Larkin & Ors, R (on the application of) v Secretary of State & Anor

A planning decision letter must be read as a whole and in a common-sense manner. A court should not infer a failure to take relevant considerations into account from an isolated word or sentence detached from the surrounding reasoning. Where a decision-maker has already addressed the relevant positive and negative considerations, it is unnecessary to repeat them when deciding whether temporary permission should be granted. Reasons are adequate where the decision letter, read as a whole, makes clear why the harm is considered to outweigh the circumstances relied upon.

The claimants applied under section 288 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 to quash the Secretary of State’s dismissal of their appeals under section 67 against refusals of retrospective permission for gypsy caravan sites.

The challenge concerned temporary permission only. The claimants argued that the Secretary of State’s decision letter, particularly its treatment of temporary permission, failed to take account of the claimants’ gypsy status, personal needs, health and educational circumstances, unmet need for sites and lack of alternatives, and gave inadequate or unintelligible reasons. No separate Article 8 challenge was pursued.

1. Application dismissed. The claimants were ordered to pay the first defendant’s costs, subject to the order not being enforced without the leave of the court.
2. Decision letters of this kind must be read as a whole and in a common-sense way. The court should avoid an interpretation which isolates one paragraph, sentence or word from the surrounding context.
3. The Secretary of State’s reasoning showed that he had considered the relevant positive and negative factors. He had accepted or adopted findings concerning gypsy status, the need for sites, personal circumstances, health, education and alternative sites, while also finding severe harm to the Green Belt, serious visual intrusion, an unsuitable noise environment, poor sustainability and inadequate access.
4. Paragraph 29 of the decision letter was directed to the Inspector’s assessment of the harm to the Green Belt, visual intrusion and noise environment. It was unnecessary to rehearse the other matters already addressed earlier in the letter. The use of the word “therefore” did not establish that those matters had been forgotten or excluded from consideration.
5. The decision-maker was not required to adopt a different approach to the weight given to the very special circumstances merely because he was considering temporary rather than permanent permission. Read as a whole, the letter made clear that the harm was so substantial that no permission, temporary or permanent, was justified.
6. The reasons were therefore neither inadequate nor unintelligible. The Article 8 point did not alter that conclusion because no separate Article 8 challenge was advanced and the issue of temporary permission had been properly addressed.

Not stated in the judgment.