Planning permission is often thought of as a technical process: assessments of traffic, design, noise, and environmental impact. But planning is also about values. It decides not just what gets built, but what kind of society we are building.
The recent High Court case of Animal Equality UK v North East Lincolnshire Council & ASL New Clee Limited [2025] EWHC 1331 (Admin) illustrates this. Although the claim against the UK’s first proposed onshore salmon farm was dismissed, the judgment reaffirmed something vital: animal welfare can be a material planning consideration.
This recognition matters because it brings the lives of animals into the heart of decisions that affect their lives.
Sentient
A material planning consideration is something a council is legally allowed to take into account when deciding a planning application. It matters because only material considerations can influence whether permission is granted or refused.
Some things are always material, like local planning policies, while others material considerations are optional: the council can choose to consider them if relevant.
In practice, the planning officer’s report highlights what they think are the key material issues (like traffic, noise, or ecology) in the planning application. Councillors can accept or reject that advice, but they must base their decision on material factors.
Decisions about farms, zoos, or wildlife facilities are not only about land use, but affect how animals will live.
The UK’s Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022 acknowledges animals, including fish, as sentient beings and as such a large portion of the public will understandably feel strongly that the potential suffering animals will experience should be relevant to planning decisions.
Mortality
Just as climate change and air quality have gradually become central to planning, animal welfare is on the same trajectory. What once seemed “beyond planning” could now become integral.
Public concern for animal welfare is at an all-time high. Ignoring it risks undermining trust in planning committees as bodies that are meant to respond to the community’s and society’s expectations.
Represented by Advocates for Animals and Alex Shattock of Landmark Chambers, Animal Equality UK challenged the approval of a large onshore salmon farm in Cleethorpes.
Expert evidence highlighted the severe welfare risks to salmon in intensive tanks, which included disease, injury, cannibalism, and mass mortality.
Economic
While the council ultimately granted permission, the High Court confirmed that animal welfare is not excluded from planning law and can be a material planning consideration. Committees may take it into account if they choose.
This judgment does not mandate consideration of animal welfare by local planning authorities, but it keeps the door wide open for welfare arguments to play a role in future planning battles.
This decision has paved the way for similar cases. We have now seen councils being forced to reconsider planning permissions for an intensive poultry unit, a zoo where welfare had been sidelined and most recently a puppy farm was refused planning permission due to animal welfare concerns.
The public mood is shifting toward recognising animals not just as economic units but as living beings deserving proper consideration in decision-making, just like humans.
Campaigners
With every acknowledgment that welfare is a “material consideration,” the ground moves further toward embedding it in planning culture.
Planning is about shaping communities, landscapes, and the conditions of life for humans, the environment and animals alike. To treat animal welfare as irrelevant is to deny that the built environment has consequences for animals.
Recognising welfare in planning aligns local decision-making with national values on sentience and gives councillors the discretion, and the responsibility, to act in ways that reflect that.
Each time a planning committee acknowledges welfare, each time campaigners raise it as material, and each time the courts affirm its relevance, the principle takes deeper root: that animals matter in the way we plan our world.
This Author
Edie Bowles is a solicitor with Advocates for Animals.