Barbican Quarter Organisation Limited, R (on the application of) v City of London Corporation

Regulation 64(2) of the Town and Country Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) Regulations 2017 requires a public authority promoting development and determining its own application to design and deliver appropriate arrangements for functional separation. Failure to implement those arrangements is a breach of duty, but does not automatically invalidate the planning decision. The court must separately consider whether the breach vitiated the decision and whether relief should be refused because the decision would inevitably have been the same.

A policy requiring demolition avoidance does not necessarily create a presumption against demolition. Its meaning depends on the policy read as a whole and in context. Planning authorities may evaluate retention and redevelopment options together. Judicial review will not intervene where officers gave a legally adequate account of the policy, conducted reasonably sufficient enquiries, and materially misleading advice or inadequate reasons have not been shown.

The claimant sought judicial review of the defendant local planning authority’s grant of planning permission for the London Wall West development at the Barbican. The interested party, another capacity of the same local authority, had promoted the application.

The claim alleged breach of the functional-separation duty under regulation 64(2) of the Town and Country Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) Regulations 2017. It also alleged that officers misunderstood Core Strategic Policy CS15 of the City of London Local Plan, failed to give adequate reasons, and failed to make sufficient enquiries about alternative schemes, including retention and refurbishment options.

The central issues were whether the arrangements for functional separation had been breached and, if so, whether that breach made the planning permission unlawful or justified a quashing order; and whether the treatment of demolition avoidance and alternative schemes involved an error of law.

1. The claim was dismissed. The claimant was ordered to pay the defendant’s costs, summarily assessed at £10,000.
2. Regulation 64(2) imposes an ongoing duty. The authority must design and deliver the administrative arrangements it has identified as appropriate to ensure functional separation. Functional separation is required when performing duties under the EIA Regulations. The duty is not confined to matters which happen to involve environmental information.
3. The defendant breached regulation 64(2) by failing to implement inaccessible confidential subfolders required by its Handling Note. However, no relevant officer accessed documents which ought to have been inaccessible. The planning decision and the decision-making process would inevitably have been the same.
4. The breach did not automatically vitiate the planning permission. Applying the separate vitiating-consequence analysis identified in R v Soneji [2005] UKHL 49, and discussed in R (Bradbury) v Brecon Beacons National Park Authority [2025] EWCA Civ 489, regulation 64(2) does not make every breach automatically fatal where the breach demonstrably had no bearing on the decision. The common-law discretion to refuse relief also applied. A quashing order would have been unjustifiable and disproportionate.
5. The court rejected the argument that CS15 paragraph [3] created a presumption or expectation against demolition. Read as a whole and in context, CS15 required an integrated evaluative assessment of sustainability, retention, redevelopment, carbon, land use and related considerations. Demolition did not necessarily conflict with the policy.
6. The officer report and meeting advice were not materially misleading under R (Mansell) v Tonbridge & Malling Borough Council [2017] EWCA Civ 1314. They adequately described retention options, the carbon optioneering methodology, aggregate and per-square-metre emissions, and the wider sustainability benefits.
7. The duty of enquiry under R (Balajigari) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2019] EWCA Civ 673 did not require further investigation of the Soft Market Exercise. The authority had sufficient material to make its decision. The principles in R (Mount Cook Land Ltd) v Westminster City Council [2003] EWCA Civ 1346 did not require further consideration of speculative or unsupported alternative schemes.