Harrogate Borough Council has won a case in the UK’s second-highest appeals court over a contentious planning decision.
The ruling stems from September 2018 when HBC granted planning permission for 21 new homes in the village of Bickerton near Wetherby.
Oxton Farm, which is near to the development, sought to overturn the decision through a judicial review, which was rejected in 2019.
In June 2020 the farm took the case to the Court of Appeal in London. They argued that HBC deviated from a government method councils use to calculate how many homes are needed in an area.
As Harrogate had no Local Plan at the time of the decision, the government says planners should use the most recent household projections made by the Office of National Statistics as its baseline for calculating its five-year housing supply.
In a report published five days before the Bickerton planning decision was made, the ONS said HBC requires 383 homes to be built a year to meet its five-year housing supply. This was almost half the 669 homes that HBC said it needed to be built each year in a previous report.
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Lawyers representing Oxton Farm said that HBC’s original projection was “falsified” by the ONS statistics.
They argued that the ONS figure of 383 new homes showed there was a “substantial surplus” of deliverable housing sites in the district and therefore there was no need to grant permission for this development, which is on green belt land.
Ruling in favour of HBC in his judgement, Lord Justice Lewison said Oxton Farm’s position was “erroneous” because the ONS was not mandatory for councils to follow.
He said:
“Government policy states quite clearly (a) that the standard method is not mandatory; (b) that the purpose of the
standard method is to determine the minimum starting point in deciding the number of homes needed in an area; and (c) that higher housing targets than those produced by the standard method will be considered sound.”