ABSTRACT
The Lands Tribunal and the Court of Appeal accepted this approach in the following cases. In RMC (UK) Ltd v Greenwich LBC [2005] the Lands Tribunal applied the Pointe Gourde principle to the determination of the scope of development, and the necessary planning permissions, which would have been permitted but for the scheme of the acquiring authority. In Spirerose Ltd v Transport for London [2007], the Tribunal gave much fuller reasons for this type of approach, and an appeal against its decision was dismissed by the Court of Appeal in 2008. Spirerose followed earlier decisions of the Tribunal in Pentrehobyn Trustees v National Assembly for Wales [2003] and Thomas’s Executors v Merthyr Tydfil CBC [2003] concerning the application of the Pointe Gourde principle to the determination of a planning permission that would be granted by the valuation date. However, a further appeal by the acquiring authority in Spirerose was allowed by the House of Lords [2009], who decided that where there was a statutory code for the determination of assumptions about the planning status of the land being acquired, that code should be applied, and there was little if any room for the application of the Pointe Gourde principle to establish the planning status.
