Council defends High Court challenge to Chatham Docks planning permission

A judge said the claimant appeared to think planning committee members needed officers to act as “priests” to interpret documents purportedly beyond their comprehension.

ArcelorMittal is the largest operator at Chatham Docks, where it leases land from Peel L&P Ports No.3 Ltd to supply construction steels to the British market.

It challenged Medway’s consent - by eight votes to seven - to Peel’s application to demolish structures and redevelop land including the ArcelorMittal site.

The steel firm said it would have to leave if this work went ahead and had no alternative site.

This was because Chatham Docks is the only non-tidal enclosed docks in Kent able to accommodate sufficiently large ships.

ArcelorMittal’s first ground was that a local planning authority has no power to grant permission for development which is substantially different from that applied.

It said the term "waterside business and enterprise campus” was broad and did not specify any particular use class, and the conditions did not clarify this. Medway argued the permission did not permit primary office use, as the firm claimed it did.

Mr Justice Chamberlain said this ground must be rejected as “in my judgment, there was no discrepancy between the uses for which Peel applied and the uses for which it was granted permission”.

The second ground was that officers materially misled the Planning Committee about the ability of a condition to preserve and maintain the 18,000 sq. m. of existing B2/B8 uses at the site.

The judge said ArcelorMittal’s submissions “seemed to cast the committee's members in the role of pre-reformation churchgoers with the planning officers as priests, so that the former were unable to understand the underlying texts except through the mediation of the latter.

“In fact, the committee's members had before them the text of condition 27 and the reason for it. They could read these for themselves and must be assumed to have done so. The condition and reason are written in plain vernacular.

“Their meaning would have been obvious to any intelligent English-speaker, a fortiori to the members of a specialist planning committee.”

He said this ground could succeed only if a specialist planning committee member would have been misled in a material way by what the officers said. “In my judgment, that test is nowhere close to being met.”

ArcelorMittal’s third ground was that the permission conflicted with a policy that prohibits planning permission for any use that is not B2 or B8 and for any development which would lead to a loss of existing B2/B8 uses on the site.

Chamberlain J said the wording used “signalled very clearly to any intelligent person reading or hearing them, a fortiori to a member of a specialist planning committee, that the proposals were not strictly in accordance with the letter of the first part of the policy, but were nonetheless judged to be in broad accordance with its aims.

“Any complaint about this is, quintessentially, a complaint about planning judgment (which would require ArcelorMittal to show that the judgment was irrational), rather than a complaint about misinterpretation of the policy.”

He dismissed an additional ground that the site might one day be used for housing, with consequent loss of employment land.

“It is not reasonably arguable that the remote possibility of a future change of use under the GPDO was a mandatorily relevant factor, i.e. one which it would be irrational not to take into account,” the judge said.

Responding to the ruling, Cllr Simon Curry, Medway Council’s Portfolio Holder for Planning, said: “We welcome the High Court’s decision to dismiss the judicial review. This reaffirms that the decision of our Planning Committee, and detailed and thorough approach from our officers, was sound and correct.

“It is important to note that the application from Peel Waters will see this land remain as employment use, and it has the potential to create new jobs, opportunities and economic growth for Medway.

“Excitingly, the plans also include a new cycle and footpath which will help to open up the area alongside the River Medway and improve public access. I look forward to seeing how the development takes shape over the coming years.”

Mark Smulian