The Llandaff North Residents’ Association, R (on the application of) v Cardiff Council & Ors

In environmental impact assessment, the identification of a project is a fact-sensitive planning judgment. Relevant considerations may include ownership, simultaneous determination, functional interdependence and whether the works are capable of standing alone. The judgment is subject to challenge only on ordinary public-law grounds, including irrationality.

Related works with cumulative environmental effects do not necessarily constitute one project. Separate projects may be assessed at different stages, provided cumulative effects are considered so far as reasonably possible. Salami slicing to avoid assessment is impermissible.

A planning officer’s report need not address every matter exhaustively. The question is whether, read fairly and benevolently, it materially misled the decision-maker. A subsequent application need not engage the requirement to describe reasonable alternatives where adequate environmental information is already available.

The claimant, a residents’ association, sought judicial review of Cardiff Council’s decisions to grant planning permission for a sewage pumping station and to discharge a drainage condition attached to outline permission for a large residential development.

The challenges alleged failures to identify the pumping station and the wider sewerage works as a single EIA project, to consider surface-water removal and off-site works, to provide adequate information about construction effects and recreational-land impacts, and to require a further hydraulic modelling assessment and consideration of reasonable alternatives.

The central issues were whether the Council’s project-identification judgment and its reliance on the officers’ reports were irrational or materially misleading, and whether the subsequent discharge application engaged the alternatives requirement under the Town and Country Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) (Wales) Regulations 2017.

1. The claim was dismissed. The Council’s decisions to grant permission for the pumping station and to discharge condition 24 were lawful.
2. The question whether related works form one EIA project is a matter of judgment for the planning authority, based on a fact-specific inquiry. The authority was entitled to consider that the pumping station and the Plasdŵr development were separate projects because they were undertaken by different parties, on separate land, were not adjacent, and the pumping station would serve existing and potential future developments as well as the residential development. The high threshold for irrationality was not met.
3. The surface-water removal scheme did not have to be treated as part of the pumping-station project. The officer was aware of the issue through consideration of the related discharge application, and was not required to work through every possible option for managing and improving the wider urban sewerage network.
4. The officers’ reports were not materially misleading. They were not required to set out every construction detail, duration or environmental effect, or to analyse recreational-space impacts exhaustively. The reports referred to the construction and environmental management plan, relevant controls, the park officer’s assessment and the absence of objection from the local rugby club.
5. Condition 24 required a masterplan informed by a hydraulic modelling assessment and addressing reinforcement works. The fact that the final solution differed from notional solutions considered in the assessment did not mean that the masterplan was uninformed by it. The masterplan identified mitigation, including connection to a point of adequacy, and Dŵr Cymru confirmed that connection would not occur until the necessary works and surface-water removal had been completed.
6. The discharge application was a subsequent application under regulation 9(1) of the Town and Country Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) (Wales) Regulations 2017. Because adequate environmental information was already available to assess significant effects, the requirement in regulation 17(3) to describe reasonable alternatives was not engaged.

Any consequential matters not agreed were to be dealt with by written submissions, with an agreed draft order filed within 14 days.