Environmental campaigner Sarah Finch says her group wouldn\u2019t have been able to bring their landmark legal action without the cap on potential costs provided by the Aarhus convention. Photograph: Mark Kerrison\/Alamy Stock Photo\/Alamy Live News.View image in fullscreenEnvironmental campaigner Sarah Finch says her group wouldn\u2019t have been able to bring their landmark legal action without the cap on potential costs provided by the Aarhus convention. Photograph: Mark Kerrison\/Alamy Stock Photo\/Alamy Live News.Right to make green challenges to planning decisions under threat, say UK lawyersExclusive: Government in \u2018private meetings\u2019 about removing cost cap protections under Aarhus convention UK politics live \u2013 latest updates The government is considering stripping back legal protections that limit the costs community groups face when challenging planning decisions that threaten nature.The Aarhus convention, an environmental treaty that was signed into law by the UK in 2005, guarantees the legal right to participate in democratic processes on environmental matters \u2013 such as sewage pollution, new roads or datacentre developments.Under the treaty, when an individual brings an environmental legal claim, they are protected by a cost cap that means they only pay \u00a35,000 of the other side\u2019s costs if they lose. For organisations, the cost cap protection is \u00a310,000.The purpose of this is to ensure legal challenges about the environment are not prohibitively expensive for individuals and public interest groups.According too environmental lawyers, the Ministry of Justice has been holding private meetings with \u201cselect\u201d stakeholders on plans to remove these cost cap protections and distance the UK from the convention.Other possible changes include doubling cost caps at each stage of a challenge and removing the costs protection where a court finds a \u201cmisuse of judicial review\u201d.Another potential change would allow groups that crowdfund legal challenges to face costs of up to 70% of the money they raise if they lose.Proposals to change the way environmental judicial reviews worked began under Keir Starmer\u2019s government, which repeatedly referred to nature as a blocker to growth.<\/p>\n
Starmer singled out activist Dr Andrew Boswell as an example of the \u201cnimbys and zealots\u201d bringing \u201cvexatious\u201d legal claims that thwart growth, including a two-year legal fight against the expansion of the A47 in Norfolk that he ultimately lost.Boswell said Starmer was \u201cputting a target\u201d on his back and that his campaign against the A47, which was funded by \u00a373,000 in crowdsourcing from 2,000 individuals, \u201cbrought the community together in Norfolk\u201d.Carol Day, a senior environmental solicitor at Leigh Day, said the changes would \u201cbring environmental litigation almost to a halt\u201d.\u201cIf 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.\u201dAnother environmental lawyer said the changes being proposed would \u201cfundamentally undermine access to environmental justice deliberately\u201d and mean \u201cpotentially really terrible decisions\u201d would not be challenged.\u201cLocal community objectors are often at the cutting edge of challenges that expose widespread government failures in relation to national and international obligations,\u201d the lawyer said.Sarah Finch, an environmental campaigner whose grassroots judicial review over an oil well in Surrey changed UK climate law, said the government\u2019s proposals would have prevented her group from bringing the case.\u201cIf we ran the risk of paying the other side\u2019s fees, we would have never brought this legal action,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s completely despicable for the government to take this right away. It\u2019s a proposal to restrict people\u2019s access to environmental justice.\u201dLawyers fear the private meetings signal the government is accelerating towards leaving the convention, which the government denies. Day said: \u201cThe UK government say they don\u2019t 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.\u201dKyle Lischak, head of ClientEarth UK, an environmental law charity, said: \u201cThe right to challenge unlawful decisions is one of the few ways people can hold those in power to account \u2026\u201cWhether it\u2019s datacentres or intensive livestock production, people too often find their rights and their environment on the chopping block in favour of rapid industrial buildout \u2013 and these people need the safe, affordable route to court to protect themselves, and nature, that the law should guarantee them.\u201dFriends of the Earth senior lawyer Niall Toru said: \u201cThe government seems determined to find someone to blame for slow growth, and environmental campaigners and community groups make an easy target.<\/p>\n
But nature isn\u2019t holding the economy back. Floods, droughts, pollution and climate breakdown are costing people and businesses billions.\u201cThese proposals will not fix those problems. Instead, they will make more people feel that decisions are being imposed on them without any meaningful way to challenge them.\u201dA government spokesperson said: \u201cThe government is committed to upholding its obligations under the Aarhus convention, including maintaining access to environmental justice that is not prohibitively expensive. There are no plans to remove costs protections for well-founded claims.\u201dExplore more on these topicsEnvironment policyActivismPlanning policyConservationnewsShareReuse this content<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Environmental campaigner Sarah Finch says her group wouldn\u2019t have been able to bring their landmark legal action without the cap on potential costs provided by the Aarhus convention. Photograph: Mark Kerrison\/Alamy Stock Photo\/Alamy Live News.View\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36421,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36420\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}