R (Davis) v Isle of Wight Council: Planning Court permits sharing draft committee reports with applicants

The Planning Court has dismissed a challenge to a solar and battery storage consent on the Isle of Wight, holding that a case officer acted lawfully in privately sharing a draft committee report with the developer for comment, and taking the opportunity to offer guidance on when such a practice will be fair.

In R (Davis) v Isle of Wight Council [2026] EWHC 1718 (Admin), Tim Smith, sitting as a Deputy High Court Judge, considered a point on which all parties agreed there was no direct authority. The permission for Sunny Oaks Renewable Energy Park's 32.5-hectare scheme at Wootton was a redetermination, the first grant having been quashed by consent following a challenge by the same objector. Ahead of the redetermination, the case officer sent a draft of her report to the applicant, incorporating some of the comments returned and rejecting others. The claimant learned of the exchange only through a Freedom of Information disclosure made after permission had been granted.

The first ground alleged a breach of natural justice through the selective sharing of the draft. The judge rejected it. A planning application is not a judicial or quasi-judicial process akin to litigation, and the authorities relied on by the claimant, drawn from inquiries and planning appeals conducted under defined procedural codes, were of limited assistance. The statutory planning code says little about what fairness requires at the application stage, leaving the decision-maker to set its own procedure subject to basic natural justice. The system is, as the Council put it, deliberately asymmetric, with the applicant at its fulcrum and the article 35 duty under the Development Management Procedure Order expressly contemplating that an authority may work proactively with an applicant to find solutions.

Crucially, a breach of natural justice requires both unfairness and material prejudice, and the claimant could show neither. The officer's purpose in sharing the draft, to secure factual accuracy and ensure all relevant considerations were addressed, was sensible and unobjectionable, particularly given the earlier quashing. She had plainly exercised independent judgement, accepting some suggestions and discarding others, and the section on planning balance and conclusions was withheld from the applicant entirely. The claimant, for his part, had participated extensively, submitting voluminous representations across several rounds, materially influencing the final report and speaking at committee.

The judge declined to lay down exhaustive guard rails but identified relevant factors, describing a spectrum drawn from Jory. Chief among them was that the officer must exercise genuine independent judgement rather than passively accept comments, with the significance of accepted comments ranging from typographical corrections at one end to input on the recommendation itself at the other, and greater transparency reducing any unfairness. The recent Court of Appeal decision in Ocean One Hundred, the nearest analogue, was read as turning on material omissions that rendered a report unbalanced rather than on privileged access as such.

The second ground, that the marked-up draft and a clarificatory email of 11 April were background papers wrongly omitted from the register under section 100D of the Local Government Act 1972, also failed. Following Juden, a draft of the report itself falls outside the provision, and the third-party authorship of the comments did not distinguish that principle. The email amounted to routine dialogue seeking clarification, satisfying neither limb of the statutory test, and the officer had rationally concluded that neither document qualified.