Gallagher Estates Ltd & Anor v Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council

For a sound local plan, housing provision must begin with a full and objective assessment of housing need, including market and affordable housing. The assessment must then be distinguished from the policy-based housing requirement, which may be constrained only where other national policies justify doing so. A plan cannot lawfully replace that exercise with a general balancing of need, supply and policy factors, or by adopting an earlier regional policy figure without careful adjustment to the National Planning Policy Framework approach. Green Belt boundaries may be altered only in exceptional circumstances. That requires more than a changed planning judgment or current development constraints; ordinarily, a fundamental assumption underlying the established boundary must have been clearly and permanently falsified.

The claimants challenged the defendant local planning authority’s adoption of the Solihull Local Plan under section 113 of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004. The Plan allocated 11,000 new dwellings for 2006–2028 and returned two previously safeguarded sites to the Green Belt.

The claim alleged that the authority and the examining inspector had failed to assess full objectively assessed housing need, comply with the duty to cooperate, and apply the correct test for altering Green Belt boundaries. The central questions were whether the Inspector’s report lawfully addressed housing need and whether exceptional circumstances justified redefining the Green Belt.

1. Ground 1 succeeded. The National Planning Policy Framework required the Inspector to identify full objectively assessed housing need before considering whether other policies justified a lower housing requirement. Household projections were relevant but did not themselves constitute the assessment.
2. The Inspector had confused “policy off” housing need with the “policy on” housing requirement. He relied substantially on the former regional strategy figure and later projections, but nowhere objectively assessed full housing need in numerical terms. The earlier regional process had undertaken a conventional planning balance and did not provide a compliant substitute assessment. Paragraph 218 of the NPPF permitted reliance on earlier evidence, but required extreme caution when using an earlier policy-on figure because the NPPF had materially changed the housing-supply approach.
3. That failure meant the Plan was not positively prepared or consistent with national policy and was therefore unsound. It also prevented a proper assessment of any shortfall and consequently prevented a reliable conclusion on the duty to cooperate. No separate finding on Ground 2 was therefore made.
4. Ground 3 succeeded. The test in paragraph 83 of the NPPF remained the stringent exceptional-circumstances test formerly expressed in PPG2. Exceptional circumstances were required for either extending or reducing the Green Belt. Under COPAS v Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, circumstances were not exceptional unless they necessitated boundary revision.
5. The Inspector had merely balanced current planning considerations and concluded that the sites were unlikely to be suitable for development. That did not establish any fundamental change or falsification of the assumptions underlying the established boundary. The reallocation of the sites to the Green Belt was therefore unlawful.
6. The application succeeded. The parties were given seven days to agree a consent order or make written submissions on consequential matters.

First-instance judicial review claim. No prior appellate history was stated in the judgment.