Barking supermarket extension to undergo judicial review

Estate and Agency Properties Ltd (EAP), which owns a retail park to the east of the Tesco store, had applied for judicial review of the permission for extension on grounds that the Council's planning officers, in their recommendations to the Council's planning committee, had failed to properly interpret the local planning policies relevant to the decision.

EAP said that the proposals directly impacted on the Council's Core Strategy which identified redevelopment of EAP's retail park as a "key component of improvements to Barking town centre". It also impacted, the EAP said, on policies in the Council's Area Action Plan which envisaged that the Council would allow Tesco to be relocated onto EAP's retail park as part of a housing and retail mixed use development and with the existing Tesco to be redeveloped into housing.

EAP said that granting permission for the extension would "act as a significant disincentive" to Tesco to participate in a redevelopment of EAP's retail park, which was a "key component" of the Core Strategy. It said that the officers' recommendation had failed "properly to engage with the significant impact the present application had on the fulfilment of these local planning policies" and that, as a result, the Council's planning committee had not had the opportunity to weigh up the planning merits of the application in the light of that "highly significant" consideration.

The judge said that the officers had failed to "properly or fairly" identify the issue for the members of the planning committee because they "misunderstood, or misapplied, the relevant planning policies and their impact upon the application".

"There was a question whether, given the positions of the Claimant and Tesco, granting this permission would act as a disincentive to Tesco coming forward as a co-developer of the ARP as envisaged in the AAP policies," the judge said. "That was a matter upon which the members should have been invited to come to a view and, having come to a view one way or the other, then, to determine whether or not, as a matter of planning judgment, planning permission should be granted."