Remediation in UK Law

Secondly, as Green Belt policies NPPF 89 and 90 demonstrate, considerations of appropriateness, preservation of openness and conflict with Green Belt purposes are not exclusively dependent on the size of building or structures but include their purpose. The Green Belt may not be harmed necessarily by one but is harmed necessarily by another. These concepts are to be applied, in the light of the nature of a particular type of development.

And, contrary to Ms Sheikh's submission, the "juridical basis" for it is not obscure. It has been recognized in jurisprudence extending back at least to the Divisional Court's decision in Murfitt, and has been consistently applied by the courts since that decision.

It is that an enforcement notice directed at a breach of planning control by the making of an unauthorized material change of use may lawfully require the land or building in question to be restored to its condition before that change of use took place, by the removal of associated works as well as the cessation of the use itself – provided that the works concerned are integral to or part and parcel of the unauthorized use.

It does not, in my view, cast doubt on the proposition that when a local planning authority is properly enforcing against a material change of use of premises where that change of use has entailed subsequent physical works to facilitate and support it, and those works are thus integral to the unauthorized use, the statutory scheme allows the enforcement notice to require the removal of such works as well as the cessation of the use itself.

It is a wide power of correction, a generously expressed slip rule, it is not a power which can properly be used to attack the substance of an enforcement notice. So, for example, a notice which requires the recipient to return the land to its condition before the breach cannot, by reliance on section 176(1)(b), be turned into a notice which requires something less.

The first is that the effluent discharge agreement (ie the agreement dated 2 April 1965 as varied with effect from 1 December 1969) provided for a maximum daily effluent discharge of (in metric terms) 364 m?

The fact of the matter is that there are no "precise provisions" governing the management of waste which escapes unintentionally from the sewerage system. Accordingly they are not "covered by other legislation" in the sense explained by the ECJ. That may not be surprising, since the escapes are by definition unplanned, and therefore outside the scope of the ordinary management regime.