On the 16th December the UK Supreme Court ruled in favour of Heathrow Ltd who had appealed a previous judgement of the Court of Appeal that the Secretary of State for Transport had failed to take the Paris Agreement into account when designating the Airports National Policy Statement (ANPS) and accordingly, the ANPS was of no legal effect. The Supreme Court judgement can be found here.
The appeal concerned the the lawfulness of the ANPS and its environmental report, here.
Charity Plan B intends to take the judgement to the European Court of Rights on the basis that reliance upon the 2C target is a breach of the right to life. Lawyer Tim Crosland had tweeted the judgement early having being one of the parties involved and received the ruling in advance. He is being reported to the attorney general by the Supreme Court. Tim detailed his reasons for this here.
The Good Law project with Dale Vince have written to the Goverment to require it reviews the ANPS or face more legal proceedings.
Caroline Russell the Green party Transport spokesperson said: “Heathrow is already the largest single emitter of CO2 in the UK. Expansion is utterly incompatabible with tackling the climate emergency and meeting the targets set out in Paris Agreement”.
Heathrow can now proceed to submit an application for a Development Consent Order (DCO) to the Planning Inspectorate under the earlier laxer regime. Heathrow expansion implies 40 million tonnes of CO2 from UK aviation by 2050. Is there even the demand for an additional 700 flights per day in the era of Zoom?
The issue is really now with the UK government, since the third runway was approved in 2018 the UK Government has committed to net zero emissions by 2050 and has now pledged to “cut carbon emissions by 68% compared to 1990 levels by 2030“.
The onus is on the UK Government to rule out Heathrow expansion, it should update the ANPS to take account of its net zero commitments.