South Oxfordshire District Council v Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government & Anor

National planning policy is a material consideration within the statutory, plan-led decision-making framework. The National Planning Policy Framework does not displace the statutory priority given to the development plan or prescribe the weight to be given to an out-of-date housing policy.

A development plan is silent where it lacks a body of policy relevant and sufficient to determine whether the proposal is acceptable in principle. Whether that is so is a matter of interpretation and planning judgment assessed at the date of the decision. A planning permission may be an “other mechanism” for bringing forward housing where the plan’s intended allocation mechanism has been abandoned. The decision-maker need not determine five-year housing supply in every case where the proposal would provide a significant housing benefit and the outcome would be unchanged.

South Oxfordshire District Council challenged, under Town and Country Planning Act 1990, an inspector’s decision allowing an appeal against refusal of outline permission for up to 120 dwellings and open space at Chinnor. The Secretary of State did not resist the claim, accepting that the inspector had taken apparently contrasting approaches in two related appeals concerning the status of Policy CSR1 and paragraph 14 of the National Planning Policy Framework.

The Council alleged errors concerning the meaning of a silent development plan, inconsistency between the two decision letters, the plan-led system, Policy CSC1, and landscape reasoning. The central issues were whether the development plan was silent or out of date, whether the inspector had to determine five-year housing supply, and whether the permission was legally rationally reasoned.

1. Claim dismissed. The inspector’s decision was not unlawful. Her conclusions were comprehensive, intelligible and adequately reasoned.
2. The National Planning Policy Framework is government policy and therefore a material consideration. It operates within the statutory framework established by sections 70(1) and 70(2) of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and section 38(6) of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004. It does not modify the statutory presumption in favour of the development plan, and the weight given to its policies is for the decision-maker.
3. The distinction between a plan being silent and relevant policies being out of date does not prevent overlap in an individual case. The essential questions are whether the plan contains a body of policy relevant to the proposal and whether that body of policy is sufficient to enable the development to be judged acceptable or unacceptable in principle. The assessment is made at the date of the decision and involves planning judgment.
4. The inspector was entitled to find that the development plan was effectively silent on the allocation of housing sites in the larger villages. The Core Strategy anticipated allocation through a Site Allocations Development Plan Document, but that mechanism had been abandoned. The older Local Plan policies did not resolve the tension between greenfield development and the level of housing anticipated for Chinnor.
5. It was unnecessary to determine five-year housing supply. The inspector had found, on unchallenged planning evidence, that housing should be provided at Chinnor, that the proposal would make a significant quantitative and qualitative contribution, and that it constituted sustainable development. Neither the Framework nor the Core Strategy made the provision of homes beyond a five-year supply inherently objectionable.
6. The inspector was entitled to treat the grant of planning permission as an “other mechanism” under Policy CSC1. The policy did not prevent sites coming forward before the projected delivery dates in Table 18.1, and the relevant housing policies did not impose that temporal limitation.
7. The differing reasoning in the two decision letters did not establish unlawful inconsistency. The inspector reached materially the same planning judgment in both cases, and adopting the approach in the other appeal could not have produced a different outcome. The landscape grounds were merits arguments rather than errors of law.

The claim was dismissed on all grounds.

This was a first-instance judicial review of an inspector’s decision allowing an appeal under section 78 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. The inspector’s decision was upheld.