AC-2024-LDS-000251 - [2025] EWHC 2256 (Admin)

This judicial review, brought by the claimant action group against the defendant local planning authority, proceeds by leave of Ms Karen Ridge, sitting as a deputy High Court judge. Ms Ridge is a former planning inspector with extensive experience in this field. I gratefully summarise the nature of the claim from her order of 11 February 2025, granting limited permission:

“1.

The challenge relates to a grant of outline planning permission (OPP) on 23 October 2024 for residential development of up to 181 dwellings on a 7-hectare site at Heybeck Lane, Dewsbury. The site forms part of a larger 120-hectare parcel of land (MXS7) which was allocated for residential development in the Defendant’s Local Plan adopted in 2019. The remainder of the allocation, being by far the larger site, is known as the Leeds Road site and was subject to a contemporaneous application for OPP.

2.

Applications relating to OPP in relation to both sites were determined by the Defendant’s Strategic Planning Committee (SPC) at a meeting on 8 December 2022. Both applications were the subject of resolutions to approve the proposals (subject to the SSHCLG not calling them in) and subject to the delegation of the issue of the decision notice to the Head of Planning on completion of a set of conditions and execution of a section 106 agreement.

3.

The Officer’s Report in relation to the Heybeck Lane application cross refers to the Leeds Road report given that both sites dealt with similar issues and were being considered at the same meeting. The final list of conditions was completed and the section 106 agreement executed in relation to the claim site and OPP granted in relation to Heybeck Lane in October 2024. The OPP in relation to the Leeds Road site has not been issued but the claimant has indicated its intention to judicially review that grant of OPP as well.”

Ms Ridge granted permission on the third and fourth of four grounds of challenge. The third is, in her summary, that “the Defendant erred by taking future ecological surveys into account without sight of the relevant condition or that the ecology conditions which were imposed were ineffective”. The fourth is that “that when it made the decision the Defendant took into account an inaccurate Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) assessment and/or it issued a decision notice without legally adequate provision to secure BNG”.

The claimant now seeks permission to add a fifth ground of challenge, admittedly out of time, by application made on 28 April 2025. The proposed fifth ground is: “[f]ailure to publish the section 106 agreement (Footnote: ¹) in accordance with Article 40(3)(b) of the Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) (England) Order 2015 [(the 2015 DMP Order)], rendering the grant of planning permission invalid.”

The defendant (the LPA) and the first interested party (the developer) oppose permission to rely on the fifth ground. It is for me to determine the application and I heard submissions on that issue at the hearing, as well as submissions on the third and fourth grounds of challenge. I shall address all three grounds of challenge in this judgment, I need say no more about the first and second grounds, for which the deputy judge refused permission.