UK Environmental Law
PIL's work on environmental issues is for the community group or individual facing the environmental consequences of polluting developments. We act for individuals, community groups, amenity groups and resident groups. The projects PIL have opposed and in many cases stopped include:
- Incinerators (hazardous, clinical, municipal and animal)
- Landfills (special and municipal)
- Open cast coal schemes
- Aggregate quarries
- Other minerals projects such as sand, gravel, peat and limestone
- Chemical plants
- Nuclear installations
- Inappropriately sited mobile phone masts
- Industrial developments
- Inappropriate developments on greenfield land
We have had a string of cases reported in law reports since PIL was established in 1999.
Litigation through judicial review is a relatively blunt instrument. We aim for a preventative approach to polluting developments. We are not personal injury lawyers who act to sue for damages once a project has caused harm to public health and the environment. PIL try to take pre-emptive action, that is, to make representations to a decision-maker prior to a decision being made, say, to grant planning permission for a particular project. In that way we feed our legal representations into the broader political process so that an authority might be persuaded not to grant consent at all. For example, if an incinerator is unacceptable to the local community because of the increased levels of prescribed pollutants it is better to persuade a local planning authority of that than expect a judge on judicial review to enter the debate as to whether that is or is not acceptable. Many of our successes have been in persuading public bodies to refuse consent for polluting projects so that, if the developer decides not to appeal, the community is then free of the problem.
Besides acting on individual projects PIL have also advised and represented national pressure groups on broader issues. For example, for Friends of the Earth, we have acted in persuading the government to introduce much tougher regulatory control on open cast coal schemes in England and Wales through Mineral Planning Guidance Note 3, and not to abandon the rights of third parties to object to major infrastructure projects through the planning system. We have also written about issues such as incinerators and landfills in the context of human rights or other issues of policy that have been instrumental in shaping the opinion of policy-makers and regulators.
The PIL team has a national reputation for environmental work that we are proud of. We are committed to the cause of the environmental movement and fearless in our struggle for environmental justice. There are very few firms like ours that act only for those affected by polluting projects, and of the few we can compete with any on affordability, reputation and experience.