Uk Coal Mining Ltd v North Warwickshire Borough Council

A local planning authority must exercise its own planning judgment and decide what weight to give material considerations. A challenge based on failure to consider a material matter succeeds only where the matter was genuinely left out of account. Reasons for departing from an inspector’s recommendation must address the principal important controversial issues and explain the decision sufficiently to reveal how the issue was resolved. A failure to give adequate reasons does not justify relief unless the claimant has suffered genuine substantial prejudice. Even where unlawfulness is established, the court retains a discretion over relief and may refuse a quashing order where its consequences would be disproportionate.

The claimant, a landowner seeking housing development on former colliery land, challenged parts of the defendant local planning authority’s adopted local plan under section 287 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. The authority had departed from an inspector’s recommendation for additional housing provision at Polesworth and Dordon after adopting a different assessment of housing requirements.

The claimant alleged failure to consider the delayed production of later development-plan documents, inadequate reasons for rejecting the inspector’s recommendations, and perversity. The central issues were whether the authority had unlawfully failed to consider a material consideration, whether its reasons were adequate, whether substantial prejudice had been shown, and whether relief should be granted.

1. Grounds based on material considerations and perversity. The authority, rather than the court, was required to exercise planning judgment and determine the weight to attach to material considerations. In context, the authority had proceeded on the basis that the housing shortfall was insignificant. The timing of later development-plan documents was therefore not shown to have been omitted from consideration in any legally material sense. On the same premise, the decision was not perverse.
2. Reasons. Applying the approach in South Buckinghamshire District Council v Porter (No.2) [2004] UKHL 33, reasons must be intelligible and adequate, address the principal important controversial issues, and disclose how material issues of law or fact were resolved. The authority was entitled to use 2001 rather than 1996 as the starting date for calculating housing requirements. Its reasons nevertheless failed to acknowledge that, even on its own analysis, a housing shortfall remained, or to explain why that shortfall was insignificant. The reasons were therefore inadequate.
3. Prejudice. A failure to give adequate reasons does not by itself establish a successful statutory challenge. The claimant had to show genuine substantial prejudice. It failed to do so because acceptance of the inspector’s recommendations would not probably have resulted in an allocation on or near the claimant’s land, given the authority’s entitlement to adopt a different assessment of housing need.
4. Discretionary relief. The court retained a discretion whether to quash the plan. Removing the development-boundary wording sought by the claimant would achieve nothing substantive for it and could create widespread uncertainty about permitted development. Quashing the plan in that form would be disproportionate. The challenge therefore failed and relief was refused.

First-instance judicial review proceedings. No appellate history is stated in the judgment.