Celtic Energy Ltd, R (on the application of) v The Welsh Ministers

On a challenge under Town and Country Planning Act 1990, the court reviews legality rather than planning merits. National planning guidance may be a material consideration in determining an individual application, including guidance directed principally to future development plans. An inspector may form an independent assessment of landscape impact from the evidence and site visits. A procedural error or unfairness will not justify quashing a decision where the challenged matter was ancillary and the same result would necessarily have followed from lawful, independent reasons. The report must be read as a whole. There is no prescribed format for identifying or weighing planning benefits, provided the balancing exercise is apparent.

Celtic Energy applied under section 288 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 to quash the Welsh Ministers’ dismissal of two appeals against refusals of permission for an extension to an existing opencast coal mine. The appeals concerned land within the areas of Bridgend County Borough Council and Neath Port Talbot County Borough Council.

The claimant challenged the inspector’s treatment of Minerals Technical Advice Note 2: Coal, his landscape assessment, his conclusions on dust and procedural fairness, and his balancing of the proposal’s benefits against its environmental effects. The Welsh Ministers accepted the inspector’s recommendations and reasons. The central issue was whether any alleged error of law, failure to consider relevant matters, inadequate reasoning or procedural unfairness materially undermined the decisions.

1. Application dismissed. The Welsh Ministers lawfully accepted the inspector’s recommendations dismissing both appeals.
2. Under section 288, the court reviews legality. It asks whether the decision-maker acted perversely, considered irrelevant matters, failed to consider relevant matters, complied with statutory procedure and observed natural justice. The court must not conduct a merits review or subject the decision letter to excessive textual analysis. The decision must be read as a whole and in a straightforward manner.
3. Minerals Technical Advice Note 2: Coal was expressly stated to be material to individual planning applications and appeals. Although it did not expressly supersede existing development-plan buffer zones, the inspector was entitled to treat its 500-metre guidance as expressing the view that that distance generally struck the correct balance between local amenity and the need for coal. He therefore did not err in giving the guidance greater weight than the older 200-metre policy.
4. The inspector was entitled to make his own landscape assessment using the evidence, objectors’ evidence and his site inspections. Landscape impact was not an agreed matter. Even if the claimant should have been alerted to the inspector’s different assessment of one area, the outcome would have been unchanged because the principal findings of harm remained.
5. The inspector had reached conclusions about the reliability of background dust data which had not been put to the claimant’s expert. That was procedurally unfair. Nevertheless, the dust finding was additional to the independent landscape, visual-amenity and countryside reasons for dismissing the appeals. The decision therefore remained lawful because the alleged unfairness could not have affected the result.
6. The inspector had carried out the required balancing exercise. The report acknowledged the economic, employment, energy-supply, coal-blending and extension-of-an-existing-site benefits and gave them appropriate weight. It was unnecessary to repeat every benefit under a separate heading or to restate restoration benefits already addressed in the report. The weight given to competing planning considerations was a matter for the decision-maker.

This was a first-instance application under section 288 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. The Welsh Ministers had dismissed the claimant’s planning appeals after accepting the inspector’s report and recommendations. The application to quash those decisions was dismissed.