A Derbyshire property owner who created a floodlit manege on his land without planning permission has failed to obtain permission to appeal against a ruling requiring him to return the land to its former condition.
Michael Ludlam constructed the manege at the rear of The Bungalow, The Paddock, Somersal Herbert, to enable his 16-year-old daughter, Francesca, to practise her horseriding.
Ludlam said that his daughter, who had left school to become an event rider, was “probably the youngest person to be selected for the Great Britain Junior Event Squad”. However, he argued that her horseriding potential would be “severely curtailed” by the perverse judgment of a planning inspector who had upheld an enforcement notice in respect of the manege.
Ludlam claimed that the inspector had failed to consider the possibility of granting consent for the manege without floodlights and failed to take account of the fact that neighbouring residents would not object to the development.
However, a High Court judge ruled that the inspector could not be held to have been at fault for failing to grant conditional consent for the manege as the possibility of imposing conditional consent had not been put forward.
Seeking permission to appeal against that ruling, Ludlam argued that the original inspector had “adopted perverse and prejudicial tactics to ignore all the letters of support of the affected people”. The inspector had, he claimed, overridden all the evidence by ruling as a fact that “a horse on sand is noisy and therefore irritating to potential future neighbours”.
But the Appeal Court today refused Ludlam permission to challenge the High Court’s decision. Mance LJ said that although he “may have been a bit unlucky on the facts of the case”, Ludlum’s challenge raised “no important point of principle” and there was “no compelling reason” why the matter should go before the full Court of Appeal.
R (on the application of Ludlam and another) v Secretary of State for Transport, Local Government and the Regions and another Court of Appeal (Mance LJ) 19 May 2003.
The applicant appeared in person; the respondents did not appear and were not represented.
References: PLS News 20/5/03
