BUCKINGHAMSHIRE COUNCIL v SECRETARY OF STATE FOR TRANSPORT

Under Schedule 17 to the High Speed Rail (London-West Midlands) Act 2017, a request for approval is valid when it contains the information without which no reasonable authority could lawfully determine it. The test is objective and requires relevance, necessity and proportionality. The local authority is not the final judge of validity.

Unless an appeal provision expressly excludes it, the Secretary of State may determine disputes about validity, including whether further information was required. The appellate decision-maker may also decide the planning merits.

Paragraph 6 concerns routes and arrangements relating to large goods vehicles. Effects on other local roads may be relevant to route choice or modification, but the approval process cannot become an all-purpose traffic management scheme. Judicial review claims failed where no viable alternative route or specific modification had been identified.

HS2 Ltd made requests to Buckinghamshire Council for approval of large goods vehicle routes serving HS2 construction sites under Schedule 17 to the High Speed Rail (London-West Midlands) Act 2017. The Council maintained that necessary information had not been supplied, so the requests were invalid and the eight-week period for determination had not begun.

HS2 Ltd appealed against non-determination. Inspectors, acting for the Secretaries of State, allowed the appeals and concluded that sufficient information had been supplied. The Council brought three linked judicial review claims.

The issues included the scope of appellate jurisdiction, the effect of Planning Forum Notes and statutory guidance, the proper interpretation of paragraph 6, and whether cumulative traffic effects had been considered.

1. Jurisdiction. The claims were dismissed. The Court of Appeal’s observations in Hillingdon 1 that a local authority could decline to process a request until adequate information was supplied were obiter, not ratio. Its ratio was that HS2 Ltd had an implied duty to provide information sufficient for the authority to perform its statutory functions.
2. The objective validity test is whether the information supplied is that without which no reasonable authority could lawfully determine the request. The test incorporates relevance, necessity and proportionality. The authority’s subjective view is not decisive. The statutory appeal provisions did not expressly exclude appeals on validity, and the Secretaries of State therefore had jurisdiction to decide the issue and the merits.
3. Compliance with the Planning Forum Notes did not automatically establish validity, but further information could not be required merely because the Council reasonably wanted it. The Inspectors were entitled to conclude that they had sufficient information for lawful decisions. Later statutory guidance could inform the merits but could not retrospectively invalidate the requests.
4. Paragraph 6 concerns routes and arrangements for large goods vehicles. Effects on other local roads can be relevant when considering alternative routes or modifications, including indirect effects such as rat-running. The strategic road network itself was outside the local approval power. Once a route was approved, modifications had to relate to the route’s physical preparation, repair, alteration, signing or use. The process was not an all-purpose traffic management scheme.
5. The Brackley Road Inspector erred in treating rat-running through Turweston as legally irrelevant merely because Turweston was not on the proposed route. The error was immaterial. No alternative route or specific modification had been proposed, and the Inspectors had sufficient material to reach the same conclusions.
6. The cumulative effects challenge also failed. The Wendover Green Tunnel Inspector had considered cumulative traffic effects through the relevant traffic-management documents. The A413 Inspector expected that issue to be addressed in the Wendover decision. Although the earlier decision would have been relevant, it was not so obviously material that failure to obtain it independently made the decision unlawful. In any event, relief would have been refused because the outcome could not realistically have differed.

The applications for judicial review were dismissed.

First-instance judicial review proceedings. The judgment itself records earlier related decisions:

• Court of Appeal: R (London Borough of Hillingdon) v Secretaries of State for Transport and for Housing, Communities and Local Government [2020] EWCA Civ 1005.
• Court of Appeal: permission to appeal from the related first-instance judgment was refused in [2021] EWCA Civ 1501.