Planning, Environment and Property Newsletter - Winter 2024 Edition

Welcome to our January 2024 edition of the Planning Environment & Property Newsletter. A very happy new year to you all, we hope that you managed to enjoy some time off over the Christmas break. What better way to start back, than with a roundup of key decisions and developments from the end of 2023 across the sector?

The end of the year saw a swathe of planning related changes with the enactment of the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act 2023 followed shortly later with the release of the new National Planning Policy Framework. Following on from James Burton’s detailed pre-Christmas article on the NPPF: The Christmas 2023 NPPF: a survey (Tidings of comfort and joy, or a bleak midwinter?) published on our website on 1 January 2024, Celia Reynolds provides her thoughts on reworks to the tilted balance.

We also have a series of articles on other cases from 2023 which have caught our attention: 

• Stephen Tromans KC, Stephanie David, and Ruth Keating consider the case of R (Suez Recycling and Recovery UK Ltd) v Environment Agency which concerned Compliance Assessment Reports and the routes by which they can be challenged;
• Richard Wald KC and Jake Thorold consider R(Clarke-Holland) v SSHD, in which they both acted for one of the Claimants (West Lindsey District Council), on the use of Class Q emergency permitted development rights to accommodate asylum seekers;
• David Sawtell takes a look at Duchess Bedford House RTM Co Ltd v Campden Hill Gate, a case demonstrating the difficulty of construing leasehold covenants;
• Daniel Kozelko provides his thoughts on the potential for uncertainty in the scope of s73 Town and Country Planning Act 1990 in light of the conflicting decisions in Armstrong and Fiske;
• Lastly, Rebecca Cattermole covers the decision in FSV Freeholders Limited v GL1 Limited which provides an example of some of the complexities caused by the myriad array of residential leaseholders’ statutory rights that arise when dealing with blocks of flats.

We hope this provides some food for thought and wish you all a happy, productive and prosperous 2024.

Download below: