Last week, the Court of Appeal answered the question “what is a flat?”. This week, in a dispute over uPVC windows in a conservation area, the High Court has answered the question “what is a building?”
The dispute relates to a new set of uPVC windows installed in one of the houses on Middleton Road in London N22, part of the Bowes Park Conservation Area.
In May last year, Haringey Council issued the owner of the house with an enforcement notice for putting them in without permission.
The owner appealed and in April this year a planning inspector found in favour of the home-owner, based on his definition of a building.
The inspector had to decide whether the windows had “materially affected the external appearance of the building”.
In his decision, he found that it did affect the external appearance of the house. However, the house was in a terrace with two others, and they had uPVC windows. Therefore, he defined the whole terrace as the building, and found that the windows hadn’t materially affected its appearance.
The council appealed to the High Court, which, in a ruling handed down in the last week, overturned the inspector’s finding and told the council to reconsider the matter.
At the hearing, a lawyer for the council said that the planning inspector had misapplied a 1995 judgment that considered whether the Gateshead Metrocentre was a single building or a collection of retail units.
In his judgment, planning judge Mr Justice Lieven backed the council’s argument.
“It is on the face of it a somewhat surprising proposition that the building is an entire terrace, rather than each individual property,” he said in his ruling.
“Such an approach is, to my understanding, an unusual one. In common parlance, each house in a terrace would be considered a building. Also, when there are a number of listed buildings in a terrace, each separate house is usually, if not always, separately listed.
“Although this does not mean that as a matter of law the inspector was necessarily wrong to find that the whole terrace was a building, particularly given that it was a short terrace, it was a conclusion which required clear and adequate reasoning.
“The inspector… seems to have somewhat conflated the issue of what is the building with the second question of what is the effect on the external appearance,” he said.
In addition, he found that the inspector had misapplied the Metrocentre ruling.
“I therefore allow the appeal and will remit the matter to the first respondent,” he said.
London Borough of Haringey v Secretary of State for Housing, Communities & Local Government and Paul Muir
Planning Court (Lieven J) 1 November 2019
Mr Giles Atkinson (instructed by London Borough of Haringey) for the appellant; Ms Jacqueline Lean (instructed by Government Legal Department) for the first respondent; the second respondent was not represented and did not attend.
