Right to make green challenges to planning decisions under threat, say UK lawyers
The UK government is considering stripping back legal protections that limit costs for community groups challenging planning decisions threatening nature.
The Aarhus convention, signed into UK law in 2005, guarantees the right to participate in environmental legal processes. Under the treaty, individuals pay only £5,000 of the other side's costs if they lose, while organizations face a £10,000 cap. These protections ensure environmental challenges aren't prohibitively expensive for public interest groups.
Proposed Changes
Environmental lawyers reveal the Ministry of Justice has held private meetings with stakeholders on plans to remove these cost protections. Other possible changes include doubling cost caps at each stage of a challenge and removing costs protection where a court finds a "misuse of judicial review". Groups crowdfunding legal challenges could face costs of up to 70% of raised funds if they lose.
If they had a bank of cases where they could point to legal action holding things up, I think we could try and have a sensible discussion about it. But we have nothing from them, no kind of hard and fast evidence.
Government Position
Proposals to change environmental judicial reviews began under Keir Starmer's government, which repeatedly referred to nature as a "blocker to growth". Starmer singled out activist Dr Andrew Boswell as an example of "nimbys and zealots" bringing "vexatious" legal claims. Boswell's campaign against the A47 expansion in Norfolk was funded by £73,000 crowdsourced from 2,000 individuals.
The UK government say they don't want to leave the convention, but [potential changes] would put them in a very difficult position because they would be very significantly non-compliant with it.
Sarah Finch, whose judicial review over an oil well changed UK climate law, said the government's proposals would have prevented her case. "If we ran the risk of paying the other side's fees, we would have never brought this legal action," she stated. Lawyers fear the changes would "fundamentally undermine access to environmental justice deliberately".
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