R (on the application of Lee Valley Regional Park Authority) v Broxbourne Borough Council [2015] EWHC 185 (Admin)
Lee Valley is an important High Court case on previously developed land in the Green Belt. It is especially useful where an application site is a mixture of genuinely developed land and open or undeveloped land. The court held that the existence of some previously developed land does not automatically make the whole site brownfield for Green Belt purposes.
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- Neutral citation
- [2015] EWHC 185 (Admin)
- Court
- High Court of Justice, Queen's Bench Division, Administrative Court
- Judgment date
- 30th January 2015
- Judge
- Mr Justice Ouseley
- Case number
- CO/2496/2014
What Lee Valley decided
Broxbourne Borough Council granted outline permission for 90 homes on a 4.4 hectare site within the Green Belt and the Lee Valley Regional Park. The southern part contained substantial former nursery buildings and hardstanding. The northern part was largely open grass and scrub land.
The officer report treated the site broadly as a single derelict redevelopment opportunity and relied heavily on the more flexible national policy then applying to previously developed land. The Lee Valley Regional Park Authority challenged the permission.
Mr Justice Ouseley quashed the decision.
Some previously developed land does not make the whole site brownfield
The court accepted that the southern part of the site could properly be treated as previously developed land. The northern part could not.
That distinction mattered. The judge said the presence of some previously developed land within an application site does not make the whole site previously developed land. Equally, the policy does not necessarily require every square metre of an application site to be previously developed before it can have any relevance.
Where the developed and undeveloped parts are both substantial, the decision-maker has to engage with the difference rather than treating the site as one undifferentiated parcel.
The developed and undeveloped parts needed separate analysis
The southern part had derelict buildings and hardstanding. The northern part was open. Housing on the northern land therefore raised a different Green Belt question from redevelopment of the southern land.
The officer report did not properly explain which part of the site benefited from the previously developed land policy, where inappropriate development remained, what harm arose from that development and what very special circumstances were said to outweigh it.
That failure infected the Green Belt analysis.
Openness is not simply the same as visual improvement
The report argued that replacing derelict buildings with lower and more attractive housing could improve the Green Belt. The court accepted that height, bulk, footprint, dispersal and layout can all be relevant to an openness judgment.
But the decision-maker still had to confront the obvious spatial consequence of spreading housing across land that was then open. A conclusion that the scheme looked better was not enough by itself to establish that the impact on openness would be no greater.
Later case law has continued to treat openness as a matter of planning judgment, but Lee Valley remains a useful warning that visual amenity and Green Belt openness are not interchangeable concepts.
Very special circumstances must outweigh the identified harm
The report also referred to benefits such as removal of dereliction, better access to the Regional Park, housing supply and the quality of the proposed development.
The legal problem was not that those matters could never count in favour of the scheme. It was that the report had not first identified the Green Belt harm correctly and then explained what considerations clearly outweighed that harm.
The court criticised factors which were really descriptions of a lesser degree of harm being presented as though they were positive very special circumstances.
The case still matters despite later NPPF changes
The national Green Belt policy and paragraph numbering have changed since 2015, and the current NPPF now also contains the separate concept of grey belt. Lee Valley should therefore not be used as a substitute for reading the current policy.
Its enduring value is the treatment of mixed sites. Where only part of a site is previously developed land, the planning authority still needs to explain which land falls within the definition and how the policy applies to the remainder.
The same point was applied again in Ribble Valley Borough Council v Secretary of State in 2025.
Read the full Lee Valley judgment
The High Court judgment is held in the Planning Geek case law library. Gold Members can open the protected PDF below.
Related Planning Geek guidance
See our guides to grey belt, Green Belt, greenfield and brownfield land and previously developed land.
Lee Valley Case Law Page Updated: 9th September 2026