Great Hadham Country Club Ltd & Anor v Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government & Anor

In a statutory planning review, the court must independently determine whether an agreed basis for quashing a planning decision is legally proper. A planning application must be assessed according to the development actually proposed, including proposed enforceable conditions, rather than being recast as a materially different form of development. A policy treating special residential uses as normal residential development does not convert proposed holiday accommodation into permanent housing. Where an inspector considers proposed conditions unenforceable, the inspector must address relevant alternative conditions put forward by parties or identified in government guidance. Merely mentioning such conditions is insufficient.

The claimants challenged a Planning Inspector’s decision dismissing an appeal against refusal of permission for 26 leisure lodges at a golf and country club. The lodges were proposed for holiday accommodation, subject to conditions restricting permanent residential occupation.

The Inspector assessed the proposal as normal permanent residential development, relied on paragraph 3.16.1 of the local plan, and concluded that the proposed condition was unenforceable. The Secretary of State later agreed by email to concede Ground 1, but disputed the scope of that concession when a draft consent order was circulated. The court therefore determined both whether an agreement had been reached and whether the agreed grounds were proper bases for quashing the decision.

1. Agreement and court approval. The Secretary of State had agreed to concede Ground 1 and pay the claimants’ reasonable costs to the date of agreement. That agreement was subject to the court’s approval. Because a statutory review has a public law element, the court retained ultimate responsibility for deciding whether the decision should be quashed and whether the proposed grounds were legally proper.
2. Transparency of concessions. A consent quashing order must identify transparently and with proper particularity the error accepted by the decision-maker. The court endorsed the guidance in R (Kemball) v Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government [2015] EWHC 338 (Admin) and Trustees of the Barker Mill Estates v Test Valley Borough Council [2016] EWHC 3028 (Admin). The Secretary of State should not ordinarily resile from an agreed basis without good reason.
3. Nature of the development. The Inspector erred in treating an application for leisure lodges used as holiday accommodation, subject to a proposed occupancy condition, as an application for permanent residential development. The proposal had to be assessed as presented by the claimants, rather than by considering a materially different unrestricted use.
4. Local-plan policy. Paragraph 3.16.1 applied where caravans or similar structures were proposed for special residential use. It did not deem every proposed use of a caravan to be residential. The policy therefore did not justify treating the holiday lodges as normal residential development.
5. Conditions. Once the proposed restriction was accepted to be enforceable, the Inspector had to consider whether permission could be granted on that basis and whether relevant policies prohibited it. He also erred by failing to consider alternative conditions proposed by the Council or contained in the Government’s Good Practice Guide on planning for tourism. Reciting those conditions was not a sufficient assessment of their enforceability, reasonableness or effect on viability. The obligation was particularly important because the claimants were unrepresented before the Inspector. The claim was allowed and the decision was quashed.

The judgment does not state any appellate history. It records that permission for the statutory review was granted by Holgate J on Ground 1 and refused on the remaining grounds.