R (Moakes) v Canterbury City Council [2025] EWCA Civ 927
Moakes is a useful Court of Appeal decision on procedural fairness in planning committee decision-making, particularly where a council has adopted rules allowing members of the public and organisations to speak.
The case concerned a major winery and warehousing development in the Kent Downs AONB.
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- Neutral citation
- [2025] EWCA Civ 927
- Court
- Court of Appeal (Civil Division)
- Judgment date
- 21st July 2025
- Judge
- Stuart-Smith LJ, Andrews LJ and Lewis LJ
- Case number
- CA-2024-001414
The council had breached its own speaking procedure
Council officers had wrongly told representatives of CPRE Kent and Natural England that they could not use certain speaking slots in a representative capacity. The Court accepted that this was a breach of the council’s constitution.
A procedural breach is not automatically an unlawful planning decision
The important point is that breach of a procedural rule and procedural unfairness are not necessarily the same thing. The claimant must establish that the procedural error caused material prejudice before the decision itself becomes unlawful on that ground.
Here, the relevant objections were already before the committee in writing, Natural England’s position was fairly presented, and there was no evidence that the lost speaking opportunities would have added anything material. The Court therefore found no procedural unfairness.
Public speaking is not generally required by common law
Planning authorities are not generally obliged at common law to allow oral representations at committee. But where a council voluntarily creates a speaking procedure, that procedure must itself be operated fairly.
No special reasons test simply because a statutory consultee disagrees
The views of a statutory consultee may deserve great weight, but there is no separate heightened legal formula for the reasons required when an authority reaches a different conclusion. The familiar South Bucks v Porter test still applies: reasons must be intelligible and adequate on the principal controversial issues.
The reasons for disagreement can emerge from the officer report and decision read as a whole. They do not always need to be placed under a separate heading saying why the consultee was rejected.
Consistency requires genuinely comparable cases
The Court also rejected the argument that the council needed to explain a departure from a recent appeal decision concerning another winery. The two proposals involved different landscape effects and significantly different evidence on economic need. They were therefore not materially “like” cases requiring a consistency explanation.
Read the full Moakes judgment
Planning Geek holds the approved Court of Appeal judgment in the protected case law library. Gold Members can open the PDF below.
Moakes Case Law Page Updated: 11th September 2026