Campaigners will be blocked from “excessive” challenges to infrastructure projects such as nuclear plants, train lines and wind farms to enable them to be completed more quickly, Keir Starmer has announced.
New planning rules will prevent "NIMBY" (not in my back yard) “blockers” from bringing repeated legal challenges against major infrastructure projects, the prime minister said.
Under the existing rules, “unarguable” cases can be brought back to the courts three times, which can add “years of delay and hundreds of millions of cost to projects that have been approved by democratically elected ministers, while also clogging up the courts”, No.10 said in an announcement this morning.
To secure permission for a judicial review of a major infrastructure project in England and Wales, campaigners can first write to the High Court, then attend an oral hearing and then appeal to the Court of Appeal.
The proposed reforms would scrap the “paper permission stage”, giving opponents of most major projects only one chance at an oral hearing to convince a judge to authorise a judicial review.
The High Court would be given new powers to deem challenges "totally without merit" and prevent them from progressing to the Court of Appeal. However, in other cases, a request to appeal will be allowed.
Some 58% of all decisions on major infrastructure are taken to court, according to No.10. Each legal challenge takes around a year and a half to be resolved.
Projects that have been delayed for two or more years by legal challenges include the Sizewell C nuclear power station, despite the High Court dismissing the case against it and aspects as “utterly hopeless”; the A47 National Highway Project, which was opposed by a former Green councillor whose case was dismissed as having “no logical basis”; and wind farms in East Anglia.
No.10 said major road projects have been forced to pay “up to £121m per scheme being dragged through the courts”.
Starmer said: “For too long, blockers have had the upper hand in legal challenges – using our court processes to frustrate growth.
“We’re putting an end to this challenge culture by taking on the NIMBYs and a broken system that has slowed down our progress as a nation”.
The announcement comes three months after lawyer and life peer Charles Banner KC completed a review – commissioned by then-prime minister Rishi Sunak in early 2024 – into legal challenges against nationally significant infrastructure projects.
His review concluded that the “current three bites of the cherry to obtain permission to apply for judicial review is excessive and should be reduced to either two or one”. He recommended that there should be two opportunities to obtain permission for a judicial review: one in the High Court and one in the Court of Appeal.
Commenting on today’s announcement, Lord Banner said his review had found “a clear case for streamlining judicial reviews on consenting decisions for nationally significant infrastructure projects, given that delays to these projects cause real detriment to the public interest”.
“In the course of my review, I saw broad consensus from claimants to scheme promoters that a quicker system of justice would be in their interests, provided that cases can still be tried fairly,” he said.
“I am therefore pleased to see the government acting on the back of my review. In particular, reducing the number of permission attempts to one for truly hopeless cases should weed out the worst offenders, without risking inadvertent delays because judges choose to err on the side of caution.”