A High Court judge has quashed a planning notice issued by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea that ordered a home owner to repaint her house.
In March 2015, the owner of a multimillion pound house in Kensington painted her house in red and white stripes. Speculation at the time said that the owner did this to spite neighbours who objected to her plans to demolish the house and replace it with a new home, although this has been denied by the homeowner.
The brightly coloured house certainly stands out amongst the other expensive properties in Kensington, which led to the local authority serving a notice on the homeowner "because it appears to the council that the amenity of a part of their area is adversely affected by the condition of the land".
The notice was issued under section 215 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, which states that where the amenity of a local planning authority's area is adversely affected by the condition of the land, they can issue a notice on the owner of the land requiring steps to be taken to fix the condition of it. In this instance, the notice required the homeowner to repaint the house white.
However, after the homeowner lost appeals in the Magistrates' Court and the Crown Court in 2016, she took her appeal to the High Court. There, Mr justice Gilbart ruled that the stripy facade was lawful. The Judge said, "In my judgement, to allow a local planning authority to use section 215 to deal with questions of aesthetics, as opposed to disrepair or dilapidation, falls outside the intention and spirit of the planning code. I am therefore of the view that it is an improper use of section 215 to use it to alter a lawful painting scheme."
