Redhill Aerodrome Ltd v Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government & Ors

Under paragraph 88 of the National Planning Policy Framework, “any other harm” means additional harm to the Green Belt, not non-Green-Belt harm which has failed to reach the Framework’s individual threshold for refusal. Such harm cannot be aggregated cumulatively to strengthen the Green Belt objection unless the Framework provides for that approach. Non-Green-Belt considerations remain material, but they must be assessed at the appropriate stage of the overall planning decision. The interpretation adopted in River Club v Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government arose under a different policy framework and did not determine the NPPF question.

The claimant challenged, under section 288 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, an Inspector’s dismissal of two appeals concerning proposals to replace grass runways at Redhill Aerodrome with a hard runway and associated works. The site lay within the Metropolitan Green Belt.

The Inspector found the development inappropriate and harmful to the Green Belt. She also identified landscape, visual, noise, disturbance, transport and other harms, but concluded that the positive economic considerations did not clearly outweigh the combined harm. The central issue was whether those non-Green-Belt harms could be included within “any other harm” in paragraph 88 of the NPPF, including cumulatively where they did not independently meet NPPF refusal thresholds.

1. Appeal allowed. The Inspector’s decision was quashed or otherwise set aside, with submissions invited on the final order and costs.
2. Planning policy is a question of law for the court. The NPPF must be interpreted objectively and as a whole. Paragraph 88 preserves the Green Belt policy of giving substantial weight to Green Belt harm, but its operation must be understood within the NPPF’s more directive and structured policy framework.
3. “Any other harm” in paragraph 88 means harm additional to the definitional harm caused by inappropriate development and additional harm to the Green Belt. Landscape character and visual amenity are material considerations, but they are not themselves Green Belt harm because the Green Belt is a spatial policy delivered through its specified purposes.
4. Where the NPPF sets an individual threshold at which a consideration warrants refusal, a harmful impact below that threshold cannot be included as “any other harm”. Nor can several such sub-threshold non-Green-Belt impacts be combined as residual cumulative harm in the Green Belt balance. The NPPF expressly provides for residual cumulative transport impacts in paragraph 32, but contains no equivalent provision in its Green Belt policy.
5. The Inspector had therefore erred by including the identified non-Green-Belt harms in the paragraph 88 balance. Her general conclusion that environmental harm significantly and demonstrably outweighed the economic benefits was tainted by that error, and it could not be said that she would inevitably have reached the same decision using the correct approach.
6. The court did not need to decide that River Club v Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government was wrongly decided. That case concerned a different policy context, in which there was greater scope for flexible interpretation.

This was a first-instance statutory challenge in the Administrative Court. The judgment does not state a prior appellate stage.