CA-2025-000986 - [2025] EWCA Civ 1405

Although the proximity principle is an important principle in waste planning, among others, and the appellant’s skeleton was lengthy, this appeal simply involves a reasons challenge on the application of only part of one criterion in Policy 4 of the Waste Plan. I will summarise key parts of the appellant’s submissions which bear upon this relatively narrow legal issue, focusing on what emerged from the oral submissions.

The appellant defines the issue on the adequacy of the reasoning of the Inspector and the Secretary of State as being whether the proposal supported the Waste Plan’s Spatial Strategy and adhered to the proximity principle (para.3 of skeleton). The appellant’s case is not concerned with whether the Inspector correctly understood the relevant policies, but with whether he correctly understood that issue. Although the question of whether there was a “need/capacity” gap and, if so, its size was a “precondition” to granting planning permission on an unallocated site, whether or not the appeal proposal on the Portland site would address that need so as to support delivery of the Spatial Strategy and comply with the proximity principle was a separate issue which required additional reasoning to be supplied in the decision. Like the Inspector and the Secretary of State, the judge erred by treating the need/capacity gap issue as supplanting the application of the proximity principle. It was insufficient for the Inspector to give reasoning in relation to Policy 4(a) of the Waste Plan but not Policy 4(c).

The Inspector’s reasoning, in particular at IR 12.100 to IR 12.109 only addressed the exercise of comparing the appeal proposal with the allocated sites. Although that was relevant to Policy 4(a), it did not provide any explanation as to why Policy 4(c) was satisfied. Furthermore, the Inspector’s conclusions at IR 12.92 to IR 12.95 were simply dealing with highways, climate change and carbon emissions. Those matters were not a proxy for the proximity principle: the need to reduce waste miles is driven by considerations wider than climate change.

The Inspector mistakenly thought that the WPA had conceded that if PPL’s case on the scale of the unmet need for new management facilities were to be accepted, then the proposal would comply with policies 1, 4 and 6 of the Waste Plan. That helps to explain why the Inspector wrongly failed to deal with the application of the proximity principle as a separate consideration.