UK quietly eyes axe for cost caps that let locals fight green planning calls

UK lawyers say the Ministry of Justice has been holding private meetings with hand-picked stakeholders about plans to strip out the cost caps that shield community groups challenging planning decisions. Under the Aarhus convention, signed into UK law in 2005, anyone who loses an environmental legal claim pays just £5,000 of the other side's costs, while organisations pay £10,000. The treaty promises a legal right to take part in environmental decisions on sewage pollution, new roads and datacentre developments, and protects claimants from facing ruinously expensive court bills.

Other proposals on the table include doubling the cost caps at each stage of a challenge, removing costs protection where a court finds a “misuse of judicial review”, and making groups that crowdfund legal fights liable for up to 70% of the money they raise if they lose. Lawyers believe the private talks also signal the government is moving to distance Britain from the convention. Ministers deny that.

The drive began under Keir Starmer's government, which repeatedly framed nature as a blocker to growth. Starmer singled out activist Dr Andrew Boswell as an example of the “nimbys and zealots” filing “vexatious” claims, citing his two-year fight against the expansion of the A47 in Norfolk, which Boswell lost. Boswell said the prime minister was “putting a target” on his back, and that his campaign — funded by £73,000 crowd-sourced from 2,000 individuals — “brought the community together in Norfolk”.

Carol Day, a senior environmental solicitor at Leigh Day, said the changes would “bring environmental litigation almost to a halt”. She added that ministers have offered no evidence of cases holding up projects: “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.” Another environmental lawyer said the plans would “fundamentally undermine access to environmental justice deliberately” and leave “potentially really terrible decisions” unchallenged.

Sarah Finch, whose grassroots judicial review over an oil well in Surrey changed UK climate law, said the proposals would have stopped her group bringing the case at all. “If we ran the risk of paying the other side's fees, we would have never brought this legal action,” she said. “It's completely despicable for the government to take this right away.”

Kyle Lischak, head of ClientEarth UK, called the right to challenge unlawful decisions one of the few ways people hold power to account, saying those facing datacentres or intensive livestock production need the “safe, affordable route to court” the law should guarantee. Friends of the Earth senior lawyer Niall Toru said nature isn't holding the economy back and that floods, droughts, pollution and climate breakdown cost people and businesses billions. A government spokesperson said it is committed to its Aarhus obligations and that there are “no plans to remove costs protections for well-founded claims”, while Day warned the mooted changes would leave the UK “very significantly non-compliant” with the treaty.