R (Nunn) v First Secretary of State & Ors [2005] EWCA Civ 101
The point in plain English: Under the telecommunications prior-approval regime considered in this case, once the council missed the statutory 56-day deadline the developer obtained the benefit of the GPDO permission. The council’s procedural failure could not later be cured by taking that permission away from an innocent developer.
What happened
T-Mobile applied under the then Part 24 telecommunications permitted-development regime. Leeds City Council decided that prior approval was required and resolved to refuse it, but notified T-Mobile after the statutory 56-day period had expired.
An enforcement appeal followed. The Inspector concluded that the GPDO permission had accrued because the refusal had not been notified in time.
What the Court of Appeal decided
The Court of Appeal upheld that conclusion. The local resident had lost the opportunity for her objections to be determined through the expected process, and the court accepted that this infringed her Article 6 rights. But the failure was the council’s. It did not make the GPDO scheme unlawful or remove the planning permission which T-Mobile had acquired under it.
Any remedy against the council could not be achieved by rewriting the statutory scheme so as to take away the innocent developer’s accrued permission.
Why Nunn matters today
The case concerned the old Part 24 telecommunications rules. Telecommunications permitted development is now found principally in Part 16 of Schedule 2 to the GPDO 2015, and the current provisions must be checked directly.
The wider lesson remains useful: where a GPDO right gives legal consequences to expiry of a decision period, a planning authority’s missed deadline can have substantive consequences. See Planning Geek on prior approval deemed consent.
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