Local plan – Housing allocation – Inspector recommending inclusion of claimant’s land for housing – Defendant council applying different plan period and departing from recommendations – Defendants finding no significant housing shortfall and no need to allocate claimant’s land for housing – Whether failure to take into account material consideration – Whether reasons inadequate – Claim dismissed
The claimant owned a former colliery site at Polesworth and Dordon that it wanted to develop for housing. It lodged an objection to the non-allocation of its land for housing in a draft local plan that the defendant council had produced. An inspector considered objections to the draft plan at a public inquiry. In his report, the inspector recommended that land be made available in the Polesworth/Dordon area for up to 425 dwellings to be provided in the period after 2007 and before 2011, and indicated that the claimant’s site was the most suitable for such development.
The defendants then modified the plan. They took the view that: (i) the appropriate period over which to consider housing allocations in the plan was 2001 to 2011; (ii) the overall housing requirement for the plan period should be reduced; and (iii) the true shortfall in housing provision was only 271 units. They concluded that a modification to include the claimant’s site for housing development at that stage was unnecessary. In their published reasons, issued under regulation 27(1) of the Town and Country Planning (Development Plan) Regulations 1999, they stated that they were departing from the inspector’s recommendation in order to reflect the 2001 start date and the consequential changes to the number of dwellings required over the remaining plan period. The claimant made further objections to the effect that the development plan required under the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 would emerge later than previously assumed, such that a gap in housing provision would arise in the meantime. The defendants rejected those objections and adopted the plan.
The claimant applied to quash the relevant parts of the plan under section 287 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. It submitted that the defendants had: (i) failed to take into account a material consideration, namely the timing issue raised in its objections; and (ii) given inadequate reasons for their decision.
Held: The claim was dismissed.
The defendants had clearly not accepted the existence of a significant shortfall in housing; that was a matter of planning judgment for them to make. As a result of their conclusion, they had not considered it to be important that development plans under the 2004 Act might be delayed. They had not failed to take into account a material consideration since, in the absence of a housing shortfall that required to be addressed, the timing of the production of those development plans was irrelevant. It had not been perverse or unreasonable to adopt the plan. It had been open to the defendants to depart from the inspector’s recommendations. Once they had concluded that the housing shortfall should be calculated over the period 2001 to 2011, not 2006 to 2011 as the inspector had done, they had been entitled to reach different conclusions from those delivered by the inspector.
The defendants’ reasons for adopting the plan were inadequate. Although it had been open to them to conclude that any housing shortfall was not significant, they had failed to explain why they took that view in the light of a shortfall of 271 dwellings according to their own calculations, even allowing for the later start date of 2001: South Bucks District Council v Porter (No 2) [2004] UKHL 33; [2004] 4 PLR 50 applied. However, the claimant had not been substantially prejudiced by the defendants’ failure. Even if the policies suggested by the inspector had been included in the plan, they would have been incorporated on the basis of the lesser housing need and there was no guarantee that the plan would have favoured development on the claimant’s site. The deletion of the relevant words from the plan would not assist the claimant. It could advance the inspector’s suggestions and its own arguments regarding housing provision in any future planning application. Quashing the relevant parts of the plan would be a disproportionate response to such prejudice as the claimant had suffered.
John Hobson QC and Andrew Fraser-Urquhart (instructed by Nabarro Nathanson, of Sheffield) appeared for the claimant; Ian Dove QC and Jenny Wigley (instructed by the legal department of North Warwickshire Borough Council) appeared for the defendants.
Sally Dobson, barrister
