The High Court sealed an order on 19 June 2026 in the judicial review brought by Gatwick Airport Limited against the Secretary of State for Transport, concluding proceedings that were heard on 20 January 2026, according to the judiciary's published judgment.

The case turned on the Secretary of State's decision of 21 September 2025, which granted development consent for Gatwick's expansion. That decision — a Development Consent Order under the Planning Act 2008 — is the culmination of a planning process that has lurched through repeated legal and political reversals over more than a decade.

The litigation cannot be understood without its backstory. In February 2020, the Court of Appeal ruled that the designation of the Airports National Policy Statement (ANPS) was unlawful and suspended its effect pending further Government action. That judgment — handed down at a moment when the third Heathrow runway was the dominant headline — applied with equal force to Gatwick's own expansion ambitions, stripping the project of the policy foundation on which any DCO application would have to rest. The Government subsequently confirmed the ANPS, Parliament endorsed it, and the planning examination for Gatwick's northern runway proposal eventually ran its course, producing the September 2025 consent.

Gatwick Airport Limited's challenge in the January hearing was directed at that consent decision. The sealing of the court's order on 19 June brings the High Court phase to a formal close, though the published record does not specify the outcome of the challenge or whether any party intends to pursue a further appeal.

The procedural history here is worth dwelling on. DCO challenges under the Planning Act 2008 and the Infrastructure Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) Regulations are notoriously time-compressed: claimants must file within six weeks of the decision, and courts are expected to determine statutory reviews expeditiously. A hearing date of 20 January — roughly four months after the September 2025 consent — sits within that compressed timetable, suggesting the litigation moved at approximately the pace Parliament intended for nationally significant infrastructure disputes.

Communities Against Gatwick Noise Emissions (CAGNE) and Peter Barclay were separately named in related transmission direction proceedings before the Secretary of State, according to an earlier judiciary record published in January 2026, indicating that the legal activity around the September 2025 consent was not confined to a single claimant or a single forum. Noise and environmental objections have been the consistent thread running through Gatwick expansion litigation since the original ANPS designation.

Aviation policy is reserved to Westminster, but the planning and environmental consequences of a second usable runway at Gatwick fall disproportionately on communities in Surrey and West Sussex — both areas outside any devolved legislature's competence, though the contrast with the scrutiny Holyrood or the Senedd would apply to equivalent infrastructure in Scotland or Wales is a standing point of tension in how England's planning system handles major schemes.

The September 2025 DCO itself now has legal force for the purposes of the court order, subject to whatever the sealed judgment provides. For the airport, its funders, and the supply chain now watching contractual trigger points, the resolution of the High Court phase reduces one category of legal uncertainty. Whether the 2020 Court of Appeal precedent on the ANPS, the January 2026 hearing, or the June 2026 order will feature prominently in any future policy review of the NPS framework for aviation is a question that will interest both planning lawyers and the Department for Transport in equal measure.