R v Somerset County Council and ARC Southern Limited ex p Dixon

This case dealt with, among others, the locus standi of the applicant in leave applications and the meaning of the term "sufficient interest" when bringing a matter to court. The applicant applied for leave to challenge a grant of conditional planning permission made by the Somerset County Council ARC Southern Limited. The effect of the grant was to permit ARC to extend their limestone extraction operation at their quarry in Somerset. The extraction of limestone from this site had been permitted since 1939. Later on ARC sought permission to extend their operation and the County Council granted conditional planning permission for extension of the limestone quarrying. The respondents argued that the applicant, having no interest as a landowner or as the possessor of a personal right or interest threatened by the proposed quarrying, had no "sufficient interest" within the Supreme Court Act 1981 to bring this application in court. The court examined the requirement of locus standi by analyzing the relevant statutory scheme as well as jurisdiction on the issue of “standing” over the recent years. It noted that it was necessary to demonstrate that the applicant was not a mere busybody. But there were, in public life, cases of apparent abuse of power in which any individual, simply as a citizen, had a sufficient interest to bring the matter before the court. It also emphasized that public law was not at base about rights, but about wrongs -- that was to say misuses of public power; and the courts had always been alive to the fact that a person or organisation with no particular stake in the issue or the outcome could, without in any sense being a mere meddler, be well placed to call the attention of the court to an apparent misuse of public power. If an arguable case of such misuse could be made out on an application for leave, the court’s only concern was to ensure that it was not being done for an ill motive. The court concluded that the applicant was plainly neither a busybody nor a mere troublemaker, even if the implications of his application were troublesome for the intended respondents. He was perfectly entitled as a citizen to be concerned about, and to draw the attention of the court to, what he contended was an illegality in the grant of a planning consent which was bound to have an impact on the natural environment. However, the objection which the applicant sought to advance to the material grant of planning permission was not sustainable. For this reason, and not because of want of standing, the court refused leave to move for judicial review.