Supreme Court case considering whether the Scottish Ministers had given adequate reasons for their decision to approve the Fife Structure Plan with modifications; Ms Uprichard arguing that the reasons given by the Ministers had not adequately addressed her objections to proposed modifications to the plan.

 In brief, the essence of Ms Uprichard’s objection was that the modifications to the plan did not contain any modification to the strategy within the plan that St Andrews should become an economic driver for Fife (by significantly expanding the town). In support of her contention that there should have been such a modification, she referred to both a 1998 study which asserted that St Andrews was “at its landscape capacity” and to the “Grant Report” which concluded that there was limited scope for development.

Amongst the reasons given by the Ministers for not modifying the structure plan on the basis of objections such as those given by Ms Uprichard, was “reason 33” to the effect that the Grant Report had indicated that there was some scope for development (subject to mitigation) to the west of St Andrews. Ms Uprichard argued that this did not address her objection (which she claimed was that the available capacity could not accommodate the scale of the planned development rather than that there was no capacity for development). Ms Uprichard’s arguments were rejected in the Inner house and her appeal to the Supreme Court was also dismissed.

The assertion that St Andrews was at landscape capacity appeared in Ms Uprichard’s’ letter of objection and reason 33 addressed objections of that general tenor by referring to the finding of the Grant Report that there existed some scope for development to the west of St Andrews. The broader point made by Ms Uprichard that the scale of development envisaged in the structure plan would damage the landscape setting of the town was addressed by the substance of further reasons given by the Ministers. The Supreme Court found that the reasons given, when read as a whole, provided an intelligible explanation to a well-informed reader such as Ms Uprichard as to why the Ministers were not persuaded by her objections.

The full judgement is available from the Supreme Court here.

All of our property and conveyancing case summaries are contained in the LKS Property and Conveyancing Casebook here.