ROMEO DANCE ACADEMY LIMITED (R on the application of) v MILTON KEYNES COUNCIL

A local planning authority must comply with its published scheme of delegation. Whether a proposal is likely to be controversial is assessed in the delegated officer’s opinion, having regard to the development’s scale and nature, the site’s history and sensitivity, and the likely level of public interest.

The source and nature of objections may be relevant to that assessment. Objections from a narrow group do not necessarily establish wider controversy, and an officer need not reproduce the scheme’s wording in an informal internal email. The assessment remains subject to ordinary public-law rationality review, but the threshold is high.

The claimant, a dance academy occupying part of a building, challenged the defendant council’s delegated grant of planning permission for a 19-bed night shelter in another part of the same building.

Permission to apply for judicial review was granted on the ground that the council had acted contrary to paragraph 2 of its Scheme of Delegation. The claimant argued that the officer had failed to consider that paragraph, misunderstood its scope, or reached an irrational conclusion that the development was unlikely to be controversial.

1. The claim was dismissed. The council had considered paragraph 2 of its Scheme of Delegation. The internal email exchange showed that the issue had expressly been raised with the delegated officer, who decided that referral to the committee or panel was unnecessary.
2. Paragraph 2 required referral where, in the delegated officer’s opinion, the development was likely to be controversial, taking account of the listed considerations. The officer’s reference to the public interest was not treated as a different legal test. Read in context, he was assessing the likely level of public interest as an indicator of controversy.
3. The officer was entitled to consider that most objections came from the claimant’s customers and that objections had been encouraged. Those matters did not make the objections insincere, but they were relevant to the breadth and level of public interest. The absence of objections from ward councillors, relevant council officers and the town council was also relevant.
4. The court rejected a forensic dissection of the brief internal email. Applying the approach in R (Mansell) v Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council [2017] EWCA Civ 1314, the email was not a formal reasoned decision or committee report and did not need to reproduce the scheme or set out the officer’s entire thought process.
5. The challenge was subject to the high Wednesbury threshold. The number and nature of the objections, paragraph 5 of the scheme, the nature of the shelter and the fact that the council itself was the applicant did not make the delegated decision irrational. Paragraph 5 was independent of paragraph 2, and its numerical referral threshold was not engaged or decisive.
6. The alternative argument under sections 31(3C) and (3D) of the Senior Courts Act 1981 did not arise. Had an error been established, the court indicated that it would have considered it highly likely that a committee or panel would have granted permission.