The High Court has rejected a challenge brought by a steel company to a grant of planning permission for a development that would require it to vacate land it occupies at Chatham Docks.
The owner of a site including the land used by the company had applied for planning permission for demolition and redevelopment of the site to provide a new waterside business and enterprise campus. After the local council resolved to grant outline planning permission, the company applied for judicial review of the decision.
The company contended that the permission, as it would be understood by a reasonable reader with some knowledge of planning law, included office use under Class E(g)(i), which had not been applied for. As a local planning authority has no power to grant permission for development which is substantially different from that applied for, the permission was unlawful. The Court noted that the decision notice permitted development of the site in accordance with the application for planning permission. It was common ground that that meant the permission was limited to what had been sought in the application. As the application was expressly limited to use classes that did not include office use, so was the permission.
The company argued that planning officers had materially misled the planning committee about the ability of a condition in the permission to maintain the existing space for Class B2 general industrial uses and Class B8 storage and distribution uses on the site. However, the Court observed that the committee’s members would have had the text of the condition and the reason for it in front of them when considering the officers’ advice. They could read them for themselves and must be assumed to have done so. On its plain meaning, the condition required the submission and approval of a scheme showing the mix of uses on the site. It had been imposed to ensure that development came forward in the spirit of a policy in the local plan that development in certain areas would only be permitted for Class B2 and Class B8 uses, and that the amount of such uses remaining on the site would be controlled.
The company also argued that the council’s conclusion that the proposals would not conflict with the policy, despite including uses outside Classes B2 and B8, must have involved a misinterpretation or an unlawful application of the policy. In the Court’s judgment, however, a fair reading of the entirety of what the planning officers had said made it clear that, while the proposals were not in strict accordance with the letter of the policy, they had been judged to be in accordance with part of the policy which stated that development resulting in the loss of existing industrial, business or storage and distribution development would not be permitted. More importantly, in the officers’ view, they were in accordance with the aims of the policy. The company’s challenge was dismissed.
