Grand Union Investments Ltd v Dacorum Borough Council

A development plan may lawfully be adopted with a commitment to an early partial review where the inspector reasonably considers that the plan provides a sound basis for planning decisions in the short to medium term and that the review will address identified longer-term deficiencies before they have practical effect. Soundness is a matter of planning judgment, not a question for the court, whose review is confined to traditional public law grounds. The requirement to identify full objectively assessed housing need is policy rather than law, although the extent to which that need should be met is constrained by relevant national policy. Strategic environmental assessment requires reasonable alternatives to the implementation of the plan to be assessed. It does not require separate assessment of every non-substantive modification or of a future review whose policies and allocations remain unknown.

Grand Union Investments Limited applied under section 113 of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 to challenge Dacorum Borough Council’s adoption of its core strategy in September 2013.

The inspector had identified deficiencies in the Council’s assessment of objectively assessed housing need, its review of Green Belt constraints and its consideration of help from neighbouring authorities. He nevertheless recommended adoption subject to Main Modification 28, which committed the Council to an early partial review. The challenge alleged that adoption on that basis was irrational and that the Council had breached the strategic environmental assessment regime by failing to assess the modification and reasonable alternatives to it.

1. Application dismissed. The Council lawfully adopted the core strategy incorporating Main Modification 28.
2. Soundness is assessed by the inspector and local planning authority as a practical planning judgment under the statutory scheme. The court’s jurisdiction under section 113 is confined to traditional public law grounds. Irrationality requires an unusually bad error of judgment, outside the range open to a reasonable decision-maker.
3. The Council had failed, in the submitted plan, properly to identify full objectively assessed housing need and to establish how far that need could be met, including through a comprehensive Green Belt review and co-operation with neighbouring authorities. Those deficiencies did not make remediation by an early review irrational. The inspector was entitled to consider the extent of the defects, their likely consequences and whether they could be remedied without restarting the plan-making process.
4. Main Modification 28 was a proportionate and rational response. The inspector found no imminent housing shortfall, considered that the plan would provide a sound basis for decisions in the short to medium term, and was satisfied that the review would be completed in time to address any later shortfall. The Council’s commitment was not legally binding, but failure to complete the review by the stated timescale would leave its housing policies out of date and materially reduce the weight they could carry.
5. The NPPF requirement to identify full objectively assessed need is policy, not statute. The words qualifying the extent to which needs should be met do not qualify the assessment of need itself.
6. The SEA challenge failed. The environmental effects of the substantive policies and allocations had been assessed. Main Modification 28 was a commitment to a future review, not a substantive policy or allocation whose environmental effects could meaningfully be assessed. Reasonable alternatives under regulation 12(2) concerned alternatives to implementing the plan, not alternatives to every non-substantive modification or to different procedural approaches to plan preparation. The future review and the plan emerging from it would require their own assessment.

Not stated in the judgment.