Pembrokeshire County Council v Ryan Jack Cole & Anor

A mandatory injunction under section 187B of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 is discretionary. The court must exercise the discretion judicially, considering the statutory purpose, effective planning control, the defendant’s ability to comply, and whether relief is just and proportionate.

The court must not reconsider planning merits allocated to the planning authorities. It may consider practical compliance, hardship, financial consequences, urgency, environmental risk, enforcement history and a pending planning application. Relief should not be granted without a sufficiently pressing need for coercive intervention.

The claimant local planning authority sought a mandatory injunction requiring the defendants to demolish an unauthorised agricultural shed, remove an access track and restore the land. The defendants remained in breach of an enforcement notice despite repeated applications for retrospective planning permission and convictions for non-compliance.

The latest planning application was pending and sought to address environmental concerns relating to manure management and the River Cleddau Special Area of Conservation. The issue was whether, applying section 187B and the guidance in South Buckinghamshire District Council v Porter, injunctive relief was necessary, just and proportionate at that stage.

1. Application refused. The court declined to grant the injunction, although the defendants remained in breach of planning control and of the enforcement notice.
2. Section 187B confers a discretionary power. The court must exercise it judicially and for the statutory purpose of restraining actual or apprehended breaches. The guidance in South Buckinghamshire District Council v Porter was applicable. The court could not revisit planning merits, but could assess hardship, financial consequences, urgency, environmental risk and the practical effect of the order.
3. The defendants’ conduct was not flagrant disregard of planning control. They had made genuine, albeit inexpert, efforts to regularise the position. Their financial hardship was relevant but supported by limited evidence. Personal anxiety, alleged shortcomings by advisers and complaints about the authority did not independently justify refusing relief.
4. The shed was properly connected with the planning mischief because its intended livestock use generated the environmental risk. The fact that livestock keeping was itself a permitted agricultural activity did not make removal of the shed inappropriate.
5. The environmental case did not establish an urgent need for an injunction. The planning inspector had been unable to conclude that the proposed development would not adversely affect the River Cleddau SAC, but had not found that the defendants’ activities had caused, were causing or were likely to cause such harm.
6. The pending planning application was not implausible and purported to address the inspector’s concerns. Removing the shed would probably cause serious financial harm and might render that application nugatory. An injunction was therefore not presently required.
7. The defendants remained legally obliged to comply with the enforcement notice and remained liable to repeated fines under section 179 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. The authority retained its powers under section 178.