UPDATE: Engaging legal services to explore Judicial Review against Clouds Hill Farm development approval
Elmbridge Borough Council (EBC) have now formalised their ‘’in-principle’’ decision of March 2025 to grant outline planning permission for CHF via the issue of a formal Decision Letter dated 6 October 2026.
We remain 100% committed to exploring ways of over-turning this decision potentially via a Judicial Review and now have 6 weeks (42 days) to file our arguments for a JR with the Planning Court. As a precursor to this we have engaged legal services to review the strength of our case and have already lodged a comprehensive Brief with them. This is important to do as the bar to secure leave to appeal is high.
Note since the ‘’in-principle’’ decision was made concerning CHF in March 2026 a lot of work has continued behind the scenes led by Ian Dilks of FEDORA, supported by their transport expert John Russell. This is summarised below:
A formal complaint was submitted to EBC regarding the way in which the decision was reached, which unsurprisingly was not upheld by them
The NPPF was revised in August 2026 and any application not yet formally concluded by that point (including CHF) has to comply with it. EBC believe that their decision does so but FEDORA has refuted this.
Specifically:
a. The updated NPPF confirms that a ‘’reasonable walking distance’’ to a railway station is 800m – not the 2km+ adopted by EBC.
b. Furthermore, as CHF is in the Green Belt any residential development must “be within reasonable walking distance of a well-connected station’’. Clearly it is not.
c. The NPPF now explicitly requires that development should reduce the need to travel by car. The CHF site does not achieve that objective. Importantly, cars and car sharing are now deleted from the NPPF glossary definition of sustainable modes so the only sustainable modes of relevance to the CHF site are:
Cycling – which the CHA and EBC has stated would not be acceptable for most people.
Walking – the agreed distance to the station is more than three times the distance and time set out in the NPPF, to which consideration must be added the unpleasant and difficult nature of the walk.
Public Transport – this is currently non-existent and even the modest improvements proposed are inadequate and dependent on time limited future contributions from the Applicant which are no longer deemed to be sustainable transport modes.
d. The updated NPPF requires that the “arrangements of streets and other routes (which we take to mean routes to everyday facilities) should help create places that are safe, inclusive and attractive for all users (particularly for women and girls, or other groups who may be vulnerable to crime or the fear of crime, and for those with limited mobility)”. Again, the CHF site does not achieve this given the number of times required to cross the road to reach the High Street and the volume and nature of traffic on the A244.
At the same time as the updated NPPF was published, the Department for Transport (DfT) released an update to the Connectivity Tool which must now be considered and which is used to assess site sustainability. This allows sites to be compared in a consistent, structured, and reliable way. According to the Applicant the site is Elmbridge 018 which is classed as: “Urban City and Town”. For similarly located sites the Clouds Hill Farm site scores in the bottom 10th percentile in terms of connectivity/sustainability. Sitting in the bottom 10% means that significant public transport or land use interventions will be required to make the site acceptable.
These points reinforce our current arguments and we believe we have a good chance of securing leave to appeal so please look out for further updates!
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