Conservation campaign group Wild Justice has issued a legal challenge to the government’s claim that the new Planning and Infrastructure Bill would not reduce environmental protections.
The judicial review challenge will look to correct a statement made in Parliament and in official guidance by Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner in April 2025, who said that the bill would not reduce the level of environmental protection in law.
Bob Elliot, CEO of Wild Justice said, “Our laws were already failing to defend nature, and we believe this bill continues to take us from bad to worse. The government’s claim that it will do no harm is just not true. It has also been suggested that concerns raised about the bill are ‘spurious’. This is an insult to everyone fighting for our wildlife. We will not stand by and watch while they dismantle the very foundations of environmental protection.”
In May, Wild Justice sent a pre-action protocol letter to the government in a first step towards legal action, arguing that the statement was not correct. Now, the group has filed an application for a judicial review in the High Court to challenge the statement.
Wild Justice refers to a legal opinion provided by expert planning barristers, who they commissioned to review the bill. The opinion states that the bill will weaken existing levels of environmental protection in law.
The legal opinion says a key factor in weakening environmental protections would be the removal of the requirement to be sure beyond reasonable scientific doubt that a development would not have a negative impact on a protected site.
Instead, developers would be able to pay into a levy scheme in an attempt to mitigate any environmental harm caused.
The Office for Environmental Protection (OEP), which is listed as an interested party in the claim, has also labelled the bill a “regression” for environmental protections in law.
Wild Justice says the Deputy Prime Minister’s statements to Parliament and elsewhere about the bill did not offer a legal explanation or rationale for the view that it would not reduce environmental protections.
Leigh Day partner Ricardo Gama, who represents Wild Justice, said, “The 2021 Environment Act put an obligation on the government to be clear about whether any changes to the law post-Brexit would mean a reduction in current environmental protections. That transparency is important so that the public, but also MPs, are clear about the trade-offs involved in changing the law. By bringing this challenge, our client hopes to force the government to be transparent about what the Planning and Infrastructure Bill will mean for existing environmental protections.”