Mahadevan Krishnamohan v Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government & Anor

For an outline planning application, the statutory requirement is that the submitted plan or plans be sufficient to identify the land to which the application relates. The legislation does not prescribe a particular label, format, scale or colouring where the plans, read together, fulfil that function.

A planning authority may waive or not insist upon its own form requirements where it has sufficient information to determine the application. A defect in the application does not automatically make the resulting planning permission a nullity. Unless and until the permission is quashed on judicial review, it continues to have legal effect.

The claimant challenged the Secretary of State’s decision on two linked appeals concerning certificates of lawful existing use or development for Cliveden Stud House. He argued that the 1969 outline planning application was invalid because its plans did not sufficiently identify the application land, and that the resulting permission and reserved matters approval were therefore ineffective.

He also alleged that the Inspector had misconstrued an earlier appeal decision, acted unfairly by failing to invite further submissions, and should have obtained correspondence omitted from the appeal documents. The challenge was brought under section 288 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990.

1. Ground 3 dismissed. Article 5(1) of the Town and Country Planning General Development Order 1963 required a plan sufficient to identify the land to which the application related. It did not prescribe the form that plan had to take. The original Plan A and the Outline Block Plan, read together or separately, sufficiently identified the land and proposed development.
2. The application was for outline permission, with siting reserved. The shaded footprint on the Outline Block Plan was indicative and did not confine the application site to that footprint. The permission, its conditions and the section 12 agreement, read as a whole and from the perspective of a reasonable reader with planning knowledge, made the scope of the permission sufficiently clear.
3. Even if the plans had failed to comply with the application-form instructions, the local planning authority could determine the application where it had sufficient information and did not insist upon further information. The Town and Country Planning Act 1962 contained no equivalent of section 327A of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990.
4. A planning permission granted following a legally defective application is not automatically a nullity. Absent a successful judicial review challenge, it continues to have legal effect. The certificate decision-maker could not simply disregard or quash the permission.
5. Grounds 1 and 2 also failed. Any error in construing the earlier Inspector’s decision was immaterial because the Inspector independently reached sustainable conclusions. There was no procedural unfairness or material prejudice. The proposed additional sub-ground was refused because the claimant’s representatives had failed to submit the correspondence, and the Inspector had sufficient material before her in any event.

The claim was dismissed.

The judgment itself was a first-instance statutory review under section 288 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 of the Secretary of State’s decision dated 13 January 2025 on linked appeals concerning CLEUD Applications 2 and 3.