High Court judge remits Leeds site allocations plan to inspectors for reconsideration

The High Court has remitted Leeds City Council’s site allocations plan to the Secretary of State For Housing, Communities and Local Government for reconsideration by planning inspectors, despite both the minister and the council opposing this course of action.

Mrs Justice Lieven considered what relief to grant after Aireborough Neighbourhood Development Forum won a case in June over calculating Green Belt site releases for housebuilding.

Lieven J found there had been a failure to take into account the actual surplus in delivery to 2023, which amounted to an error of law.

She said she had to decide whether the appropriate remedy should be a quashing order under section 113(7)(a) of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 or an order for remittal of the site allocation plan under s.113(7)(b).

The judge agreed with the Forum that limiting any order to the Aireborough area would not deal with the error, which was applicable to all Green Belt allocations across the city.

Leeds argued that quashing all Green Belt allocations would result in a lack of a five year land supply and be disproportionate and highly prejudicial to landowners and developers outside Aireborough “who would not have known that there was any possibility in this litigation that there might be quashing beyond Aireborough and might have wished to participate in the proceedings”.

The council also strongly opposed any re-examination or re-opening any part of the site allocation plan examination.

Lieven J said: “The council appears to be supporting quashing the SAP over remitting it to the inspectors.

“However, the argument as I understand it is that remittal to the inspectors would achieve nothing rather than being a positive argument for quashing over remittal. The council argues that if the [plan] was remitted then interested parties would not be given any further meaningful opportunity to make new representations…I find this submission extremely difficult to follow.”

The judge said her starting point was the nature of the legal errors found and they could be remedied.

“The council appears to be seeking to characterise the errors as being in the inspectors' reasons and, as such, capable of being remedied by simply requiring the inspectors to provide further reasons,” Lieven J said.

“This is not correct. The errors of law included a material error of fact giving rise to an error of law. A direction simply to provide further reasoning would not remedy this error.

“Further, the errors in the reasoning are so fundamental to the inspectors' analysis that I would not have in any event considered that merely requiring further reasoning was sufficient.”

She noted that the Secretary of State also opposed remittal “but the reasoning for his position is not at all clear”.

Lieven J concluded it was appropriate to remit this matter to inspectors through the Secretary of State rather than quash all or part of the plan

“It seems reasonable to start from the position that the process should be taken back to the stage where the error of law occurred rather than back to the beginning through quashing,” she concluded.