Campaigners win judicial review over extension of materials recycling facility

A local campaign group has won a judicial review of an application to extend a materials recycling facility site in Wiltshire.

Pressure group Wiltshire Waste Alliance won on two of the five grounds on which it challenged a planning inspector’s decision to overturn Wiltshire Council’s refusal of permission for the extension by Hills Waste Solutions. The site is at Lower Compton, near Calne.

In Wiltshire Waste Alliance Ltd v Secretary of State for Communities And Local Government[2018] EWHC 1110 (Admin) Sir Ross Cranston held that the inspector did not properly consider existing planning consents.

Wiltshire Waste Alliance also won on its claim that there were errors in the environmental statement.

Sir Ross said: “The inspector failed to give proper consideration to the limits of the existing consents..... [he] momentarily slipped in concluding that the application documents were not incorporated into the consent.”

Allowing the challenge over the planning consents could in turn affect the validity of the environmental statement, he added.

Sir Ross though dismissed three other grounds appealed, that the inspector gave too much weight to Hills’ evidence and that plans for landfill restoration and site allocations had been misinterpreted.

A Hills statement said: “Whilst Hills Waste Solutions is disappointed by the court decision we are pleased that the court found in our favour on three of the five grounds of claim.

“We are grateful for the court’s clarification that the site at Lower Compton is a strategic site under Wiltshire Council’s waste development plan and the activities undertaken at the site are in accordance with existing planning permissions.”

Hills said it was confident that were its application reconsidered by the Planning Inspectorate, Sir Ross’s judgment “will not fundamentally alter the positive decision reached at the original appeal”.