Planning & Regulation July 16, 2026 3 min read
What 2026 Planning Judgments Mean, by Site Type
Two High Court judgments pulled the flood Sequential Test in opposite directions this year. Gladman and North Somerset, what they actually decided, and the kinds of site each one bites on.
Our interpretation, not legal advice
We read the recent planning judgments against the sites our clients are actually weighing. Below are the ones that change a decision, and the kind of site each one bites on. Every citation here has been checked against the official court record, and every quotation against the judgment text. The interpretation is ours. It is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for advice from your solicitor or planning consultant on a specific site.
How we verified this
Every case below was taken from The National Archives Find Case Law, the official record. For each one we checked two things: that the neutral citation appears in the judgment itself, and that it matches the citation the official record holds. We then checked every quotation word for word against the judgment text. Where a quotation could not be matched, we removed it rather than paraphrase it. Of the quotations we first extracted across this exercise, just under half did not survive that check. That is the reason we do it.
The flood Sequential Test, and why the two 2026 judgments are not in conflict
The first is Gladman Developments Limited v Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government [2026] EWHC 51 (Admin), decided in January. The decision was quashed. At [100] the judgment records: "In the case of Appeal A, the overriding consideration is the failure to undertake a Sequential Test."
The second is North Somerset District Council v Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government [2026] EWHC 1430 (Admin), decided in June, where the claim was allowed. The judgment records the aim of the test at [34]: "The Framework states that the aim of the sequential test is to steer new development to areas with the lowest risk of flooding from any source, and that development should not be allocated or permitted if there are reasonably available sites appropriate for the proposed development in areas with a lower risk of flooding."
Read together, our interpretation is that they answer different questions. One is about not doing the test at all. The other is about doing it and not passing it. The first is procedural and can be fatal by itself. The second is a matter of planning judgement, and judgement can go either way once the benefits are in the balance.
Which sites this bites on
- Edge-of-settlement greenfield, largely Flood Zone 1, with an access or a field corner clipping Zone 2. The commonest mistake we see is treating the zone of the majority of the site as the zone of the proposal. The sequential test is a question about the proposal.
- Urban brownfield in Zone 2 or 3 where drier sites are realistically available. Failing the test is not automatically the end. It does mean the benefits case has to be genuine, evidenced and built early, rather than assembled after a refusal.
- Any site where a flood risk assessment has been commissioned without a sequential test scoped alongside it. On our reading of Gladman that is the sharper exposure, because it is procedural: it does not matter how good the assessment is if the prior question was never asked.
- A site where the local planning authority has not itself engaged with the sequential test in its report. That cuts both ways and is worth knowing about before an application goes in, not after.
What we do with this
We read judgments and appeal decisions against the specific site, before a client commits to land, architects, planners or surveys. The point is not the case law for its own sake. It is whether this site, with these constraints, is worth pursuing, and what would have to be true for it to work. The wider 2026 policy picture is covered in planning reform in 2026.
The judgments referred to above are public documents published by The National Archives under the Open Government Licence v3.0. As above: our interpretation, not legal advice.
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