Connors v Bromley Borough Council: when changed planning policy cannot override years of enforcement defiance

New planning policy is supposed to open doors. The question at the heart of R (Connors) v Bromley London Borough Council [2026] EWHC 1517 (Admin) is whether a council can keep a door firmly shut, using its power to decline to determine a planning application, even when the policy landscape has shifted materially in the applicant's favour. Fordham J's answer is yes, but it comes with a significant caveat that will matter for many cases that follow.

The facts involve a traveller site in green belt land near Knockholt railway station in Bromley. Thomas Connors purchased the land in February 2025 and applied for planning permission in August 2025 for two pitches for Gypsy Travellers, with caravans, dayrooms and hard surfacing. Bromley declined to determine the application under section 70C of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, a power which allows a council to refuse to consider an application on its planning merits where it overlaps with an existing enforcement notice. Two enforcement notices had been in place since May 2019. They had never been complied with. Three criminal convictions had followed. The land had never been restored.

The Claimant's case rested on a genuinely important development in planning policy. In December 2024, the Government revised both the National Planning Policy Framework and the Planning Policy for Traveller Sites. The revisions introduced the concept of "grey belt land": green belt land that does not strongly contribute to the core purposes of the green belt and which, crucially, can now accommodate development without needing to satisfy the "very special circumstances" test that had previously applied. Traveller sites that meet the relevant conditions are no longer classed as inappropriate development in grey belt land. A planning inspector had already applied this new framework favourably in July 2025 in relation to a site just across the railway line from Mr Connors' land.

The argument for quashing Bromley's decision had real force. If councils can simply decline to engage with a fundamentally changed national policy when exercising their section 70C discretion, the result is what Fordham J acknowledged as a "sterilising consequence": land which the new framework is actively encouraging for development becomes permanently locked out of consideration because of an overlapping enforcement notice. There is no right of appeal against a decision to decline to determine, so the applicant has no route to a merits assessment at all.

Fordham J accepted that the argument was arguable. He accepted its logic. He declined to accept that it succeeded, and the reason why is the key lesson of the case.

The decisive factor was that the enforcement notices had been continuously and deliberately defied for over six years. Nothing had been removed. The land had not been restored. The council's stated purpose in declining to determine was not to frustrate the new planning policy but to protect its ability to enforce notices that had been ignored through repeated prosecutions. That was, the judge found, a legally legitimate basis for the decision, one grounded in clear reasoning and a coherent enforcement objective. It was enough to make the changed national planning policy something the decision-maker was not obliged to address.

Fordham J was careful to signal that this is a fact-specific conclusion, not a general one. His observation that the outcome "could be very different if there were a reset" deserves attention. Had the applicant complied with the enforcement notices before reapplying, the central justification for Bromley's decision would have fallen away. The council could not then have pointed to ongoing defiance as the engine of its reasoning.

That is the real significance of this case. Section 70C remains a broad and largely uncircumscribed discretion. But it is not a permanent shield against changed policy in every case. Where an applicant clears the land, complies with outstanding notices and starts afresh, the calculus is different. The courts have not shut that door. They have simply confirmed who left the previous one open.