The High Court has quashed An Bord Pleanála’s refusals of planning permission for two brothers seeking to build individual homes at Ballylug, Co Wicklow, and directed the board to reconsider their appeals.
In a judgment delivered on 21 December 2017, Ms Justice O’Regan found that the inspector’s report did not give a reasoned explanation for departing from an earlier planning history involving the applicants’ sister, whose planning application had succeeded. The court also found no evidence that the inspector considered the brothers’ case under a specific rural housing criterion concerning people whose principal occupation is in a rural resource-based activity.
The brothers had applied to Wicklow County Council for permission to build on land gifted to them by their father. The council refused the applications in January 2016, citing traffic hazard, intrusive features and a failure to demonstrate housing need. On appeal, An Bord Pleanála refused permission in June 2016, relying on intrusive features and the absence of demonstrated housing need; the traffic objection had fallen away.
The brothers sought judicial review. At the hearing, their challenge was confined to the board’s assessment of housing need under the council’s development plan. The court considered whether the board had addressed the relevant criteria, whether the need test had been applied appropriately, and whether the refusal was irrational given the permission granted to their sister in 2010.
The inspector’s report referred to one criterion requiring a “definable social/economic need” and concluded that such need had not been adequately demonstrated. But the court noted that another criterion required a person employed in a rural resource-based activity to show a need to live near that activity, without requiring the same defined social or economic need. The judgment said there appeared to be no evidence that the brothers’ claim under that criterion had been considered.
The court also found the inspector’s report did not address the earlier inspector’s findings about the sister’s application, despite the siblings’ shared background. The board’s explanation that the locations differed under development-plan area levels was not set out in the report. The court held that the report’s failure to explain why the prior findings should be departed from was irrational in the legal sense.
The court granted an order of certiorari quashing the board’s decision and directed that the brothers’ appeals be reconsidered in light of those errors. It did not grant planning permission or determine the applications afresh.