Council defeats challenge to permission for extension of quarry in Green Belt

North Yorkshire County Council has fought off a legal challenge by a brewery to planning permission it gave for a quarry in the Green Belt.

The local authority had agreed that Darrington Quarries could extend its operations over a six hectares area adjacent to one of 25 hectares from which it already extracted limestone.

This was challenged by brewery Samuel Smith, which draws water from an aquifer beneath the site, and its associated company Oxton Farm.

Samuel Smith argued that the officers’ report to the council planning committee was flawed.

It had earlier successfully challenged the original grant of planning permission on the basis that the council acted unlawfully in failing to take into account environmental information as required by regulation 3(2) of the Town and Country Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) (England and Wales) Regulations 1999.

Following submission of an updated environmental statement, the council considered the application again in February 2016, advised by an officers’ report that the proposal was not inappropriate development in the Green Belt, and permission was granted after a s106 agreement was concluded.

Samuel Smith and Oxton Farm then challenged this second award on the grounds that the officers' report misapplied paragraph 90 of the National Planning Policy Framework, and should have concluded that the size and appearance of the quarry made it inappropriate development, for which no “very special circumstances” existed to justify relaxing green belt policy.

But in Samuel Smith Old Brewery (Tadcaster) & Ors, R (on the application of) v Darrington Quarries Ltd [2017] EWHC 442 Hickinbottom J said a planning officer was entitled to consider the visual impact of development on Green Belt but was not required to.

The judge said: “In this case, the potential visual impact of the development falls very far short of being an obvious material factor in respect of this issue.

“In my judgment, in the circumstances of this case, the report did not err in not taking into consideration any potential visual impact from the development. Indeed, on the facts of this case, I understand why the officers would have come to the view that consideration of visual impact would not have materially added to the overarching consideration of whether the development would adversely impact the openness of the Green Belt.

“For those reasons, in the circumstances of this case, I do not consider that the officers' Report was deficient in not referring to visual impact in the context of impact on the openness of the Green Belt.”

Mark Smulian