Macepark (Olbbury) Ltd., R (on the application of) v First Secretary of State

In planning judicial review, the decision-maker must assess the proposal against the development plan as a whole. Policies may pull in different directions, and there is no general requirement to identify a dominant policy. The weight given to individual policies is principally a matter of planning judgment. A Secretary of State may disagree with an inspector provided the decision letter gives reasons adequate to the issue.

Whether a development requires a rural location, whether a sequential site search is necessary, and the weight to give mitigation such as travel plans and shuttle buses are ordinarily matters of planning judgment. Minor defects in reasoning will not justify quashing where they could not have affected the outcome.

The claimant applied under section 288 of the Town and Crown Planning Act 1990 to quash the Secretary of State’s decision refusing permission for a large corporate management training complex, including a hotel, training facilities, leisure facilities and staff accommodation in a rural location.

The Secretary of State had called in the application after the local planning authority was minded to approve it. An inspector recommended permission, concluding that the proposal was generally in accordance with the development plan and that the policy concerns were outweighed by the site’s extant permission, economic benefits and other considerations. The Secretary of State disagreed, finding conflict with the development plan and national planning guidance. The central issues were whether his reasoning was legally adequate and whether he had lawfully addressed development-plan conformity, rural location, sequential site selection, travel, parking, leisure need and the fallback position.

1. Application dismissed. The Secretary of State’s decision was not unlawful. The claimant was ordered to pay the first defendant’s costs, summarily assessed at £7,546.50.
2. The inspector had treated Structure Plan policy I.8 as dominant because it specifically addressed tourism, leisure and recreation. That was a planning judgment, not a legal requirement. The Secretary of State was entitled to consider the development plan as a whole and to give no single policy precedence over policies directing most housing and employment development towards urban areas. The approach was consistent with R (Cummins) v Camden London Borough Council [2001] EWHC Admin 116 and R v Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council ex parte Milne [2001] 81 P&CR 27.
3. Policy I.8 was use-specific but not location-specific. There was therefore no necessary internal conflict between support for tourism, leisure and recreation development and policies favouring urban locations. The Secretary of State was entitled to conclude that the proposed management training centre did not require a rural location. Whether the claimed quiet and secluded setting constituted an operational need was a matter of planning judgment, and no more extensive reasoning was required.
4. Once the Secretary of State had found the proposal contrary to the development plan and rejected the asserted need for a rural location, he was entitled to find conflict with PPG 6. The absence of a sequential approach weighed heavily against permission. He was also entitled to find that the need for a leisure centre of the proposed scale had not been demonstrated.
5. The Secretary of State was entitled to regard the remote location, limited public transport and proposed parking provision as conflicting with PPG 13. The travel plan and shuttle bus mitigated the transport problems but did not require a different conclusion. The Secretary of State could form his own planning judgment about the likely use of cars and the adequacy of the mitigation.
6. Any failure to refer expressly to monitoring of the shuttle bus, to distinguish examination from thorough examination of staff-accommodation alternatives, or to explain further the incentive to use the bus would have been immaterial. The proposal was already decisively unacceptable because of the development-plan and policy conflicts. The Secretary of State had not misunderstood the extant permission, which he was entitled to regard as smaller and less harmful in relevant respects.