Slough Borough Council v Secretary of State for the Environment and Oury (1995) 70 P & CR 560

The point in plain English: A clear planning permission is normally read from the permission itself. An earlier application cannot be used to cut down what the permission plainly grants unless the permission properly incorporates that application or other documents.

What happened

Slough Borough Council owned land at Herschel Street and used the procedure then available for a planning authority to grant permission for development of land vested in itself.

The application material referred to an outline office development of about 1,055 m². The subsequent permission authorised Class B1(a) office development but did not itself impose a floorspace limit.

A successor in title later sought approval of reserved matters for about 1,530 m² of office floorspace. The council argued that this was outside the scope of the outline permission because it exceeded the figure in the original application.

An Inspector rejected that argument. Slough challenged the decision by judicial review.

What the courts decided

Schiemann J dismissed the council’s challenge on 25th March 1994. That first-instance decision was reported as R v Secretary of State for the Environment, ex parte Slough Borough Council [1994] EGCS 67.

The Court of Appeal dismissed Slough’s appeal on 19th May 1995. The clean report is headed Slough Borough Council v Secretary of State for the Environment and Oury and is reported at (1995) 70 P & CR 560. Some later decisions use different abbreviated citations; Planning Geek therefore uses the P & CR report as the primary citation.

The permission was clear on its face and did not restrict the amount of office floorspace. The original application therefore could not be used to insert a limit that did not appear in the permission.

A mere reference to the application number was not enough to incorporate the application into the permission. The Court said wording such as “in accordance with the plans and application” would be needed to make that relationship clear. There is an important public-interest reason for the approach: purchasers, neighbours and other third parties should ordinarily be able to understand the scope of a planning permission from the public document itself without reconstructing the historic application file.

When other documents can still matter

The Court identified recognised exceptions to the general rule. First, where the permission incorporates the application or plans by reference, those documents can be used because incorporation makes them part of the permission itself.

Second, where the permission is ambiguous on its face, surrounding application documents may be relevant to resolving that ambiguity.

The Court also recognised a further situation where the validity of the permission is challenged for want of authority or mistake. In that setting, background circumstances can be examined. That is different from using background material simply to cut down the ordinary meaning of a clear permission.

Slough also argued that the authority had no power to grant substantially more development than had been applied for. The Court held that this did not alter the construction of a permission that was plain on its face. Any challenge to the validity of the 1989 permission on that basis needed to have been brought promptly; the time for doing so had long passed.

Why Slough matters

The case remains an important authority on the interpretation of planning permissions. Its practical message is not that application documents and plans are irrelevant, but that a clear public permission should not ordinarily be cut down by extrinsic material which has not been incorporated into it.

The practical starting point is nevertheless straightforward: do not assume that a purpose, limitation or detail appearing elsewhere in the planning file has legal effect if the permission itself does not impose or incorporate it.

The principle was later developed in cases including Trump International Golf Club Scotland Ltd v Scottish Ministers [2015] UKSC 74 and London Borough of Lambeth v Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government [2019] UKSC 33. It was also applied in Planning Inspectorate appeal APP/K0235/X/25/3373400, discussed in our Bedford garage appeal report.

See also Planning Geek’s guide to planning conditions.

Source position

Planning Geek has checked the complete eight-page Court of Appeal report, including the facts, submissions, reasoning, order and footnotes. A clean copy is now held locally and is available to Gold Members below. The earlier Bath & North East Somerset inquiry bundle remains a useful corroborating public source, but the summary above has been checked against the clean report itself.