Expanding Bristol airport would lead to an unacceptable rise in carbon emissions, a court has heard.
The high court, sitting in Bristol on Tuesday and Wednesday, heard from climate campaigners challenging a central government decision to allow Bristol airport to expand its maximum capacity from 10 million to 12 million passengers a year.
Lawyers for Bristol Airport Action Network (BAAN) argued the decision did not properly take into account the full environmental impacts of the increase in flights and ignored local climate policies.
Bristol Airport Ltd first announced plans to expand in 2018. North Somerset council refused it planning permission in February 2020, citing the inevitable rise in carbon emissions as well as the increase in road traffic, loss of green belt land for parking, and rise in noise and air pollution.
But the airport operator appealed to the Planning Inspectorate, which overturned the local decision in February 2022 after a 10-week inquiry.
Inspectors said expanding the airport would undoubtedly worsen the climate crisis by increasing CO2 emissions. But with no national policy to limit airport expansion or impose capacity limits, “the conclusion must be that the aviation emissions are not so significant that they would have a material impact on the government’s ability to meet its climate change target and budgets”.
Don Davies, the then leader of North Somerset council, said at the time that the decision “flies in the face of local democracy”.
In court, campaigners contested the Planning Inspectorate’s decision, arguing that it did not properly interpret local planning strategies and aviation policies, ignored the importance of local carbon budgets and did not adequately consider the extra non-carbon emissions that would be caused by the expansion.
They also said it was wrong to “assume” that ministers would comply with their legal duties to meet carbon budgets. Estelle Dehon KC, who represented BAAN in court, said this allowed planning inspectors to ignore “the difficulty of the task ahead … the fact that the government is not on course to meet its fourth and fifth carbon budgets”, and the even higher targets it is required to meet for the sixth carbon budget.
The Planning Inspectorate would not comment on current legal proceedings but is due to give its rebuttal in court on Wednesday.
A Bristol airport spokesperson said it had welcomed the Planning Inspectorate’s decision earlier in the year. “Since then, we have pushed ahead with our plans for net zero carbon operations by 2030 and our work with partners in the region to decarbonise flight.”
BAAN campaigner Stephen Clark argued that the government was not properly assessing the cumulative climate impacts of airport expansion schemes – an argument also made by anti-road expansion campaigners. He said the Bristol decision had “national significance” because it was just one of more than 20 regional airports with growth plans. “This would lead to at least an extra 80 million passengers a year, which will make it almost impossible to comply with the UK’s legal obligation to be carbon-neutral by 2050.”
Earlier this year, a high court judge refused a claim for a judicial review from campaigners against the planned extension of Southampton airport.
However, these are not the only legal challenges to aviation policy in the UK.
Climate charity Possible recently filed a case against the government’s “jet zero” strategy, arguing it would fail to reduce aviation’s climate impacts in line with the UK’s carbon budgets and was therefore illegal. A report commissioned by the group earlier this year found the international aviation industry had failed to meet all but one of 50 of its own climate targets over the past two decades.
A separate lawsuit has been filed against the strategy by Nick Hodgkinson on behalf of anti-airport expansion group Galba, which similarly claims unrestrained growth in aviation is incompatible with net zero commitments under the Climate Change Act.
