District council fails in challenge to ruling by planning inspector

A district council has failed in a statutory challenge to a planning inspector’s decision to allow an appeal by a developer against the authority's refusal of outline planning permission.

Bassetlaw District Council appealed under Section 288 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and also challenged the inspector’s decision to award costs against it.

The inspector found Bassetlaw had adopted an unreasonable approach to the scheme at Sutton-cum-Lound, Nottinghamshire. It had refused permission because it said the development would have been contrary to policies in its local development framework and to the priorities and objectives of the emerging Sutton-cum-Lound neighbourhood plan.

Mrs Justice Andrews said Bassetlaw complained that the inspector failed to address the point about the neighbourhood plan and that this was a clear error of law that should enable the appeal to succeed.

She said in Bassetlaw District Council v Secretary of State for Housing [2019] EWHC 556: “As the courts have stressed time and again, excessive legalism has no place in the planning system.

“Whilst the meaning of a policy is a matter of interpretation for the court, the court must exercise caution to avoid treating it like a statute or a contract.

“The court's task in such cases is simply to construe the words of the policy, reading them sensibly in their context. It should resist over complication of concepts that are basically simple.”

She said the inspector disagreed with the pivotal finding by Bassetlaw that the proposed development would be out of keeping with the character of the village, and that irrespective of whether it was put in terms of council policies or the neighbourhood plan “the real objection that was being made to the grant of outline permission was that the development was not in keeping with the character of the local land”.

It would have been preferable, but not essential, for the inspector to deal with this expressly.

The judge said: “It is not open to [Bassetlaw] to recharacterise [this] as a finding that the proposed development does not conform to the policies in the plan, when it says that it does not conform with the objectives in the plan, and to then use that as a launchpad for running an entirely new argument about the scope of the neighbourhood plan, which was neither a justification for refusing planning permission in the first place, nor a matter that the planning inspector was asked to consider.

“It is too late to try and come up with a new justification for refusing planning permission for this development, and if [Bassetlaw] expressed itself in an inelegant fashion the first time round, it only has itself to blame.”

Mark Smulian