Before any soil can be removed at Straitgate Farm by Aggregate Industries in relation to its permission to quarry the site, a number of pre-commencement conditions must first be discharged by the company and approved by Devon County Council.
Anyone interested in that process might want to note Item 7 of Devon County Council's Development Management Committee agenda for Wednesday, 23rd October, 2024, concerning a short report produced by the Council relating to the approval of two controversial planning applications (DCC/4101/2018, DCC/4293/2022) for a waste disposal site at Lower Hare Farm, Whitestone, EX4 2HW, and the judicial reviews that followed, filed by Whitestone Parish Council in connection with the discharge of pre-commencement conditions.
The DCC seem to have entered wholeheartedly into the spirit of the NPPF and determined that “7 phases” has the same meaning as “3 phases”, that working from West to East is exactly the same as working from North to South, that “inert soils” are exactly the same as “engineering fill” also known as quarrying, mining, demolition and construction waste, that a gradient of “1 in 5” is exactly the same as a gradient of “1 in 10”, etc, etc.
The Parish Council submitted a judicial review claiming the decision to discharge certain pre-commencement conditions was unlawful on a number of grounds, including:
the decision to grant approval to carry out further development not authorised in the original permission by way of discharge of condition was ultra vires;
and:
the Council erred in law by asking whether submitted details were ‘acceptable’ rather than considering whether the submitted details met the requirements of the conditions;
Devon County Council conceded on both of those grounds, and says in the report:
4.4 In the light of this claim for judicial review, the following steps have been implemented within the Council’s Planning team:• training has been provided to the County Council’s planning officers on procedural requirements for the discharging of planning conditions; and• the relevant officer’s report template has been amended to require clearer consideration of the requirements of the EIA Regulations and the need to consider whether the submitted details meet the requirements of the condition.
The full report can be found below:
