AC-2024-LON-001877 - [2025] EWHC 2132 (Admin)

Mr Jones KC submitted that the inspector had made a legal error in failing to take into account and attribute weight to the history of abortive plans for regeneration of JRP, which had resulted in the decanting of the block since 2005 and the subsequent history of neglect and mismanagement by the Second Defendant. Those matters formed an important context to the negotiations between the parties. They explained why the Claimant and her family had real and legitimate fears for the risk and the consequences of failure of the Scheme. The Second Defendant had acted unreasonably in failing to acknowledge those concerns in negotiations. The Inspector had acted unlawfully in failing to take proper account of that important context and those concerns in his decision.

In particular, those matters served to explain why the Claimant had needed time in March 2023 to take legal advice on the true meaning and effect of the uplift offer before making her decision whether to accept the terms offered by the Second Defendant in the revised draft agreement. Those terms were complex and the drafting was in parts obscure. The inspector had failed to give proper consideration to those vital points, because he had misunderstood the true extent of the terms offered in the revised draft agreement in March 2023. In particular, he had misunderstood the effect of clause 9.4 of the revised draft agreement, which would have enabled the Second Defendant to decide at a later date not to proceed with the Scheme but to hand back the Premises to the Claimant unrefurbished and in an unhabitable tower block.

Had the inspector properly understood that the uplift offer was so limited, he would have accepted that the Second Defendant had acted unreasonably in refusing to allow the short extension to the Claimant to receive her solicitors’ advice before making her final choice whether to accept the terms offered by the Second Defendant in late March 2023. His error was compounded by his failure to acknowledge that it had been unreasonable for the Second Defendant not to have divulged that the deadline for acceptance of the uplift offer was driven by the terms which governed the Second Defendant’s eligibility to attract the GLA grant.

The reality was that, in the absence of considered advice from her solicitors and given the uncertainty created by clause 9.4 of the revised draft agreement, in late March 2023 the Claimant and her family had been placed by the Second Defendant in an impossible position, in which they could only prudently decline to accept the terms then offered within the tight deadline imposed by the Second Defendant. The inspector’s misunderstanding of the effect of clause 9.4 had led him to fail to grasp that essential point, which rendered the Second Defendant’s negotiating position unreasonable. That position had not improved subsequently, since the Second Defendant had consistently refused to entertain further negotiation on the Claimant’s principal point of concern, which was to secure the fall back to an uplift payment of £1m on sale of her lease, in the event of failure of the Scheme.

The inspector had failed to address these matters adequately in his reasons, which were legally deficient to explain why he had concluded in DL35 that the Second Defendant had taken reasonable steps to acquire the land and rights required to deliver the Scheme by agreement.