Appeal decisions as material considerations: weight and limits

An appeal decision is a material consideration. It is not a precedent, and the difference matters every time you put one in front of a case officer. Section 38(6) of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 requires determination in accordance with the development plan unless material considerations indicate otherwise, and an inspector's decision on a comparable scheme sits in that second category. How much weight it carries is a matter for the decision maker, which means your job is to make the comparison so close that giving it little weight looks unreasonable.

The authority for this is North Wiltshire District Council v Secretary of State for the Environment (1992), where the Court of Appeal accepted that consistency in decision making is itself desirable and that a decision maker who departs from an earlier decision on the same issue must engage with it and give reasons. That obligation is about reasoning, not outcome. An inspector is free to disagree with a colleague provided they explain why.

Why appeal decisions are indicative rather than binding

Planning decisions turn on planning judgement applied to a particular site at a particular time against a particular policy framework. Two of those three variables change constantly. The Framework was re-issued in December 2024 with renumbered paragraphs and again on 17 August 2026 with policy-coded chapters, so a decision from early 2024 was written against policy text that no longer exists in that form.

That does not make the decision worthless. It makes it evidence of approach rather than evidence of rule. An inspector's reasoning on, say, how to weigh the fallback position created by a prior approval, or what counts as a reasonable alternative site, survives the renumbering even when the paragraph reference does not. Cite the reasoning and note the policy edition in the same sentence.

Where a decision does carry heavy weight is on the same site. A dismissed appeal on an earlier scheme for the identical plot is the starting point for the officer's assessment, and your statement needs to answer it head on by identifying what has changed in the design, the evidence or the policy position.

Finding decisions on comparable issues

The Planning Inspectorate's Appeals Casework Portal is the primary source and lets you search by local planning authority, appeal type, decision date and outcome. The GOV.UK appeals service explains the routes and timescales. Neither search is good at finding decisions by subject matter, which is the thing you actually want.

Three search tactics that work better than keyword fishing:

1. Search by authority and by date range around a known contentious policy, then read the decisions rather than the summaries. Officers in that authority will recognise their own cases.
2. Work backwards from court judgments. A High Court challenge names the appeal decision it reviewed, and that decision is usually a thorough treatment of the issue.
3. Search the authority's own committee reports, which cite appeal decisions the council has lost and is anxious about.

Record the full appeal reference, the decision date, the inspector's name is not needed, and the paragraph numbers you rely on. A citation that cannot be checked in two minutes gets ignored.

Reading a decision for the reasoning

Decisions follow a predictable shape, and only part of it is useful. The procedural preamble and the site description tell you how transferable the case is. The "main issues" section tells you what the inspector thought the case was about, which is often narrower than the grounds of appeal. The conclusions carry the reasoning you want.

Read for four things. What policy framework applied, including whether the development plan was treated as out of date and whether the tilted balance was engaged. What facts the inspector found, as distinct from what the parties asserted. Which evidence the inspector accepted and which they rejected, because a decision that turned on the absence of a survey tells you to commission the survey. And what the inspector expressly declined to decide.

Distinguishing a decision on the facts

The same analysis works in reverse when the council cites a dismissal against you. Distinguishing is not about finding any difference, it is about finding a difference the inspector's reasoning depended on.

Go through the decision and isolate the operative findings. If an appeal for a rural dwelling was dismissed because the site was outside a settlement boundary and poorly served by public transport, and your site is inside the boundary, the decision is distinguished on the point that mattered. If it was dismissed on landscape character and your site shares that character, pointing out that the two sites are in different districts helps nobody.

Policy change is the strongest distinguishing argument available. A dismissal that rested on a five-year housing land supply the authority can no longer demonstrate is a different case now, and the same is true in reverse where supply has been restored since.

Citing decisions in a statement of case

Put the proposition first and the citation second. Officers and inspectors read a great many statements, and a paragraph that opens with a reference number buries the point.

Attach the decisions you rely on in full as an appendix rather than quoting at length in the body. Two or three well-chosen decisions beat a bundle of twelve. Where you cite a decision for a proposition, quote the sentence that supports it with the paragraph number, and say in one clause why the circumstances are comparable. A Planning Statement that handles three appeal decisions properly is far more use than one that lists fifteen in a footnote.

Be explicit about what you are not claiming. A sentence saying that the decision is not advanced as a precedent but as an indication of how inspectors have approached the test reads as confident rather than defensive, and it removes the easiest line of attack. The approach differs slightly when the decision is being deployed at validation stage rather than at appeal, which is covered in using appeal decisions in a planning application.

Appeal decisions against court judgments

Judgments of the Planning Court and above are a different animal. They bind on points of law, and the reasoning that forms the basis of the decision applies to every subsequent case on the same legal question. Obiter remarks do not bind but carry persuasive force depending on the court.

The practical rule is to separate the question into law and merits. Whether an inspector was entitled to treat a benefit as capable of amounting to very special circumstances is law. Whether that benefit does amount to them on your site is merits. Cite a judgment for the first and an appeal decision for the second, and never present an appeal decision as having settled a legal question. Statutory interpretation that has been argued in court is available on the National Archives caselaw service.

Heritage cases show the division clearly. The statutory duties under sections 16, 66 and 72 of the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990 have been interpreted by the courts, while the application of the balance to a particular scheme is a merits judgement, as discussed in heritage harm refusals and the statutory balance.

Where the decision you found helps the other side

Every decision you cite is now in the case, and the other side gets to read all of it. An allowed appeal that turned on a condition you cannot accept, or that contains three paragraphs of criticism of an approach your scheme adopts, has handed the authority its refusal reason.

Read the whole decision before citing any of it. Then ask what an objector would quote from it. If the answer is uncomfortable, either address the passage yourself in a sentence or find a different decision. Selective quotation that an inspector notices damages everything else in the statement, and it is noticed more often than people expect.

There is one honest uncertainty here. Nobody can tell you in advance how much weight a particular decision maker will give to a particular decision, and consistency arguments succeed less often than consultants hope. They are worth making anyway, because the obligation to give reasons for departing from an earlier decision creates a hook for challenge if the authority ignores it entirely. Where a committee has gone against its own officer, that hook matters more, as set out in committee refusals against officer advice.

Browse all 66 report types on PlanScope and start a draft statement that handles the appeal evidence properly.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. Check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.