Norman v Secretary of State for Housing Communities and Local Government & Ors

In a challenge under Town and Country Planning Act 1990, section 288, the court must review legality rather than planning merits. An inspector’s decision letter is read benevolently and flexibly. It need address the principal controversial issues and give intelligible and adequate reasons, but need not rehearse every argument or technical detail.

Planning and pollution-control regimes overlap. An inspector may take an environmental permit into account and assume that the permitting regime will operate effectively. The inspector must nevertheless assess the planning impacts independently and must not abdicate responsibility to the permitting authority. A factual or technical mistake warrants intervention only if it is material to the decision.

The claimant challenged an inspector’s decision granting planning permission for two poultry buildings accommodating approximately 82,500 birds. The challenge concerned predicted odour and noise, the inspector’s reliance on an environmental permit, the adequacy of his reasons, and the lawfulness of the related costs decision.

The claimant also challenged her exclusion from the statutory category of a person aggrieved under section 288 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. The court held that the substantive grounds failed and therefore did not need to determine standing, although it expressed the view that she was not a person aggrieved.

1. Outcome. Permission was granted on the noise and odour grounds because they were arguable, but the claim was dismissed. The remaining substantive grounds were unarguable or consequential. The court also concluded that the claimant was not a person aggrieved under section 288, although that issue did not need to be determined.
2. Planning decision letters must be read flexibly and benevolently. They must make the decision and the reasons for it intelligible, addressing the principal important controversial issues. They need not rehearse every argument, material consideration, or item of technical detail. A challenge cannot be used to reopen the planning merits.
3. On technical matters such as noise and odour, the court should be particularly cautious about legalistic dissection. The decision-maker is entitled to exercise planning judgment, provided the decision does not contain an error of law or an irrational conclusion. A mistake is immaterial where the surrounding evidence shows that it could not have affected the outcome.
4. The inspector was mistaken about the location of the poultry-unit doors. That error was not material because the noise assessment relied upon was based on the correct location, the activity was infrequent, and there were no outstanding substantive noise objections.
5. The inspector did not unlawfully conflate the environmental-permitting benchmark for annual odour pollution with the descriptive scale for instantaneous odour experience. His separate treatment of short-term odour episodes showed that he understood the distinction. He was not required to address every challenge to the modelling assumptions, since he accepted the assessment as robust and the disputed matters were technical details rather than principal controversial issues.
6. An inspector may take an environmental permit into account and assume that pollution-control regimes will operate effectively. That does not permit the inspector to leave the planning assessment to the permitting authority. Here the inspector considered odour and noise in detail before relying on the permit as one relevant factor. The environmental-impact challenge therefore added nothing to the permit challenge.
7. The costs decision identified the correct test and involved a lawful exercise of discretion. It was not rendered unlawful by the failure of the substantive challenge.

This was a first-instance statutory challenge in the Administrative Court. The judgment records that Lang J ordered a rolled-up hearing of permission, the substantive claim, and standing on 13 April 2018.