AC-2024-MAN-000347 - [2025] EWHC 2630 (Admin)

Mr Brett submitted that of central importance both to the planning officer’s recommendation to approve the planning application and the Committee’s acceptance of that recommendation was the planning officer’s advice in paragraph 5.33 of the Report, that the measures proposed in the revised Travel Plan and committed to in the Travel Plan Commitment statement can be secured through the imposition of a planning condition. It was submitted that, properly construed, condition 9 of the planning permission failed to secure the delivery of those measures and to ensure that the development would operate effectively in accordance with the controls proposed under the revised Travel Plan. Given that the need for effective control of the traffic and transport impacts of the development had been of critical importance to the Committee’s decision to grant planning permission, the planning officer’s advice was both erroneous and materially misleading. On a proper understanding of the terms of condition 9, that condition would not enable the Defendant to enforce effective control of operation of the development. The inadequacy of the condition had not been remedied by the additional sentence added to the draft condition following the meeting of the Committee on 1 May 2024.

The Claimant’s argument is founded on the contention that although condition 9 certainly contains an enforceable obligation to prepare and to submit a Travel Plan for the Defendant’s approval, the condition does not seek to control the position that would result in the event that the operator were to submit for approval a draft Travel Plan which the Defendant judged to be unacceptable. Although it would then be open to the Defendant to refuse to approve the submitted Travel Plan, the operator would nevertheless have fulfilled the operative requirement of condition 9 to submit a Travel Plan for approval. Under the terms of the condition, the operator would be free to proceed to implement the development. Moreover, in the absence of an approved Travel Plan, the operator would be relieved in practice from the requirement to operate the development in accordance with the approved details or to implement the approved measures, since there would be no such approved details or measures. The Defendant would have no basis upon which to enforce, since the operator would have complied with the operative requirements of the condition. At best, the Defendant would be driven to approving a Travel Plan which they considered to be unsatisfactory, if only to give condition 9 at least some degree of practical effect in controlling the operation of the development.

Had the Committee appreciated that condition 9 was flawed in this way, they might well have reached the view that the Interested Party had failed to address the reasons why the previous application for planning permission had been refused.