An obviously roadworthy car has been standing on some waste land for the past 10 days. For anyone minded to appropriate the car, it would be dangerous, for obvious reasons, to assume that the owner had abandoned it.
However, in other areas of law, say waiver of forfeiture or the implied surrender of a lease, the courts are far more prone to infer a person’s intention from his outward behaviour. As demonstrated by Martin Edwards and John Martin in their careful review of Hughes v Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions [2001] 1 PLR 76, the same objective approach has to be taken when deciding whether a particular planning use has been abandoned by the landowner: see
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An obviously roadworthy car has been standing on some waste land for the past 10 days. For anyone minded to appropriate the car, it would be dangerous, for obvious reasons, to assume that the owner had abandoned it.
However, in other areas of law, say waiver of forfeiture or the implied surrender of a lease, the courts are far more prone to infer a person’s intention from his outward behaviour. As demonstrated by Martin Edwards and John Martin in their careful review of Hughes v Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions [2001] 1 PLR 76, the same objective approach has to be taken when deciding whether a particular planning use has been abandoned by the landowner: see Abandoned hope, Estates Gazette 25 March 2000, p147. The decision is seen as a useful reminder of one of the ways in which a valuable planning use may be lost, despite the owner’s expressions of intent.
