual as well as spacial terms, preserved the ‘openness of the green belt’”.
There is “force” in this argument, Mr Justice Lindblom, the judge writing the judgment, said. He said that had the “troubling impression” that paragraph 90 of the NPPF was “misunderstood and misapplied”.
It was for the planning authority, not the planning officer, to decide whether the visual impact was significant, he said.
Paragraph 90 of the NPPF “implicitly requires the decision-maker to consider how those visual effects bear on the question of whether the development would ‘preserve the openness of the Green Belt’,” he said.
“Where that planning judgment is not exercised by the decision-maker, effect will not be given to that policy. This will amount to a misunderstanding of the policy, and thus its misapplication, which is a failure to have regard to the material consideration, and an error or law,” he said.
“I would allow this appeal, and order that the county council’s grant of planning permission be quashed”.
Samuel Smith Old Brewery (Tadcaster); Oxton Farm -and- North Yorkshire County Council; Darrington Quarries Ltd.
Court of Appeal (Lewison J, Lindblom J) 16 March 2018
