High Court rules on visual impact of Chester service station

A High Court judge ruled today that a planning inspector erred by failing to properly take into account impact on the openness of the green belt caused by a small extension to a service station. The legal challenge was brought by Euro Garages Limited, a service station operator in the Midlands and North of England. The company carried out works on the its Red Ensign Service Station near Chester in 2017 and, shortly before completing them, applied for retrospective planning permission. That planning permission was refused on the basis that it was inappropriate development within the green belt. However, in a ruling handed down by Mrs Justice Jefford at the Birmingham Civil Justice Centre today, ruled that the refusal should be quashed. In her judgment, the judge said that the planning inspector erred by assuming that replacing one fenced-off structure in the green belt with another one, surrounded by a less-open fence, automatically means that the openness of the green belt has been negatively effected. Instead, the planning inspector should have considered whether the new structures actually made any difference. According to the ruling, the changes to the service station were relatively small. The owners built a fenced-off storage area with a storage container in it on a plot that had previously contained an LPG tank surrounded by railings. They also built a side extension and a new entrance on a space that used to house a storage container. The inspector said that the changed amounted as a “limited in-filling” but even so, the new development needed to have  no greater impact on the openness of the green belt to be permissible. This reasoning, the judge said, is flawed because it assumed “that any infill (however limited) would necessarily result in a greater floor area or volume and it involved the assumption that any change would have a greater impact.” “The concept of greater impact involves something more than that,” the judge said. “There may, of course, be circumstances in which the replacement of an open fence with a solid structure could impact the openness of the green belt but here the open fence surrounded tanks and the solid fence surrounds a container (of lesser height) and it is difficult to see how there could be an impact on the openness of the Green Belt as distinct from the site itself.” “I would grant Euro Garages the relief sort and quash the decision of the inspector,” the judge said. Euro Garages Limited v The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government & ors Planning Court, Birmingham (Mrs Justice Jefford) 11 July 2018