THE Supreme Court has ruled that hundreds of new homes planned for Wellington have been ‘unlawfully held up’ because Somerset planners tried to impose European Union laws years after the UK left the EU.

CG Fry and Sons, which is developing the Jurston Fields estate off Wellington Relief Road, has been fighting a years-long phosphates mitigation legal battle against the council which reached the Supreme Court in February.

Now the judges have unanimously ruled in favour of the company, saying the local authority had wrongly gone back on points of principle which it had accepted when outline planning permission was granted in 2020.

They said the council should not have later tried to enforce new scientific advice from Natural England, which relied on European environmental regulations to prevent housebuilding which could see phosphates drain onto the Somerset Levels Ramsar site with harmful effects for wildlife.

The judges said the council had acted in a way which ‘could potentially eliminate the possibility of any development taking place’.

They ruled: “The council is not permitted to go back on points of principle which it has accepted by granting the outline permission.

“The conditions set out in the outline permission allowed no reference to the objective of the protection of the Ramsar site.

“It was therefore not open to the council or the inspector to refuse to discharge the sub-conditions on this basis.”

It means CG Fry can now go ahead and build phase three of the Jurston Fields site without providing costly phosphates mitigation measures.

The ruling could also leave Somerset Council open to compensation claims from other developers which have had to pay for mitigation in order to be allowed to build new homes.

About 12,000 proposed homes across Somerset have similarly been held up by the council’s insistence on following Natural England’s advice.

Lord Charlie Banner KC, who led the appeal for CG Fry, later posted an explanation on social media of the impact of the Supreme Court decision on Somerset’s wider housing crisis.

He said: “The effect of this ruling is that the thousands of consented homes that were long held up across Somerset, due to the stance taken by central and local government, were unlawfully held up.

“When and where nutrient neutrality solutions in Somerset were finally identified, those developers making Section 106 contributions for them to unlock sites which had permission but could not get pre-commencement conditions discharged, will have parted with huge sums, which in light of the judgment should not have been demanded as a pre-requisite of discharging these conditions.”

Somerset Council said it was reviewing the implications of the judgement and would issue a more detailed response later.

A spokesperson said: “We recognise the significance of this decision and its potential impact on planning decisions.

“This is a significant national case for the application of ‘nutrient neutrality’ rules, and whether the habitat regulations require an ‘appropriate assessment’ to be undertaken before a local planning authority can decide the discharge of conditions and reserved matters, following a grant of outline planning permission.”