Griffiths v The Secretary of State for the Environment and the London Borough of Bromley
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | LORD JUSTICE TEMPLEMAN,LORD JUSTICE DUNN,LORD JUSTICE CUMMING-BRUCE |
| Judgment Date | 26 January 1982 |
| Judgment citation (vLex) | [1982] EWCA Civ J0126-1 |
| Docket Number | 82/0019 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Civil Division) |
| Date | 26 January 1982 |
[1982] EWCA Civ J0126-1
Lord Justice Cumming-Bruce,
Lord Justice Templeman and
Lord Justice Dunn
82/0019
IN THE SUPREME COURT OF JUDICATURE
COURT OF APPEAL
CIVIL DIVISION
On appeal from Order of Sir Douglas Frank, Q.C., sitting as a Deputy High Court Judge.
Royal Courts of Justice,
The Appellant (Mr P. Elridge Griffiths) appeared in person.
Mr PETER LANGDON-DAVIES (instructed by the Treasury Solicitor) appeared on behalf of the Respondents.
I will ask Lord Justice Templeman to deliver the first judgment.
This is an appeal against an Order dated the 10th March 1981 of Sir Douglas Frank, sitting as a Deputy Judge of the Queen's Bench Division, whereby he struck out an application by the Appellant Mr Griffiths to quash a decision of the Respondent Secretary of State for the Environment.
Mr Griffiths sought planning permission for the erection of a farmhouse on Green Belt land near Bromley. The local planning authority refused permission. Mr Griffiths appealed, under Section 36, sub-section (1), of the Town and Country Planning Act 1971, to the Minister. The Minister dismissed the appeal in exercise of the powers vested in him by Section 36, sub-section (3), of that Act. By Section 36, sub-section (6), the decision of the Minister was expressed to be final. By Section 242, sub-section (1)(e), "Except as provided by the following provisions of this Part of this Act, the validity of…any such action on the part of the Secretary of State as is mentioned in subsection (3) of this section, shall not be questioned in any legal proceedings whatsoever". By sub-section (3), paragraph (b), the action referred to in sub-section (l)(e) is action on the part of the Secretary of State comprising "any decision of the Secretary of State on an appeal under section 36 of this Act". Thus, all avenues available to Mr Griffiths to impugn the decision of the Minister are firmly closed to him by the express words of the 1971 Act, save for the avenue which is provided by Section 245 and which is excepted from the limitations of Section 242.
By Section 245, inter alia, any person "aggrieved by any action on the part of the Secretary of State", including action on the part of the Secretary of State mentioned in Section 242, sub-section (3), is entitled to make an application to the High Court to quash the Order on certain limited grounds, which I need not mention in detail, save to say (for example) on the grounds that the action was not within the powers of the Act or that any of the requirements of the Act had not been complied with. But, in order to take advantage of Section 245, the aggrieved person must, "within six weeks from the date on which the order is confirmed or the action is taken, as the case may be, make an application to the High Court under this section". Mr Griffiths is undoubtedly a person aggrieved by the decision of the Secretary of State, and he must therefore, if he wishes to pursue his remedy under Section 245, make application within six weeks from the date on which the action by the Secretary of State was taken, that action being the decision of the Secretary of State to dismiss Mr Griffiths' appeal against the refusal of planning permission by the local authority.
We are informed that the Secretary of State made up his mind to dismiss Mr Griffiths' appeal and that the responsibility for pronouncing that decision was delegated to a Senior Executive Officer in the Department of the Environment who was duly authorised by the Secretary of State to sign letters giving his decision on appeals to him under Section 36. We are further informed that the Senior Executive Officer, a Mr Robinson, who is about to make an affidavit deposing to these facts, drafted the necessary letter, signed it and that, in accordance with the practice of the Ministry, he passed it to a junior officer, who would have date-stamped it, placed it in an envelope and put it to his out tray for posting by first-class post. We have the letter, and it is date-stamped the 8th December 1980. On that evidence Mr Langdon-Davies, who appears for the Ministry, asks us to accept—and for my part I am prepared to accept—that the letter in question was signed and posted on the 8th December 1980.
Now, if what happened on the 8th December 1980 constituted the relevant action taken by the Minister for the purposes of Section 245, then the six weeks during which Mr Griffiths was authorised to apply to the Court under Section 245 began on that date and expired on the 19th January 1981. Mr Griffiths applied to the Court on the 22nd January 1981 and therefore, if the action was taken on the 8th December 1980, he was out of time. It is common ground that there is no power to extend the time, no power in the Minister and no power in the Court. If the action by the Minister was taken on the 8th December 1980, then Mr Griffiths' application to the Court must be struck out.
We are also informed, and it is not in dispute, that the letter from the Minister announcing his decision was not received by Mr Griffiths until the 13th December 1980. If that was the date on which action was taken by the Minister within the meaning of Section 245, then the six weeks began to run on the 13th December 1980, they were still running on the 22nd January 1981 when Mr Griffiths applied to the Court, and they did not expire until the 24th January 1981. In that event, Mr Griffiths applied in time, his application should not have been struck out by the learned Judge, and he should be entitled to pursue his application to quash the Minister's Order. So the question is: When was action taken, within the meaning of Section 245?
The matter came before the learned Judge, and we have no judgment by him. We are informed the reason was that the learned Judge felt that he was bound by two decisions of the Divisional Court in the years 1967 and 1979 to hold that the six-weeks period had elapsed and that Mr Griffiths' application must therefore be struck out. In this Court Mr Langdon-Davies on behalf of the Minister has supported the decision on those grounds and also supported the decision on the ground that Rules of the Supreme Court which were in question in the decided cases were very different from the wording of the statute in the present case and that in any event, on the wording of the statute in the present case, the Minister took action not later than the 8th December 1980 when his decision was incorporated in a letter and that letter was posted.
It will be convenient to deal first of all with the two authorities on which reliance was placed and which were accepted by the learned Judge in the Court below. The first case is a reported case of the Divisional Court, Minister of Labour v. Genner Iron & Steel Co. (Wollescote) Ltd., reported in 1967 1 Weekly Law Reports at page 1386. That case concerned the construction of Order 55, rule 4, of...
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