Maroudas v Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and Another: Admn 9 Mar 2009

Application was to quash the decision of the Secretary of State, made by an inspector in May 2008 following a hearing, to confirm a modification order made in response to an application originally made under section 53(5). It had had several failings, but these had been addressed by the authority.
Held: Mackie QC upheld the inspector’s decision to treat the application as validly made by the relevant date. As he observed, there had been nothing ‘opportunistic’ about the application, made long before any hint of the proposals which led in due course to the 2006 legislation. Although he was bound by the Winchester decision, and he accepted that the defects in the original application could not be treated as ‘minor’, he was entitled to look ‘at the substance of the matter’, which was that: ‘by the time the letter of 22 April 1997 was written it was perfectly clear what the application related to. There was a map, as one sees from ‘enclosed is a summary plan of the application’ in the letter of 25 March 1997, and a signature and a date. No one would, or could, have been misled about what happened after that. Mr Maroudas rightly had to accept that he would have no grounds at all for his application if, instead of the exchange of letters, the council had gone through the bureaucratic, or some would say necessary, step of returning the form to [the applicant] to sign and amend, rather than resolving the matter on an exchange of correspondence. That seems to me to move proper strictness into unnecessary bureaucracy . . .’

Judges:

Mackie QC HHJ

Citations:

[2009] EWHC 628 (Admin)

Links:

Bailii

Cited by:

Appeal fromMaroudas v Secretary of State for Environment Food and Rural Affairs CA 18-Mar-2010
The claimant appealed against an order refusing his request to quash a footpath modification order. The request had not been signed as required.
Held: The appeal succeeded. ‘subject to the de minimis principle, an application must strictly . .
CitedTrail Riders Fellowship and Another, Regina (on The Application of) v Dorset County Council SC 18-Mar-2015
Objection had been made that a plan, used to register a right of way before it would disappear if un-registered, was to the wrong scale and that therefore the application was ineffetive.
Held: The Council’s appeal failed. The plan was too . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.

Land, Administrative

Updated: 24 July 2022; Ref: scu.330989