Outer House case concerning a petition for judicial review of the decision of Fife Council to grant planning permission for the building of a new Madras College on land at Pipeland on the outskirts of St Andrews.

The current Madras College is located on two sites and in need of replacement. The Executive Committee of Fife Council agreed that a replacement school should, where possible, be situated on a single site. Planning permission for the building of a new school on a single site at Pipeland was issued on 16 May 2014.

The Petitioners argued that in granting the permission the Council:

1)    had not considered an alternative site at North Haugh which could be used in conjunction with playing fields at Station Park (on the other side of the A91);

2)    if that argument was wrong and the Council had considered the North Haugh site then the Council had wrongly considered it to be a split site; and

3)    If the Council had been entitled to treat the North Haugh site as being split, then it had erred in excluding it from further consideration on that ground.

Lord Doherty rejected those arguments finding that the North Haugh site had been considered as an option and, after noting that North Haugh and Station Park are split by a major A class road and were not contiguous, that the Council’s consideration that the site was a split site was neither perverse nor erroneous. Lord Doherty also found that the North Haugh site had not been discounted solely on the basis that it was a split site and account had been taken of actual disadvantages of the site such as travel time for staff and pupils and the fact that North Haugh was a small site without space which may prove necessary to deal with a developing curriculum in the future. The petition was therefore refused.

The full judgement is available from Scottish Courts here.

(NB: See appeal to Inner House here.)

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