Latest court cases

Following our legal challenge in 2022, the UK government admitted to acting unlawfully in its Heat and Building Strategy, which outlines how homes and businesses can cut emissions. We challenged its failure to consider the Strategy’s impact on groups such as disabled people, the elderly and people of colour. The government is now assessing the Strategy to bring it in line with the Equalities Act.

In 2020, after a back and forth in the courts, then-secretary Robert Jenrick refused planning permission by Banks Mining to build a new opencast coal mine at Druridge Bay in Northumberland on climate change grounds. Friends of the Earth worked with local campaigners to save the local beauty spot.

In February 2020 the Court of Appeal ruled that the government’s policy giving the green light to expansion at Heathrow was unlawful on climate grounds. The ruling followed successful challenges by ourselves and Plan B, and is a testament to the importance of people power and the decades of sustained resistance to Heathrow expansion by local activists.

Environmental claims are public-interest claims because we all depend on a healthy environment. The UK signed the Aarhus Convention to facilitate access to justice for environmental claimants with this in mind. So when government changed the rules that protected claimants from excessive legal costs, we challenged them to ensure financial protections remained.

In March 2019 we supported an appeal against an injunction by fracking company Ineos, which aimed to suppress anti-fracking protests. The Court of Appeal found that the injunction was unlawful. Alongside the Sussex and Surrey 6, we also challenged UKOG's very similar injunction and managed to reduce it. Through these cases we protected free speech and the right to protest.

In December 2018 we took the government to court over its national planning policy, which set the guidelines for land use and development throughout England. The government got off on a technicality, but we succeeded in establishing that the policy does have a determinative impact on the planning system and a significant effect on the environment.

The "Frack Free Three" were jailed for causing a public nuisance during protests at Cuadrilla's fracking site in Lancashire. We joined Liberty to intervene in the mens' appeal in October 2018, arguing that their good-faith environmental concerns had been wrongly used to justify draconian sentencing. Their sentences were quashed, and they walked free within hours of the appeal hearing.