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UK weighs curbing costs protection for green challenges to planning decisions

Elena MarquezPublished 26m ago2 min readBased on 1 source
UK weighs curbing costs protection for green challenges to planning decisions
Photo by The wub / CC BY-SA 4.0

The UK government is considering removing legal protections that limit the costs community groups face when they challenge planning decisions that threaten nature, according to The Guardian.

The protections stem from the Aarhus convention, which was signed into UK law in 2005. It guarantees the legal right to take part in democratic processes on environmental matters, such as sewage pollution, new roads or datacentre developments.

A central part of that framework is a cost cap. These caps limit how much of the winning side's legal bills a losing challenger must pay. Under the current arrangement, an individual bringing an environmental legal claim pays only £5,000 of the other side's costs if they lose, while an organisation pays £10,000.

According to environmental lawyers, the Ministry of Justice has been holding private meetings with selected stakeholders on plans to remove the Aarhus cost-cap protections and distance the UK from the convention. The changes under consideration, as reported, include:

  • doubling the cost caps at each stage of an environmental challenge;
  • removing costs protection where a court finds a misuse of judicial review, a court challenge to the lawfulness of a public body's decision;
  • allowing groups that crowdfund, meaning raise money from the public online, to face costs of up to 70% of the money they raise if they lose.

Carol Day, a senior environmental solicitor at the law firm Leigh Day, said the proposed changes would bring environmental litigation almost to a halt.

Sarah Finch, a campaigner, said the government's proposals would have prevented her group from bringing the Surrey oil well judicial review, a case that changed UK climate law.

The proposals are at an early stage and have not been put into law. They concern the cost of bringing challenges rather than whether a challenge can be brought at all, although the lawyers and campaigner quoted in the report argue that higher costs would discourage many groups from going to court.

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