A TADCASTER brewery has failed in a long-running High Court challenge to plans to resurface the town’s main car park in tarmac.

Samuel Smith’s Old Brewery Company, which holds a ten-year- old planning permission for redevelopment of Tadcaster, had said it was willing to pay the extra cost to cover the car park in York stone to match its surroundings.

The brewery had asked Mr Justice Kenneth Parker, sitting in London, to quash the granting of planning permission for the tarmac scheme.

The brewery – which has a long history of bringing legal challenges to protect conservation interests in and around Tadcaster – claimed that Selby District Council’s latest decision to grant permission was “irrational” because it would look out of place in an “exceptional” and “historic” townscape.

However, dismissing the challenge, the judge said he did not see merit in any of the criticisms made of the council’s planning committee report on which the decision was based. Samuel Smith had argued that the council, in granting planning permission in April 2011, had ignored the brewery’s own planning permission, secured in 2003, to resurface the central area car park with York stone, in keeping with the surrounding buildings.

The brewery claimed that it had been trying to negotiate with the council, which owns the majority of the car park, to enable it to proceed with its own plans, to which it said it would make a big financial contribution, saving expense to the public purse.

The council has itself been trying to resurface the car park – which is currently covered in tarmac – for the last decade. It first granted planning permission in March 2003 for a scheme involving Tegula block paving in a colour known as “harvest buff”, with “pennant grey” blocks delineating the parking spaces.

In the wake of legal action from the brewery, the council consented to that first permission being quashed by the High Court in August 2003.

The council then put forward a second scheme which Samuel Smith described as “worse than the first”, involving putting tarmac on the car park at a cost of £500,000.

The council took the view that covering the car park in York stone would cost double the amount, and would not be justified with finite resources. It granted planning permission to itself in September 2004.

The brewery again took the matter to court, and, in May 2009, the council once again consented to the permission being quashed.

At the High Court yesterday, the judge said the issue was considered at length in the report, which recognised that stone might well be a superior surface, but concluded that tarmac was acceptable for a car park.