Barker EIA: outline permission and reserved matters
Regina v London Borough of Bromley, ex parte Barker [2006] UKHL 52 concerns environmental impact assessment, or EIA, where planning consent is given in more than one stage.
The Barker EIA litigation rejected an approach which treated the grant of outline permission as necessarily the last possible opportunity for assessment. However, it did not establish that every reserved-matters application automatically requires a fresh EIA.
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- Neutral citation
- [2006] UKHL 52
- Court
- House of Lords
- Judgment date
- 6th December 2006
- Judge
- Lord Bingham of Cornhill, Lord Hope of Craighead, Baroness Hale of Richmond, Lord Carswell and Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood
The Crystal Palace proposal
The case arose from a proposal for a leisure development at Crystal Palace. Outline permission had been granted in 1998, followed by approval of reserved matters.
The challenge exposed a difficulty in the way the 1988 domestic regulations had implemented the EIA Directive. The authority had proceeded on the basis that it could not require environmental assessment at the reserved-matters stage.
The House of Lords referred questions to the Court of Justice. That produced the linked Barker judgment in Case C-290/03, which the House then applied.
The consent process must be considered as a whole
For EIA purposes, a multi-stage consent process cannot be understood simply by looking at the domestic label attached to one decision.
Assessment should take place as early as the relevant environmental effects can be identified and assessed. If effects cannot adequately be identified at the principal stage, the process must allow assessment when they become identifiable at the later stage.
The earlier grant of outline permission therefore did not justify an absolute rule that the authority had no assessment function when dealing with subsequent approvals.
What the House of Lords ordered
The appeal was allowed and declarations were made about the incorrect implementation of the Directive and the mistaken view that there was no power to require EIA at the reserved-matters stage.
By then, the outline permission had expired. The House did not quash it. Nor did it declare the reserved-matters decision itself unlawful on the insufficient factual material available.
Those qualifications matter. A statement that Barker simply ‘quashed the permission for lack of EIA’ would not accurately describe this judgment.
How Barker fits with the wider cases
Read Barker with Rochdale ex parte Milne when considering the relationship between outline parameters and environmental assessment. The two questions overlap, but are not identical.
The later Supreme Court judgment in C G Fry also discusses multi-stage authorisation. Habitats assessment and EIA remain separate legal regimes; their requirements should not be merged.
The regulations considered in Barker were historical. For a current project, check the applicable legislation, the environmental information already assessed, the parameters of the permission and what remains to be authorised.
Read the House of Lords judgment
Gold Members can read the complete domestic judgment below. The associated European judgment has its own linked entry and download.
Barker EIA Case Law Page Updated: 12th September 2026