Quarries Minerals — Mining permission — Conditions — Whether claimant entitled to reopen dormant quarries in accordance with original planning permission — Claim dismissed
The claimant wished to re-open two quarries for the purpose of extracting sandstone and claimed an entitlement to do so in accordance with the planning permission granted to the claimant’s predecessor in 1952. The defendant was the mineral planning authority for the area where the quarries were situated. It considered that it was entitled to impose new conditions on any future operations at the quarries by virtue of the fact that they were dormant when the Environment Act 1995 came into effect.
The 1995 Act introduced new arrangements for regulating the terms on which the extraction of minerals could take place. Sites were designated as “active” if mineral development had been carried out between 22 February 1982 and 6 June 1995, and “dormant” if it had not been carried out to any substantial extent during that period, which, at the two quarries in question, it had not been. There was no mineral working of the two quarries to any substantial extent during the relevant period.
The claimant applied for a declaration that it was entitled to work the quarries in accordance with the 1952 permission since the defendant’s list of mineral sites wrongly treated the two quarries as separate (dormant) sites when it should have treated the six quarries covered by that permission as part of one active site so that the quarries in issue could still be worked in accordance with the original conditions. The defendant submitted that the 1952 permission constituted four separate planning permissions in a single document so that it had been right to treat the quarries as separate mineral sites and to describe them as dormant.
Held: Claim dismissed.
It was necessary to look at the substance of the matter rather than simply the form. It would be dangerous to assume that in 1952 matters of this kind were conducted in as formal a manner as today. Although the claimant needed to work several quarries to satisfy a variety of different commercial requirements, there was nothing to suggest that the six quarries to which the application related formed part of a single unit, and there were four separate permissions for planning purposes rather than one single permission.
Schedule 13 of the Environment Act 1995, contained a complete code covering the review of old permissions relating to mineral sites. It did not give a planning authority power to correct errors in the list apart from the power to make good omissions under para 6, in accordance with the procedure in that paragraph. It would not have been possible for the claimant’s predecessors in title to make an application under that paragraph for the whole of the land covered by the 1952 permission to be included in the list as a single site because that would have resulted in the same land being listed twice in a contradictory manner.
Since the land to which the application related would necessarily already have been included in the list, any such application would fall outside the provisions of subpara (1). As it was too late to challenge the list by any other method, it was now determinative of the position as far as these quarries were concerned.
Timothy Straker QC and Robert White (instructed by Aaron and Partners, of Chester) appeared for the claimant; Timothy Corner QC and Andrew Fraser-Urquhart (instructed by Nabarro Nathanson, of Sheffield) appeared for the defendant.
Eileen O’Grady, barrister
