Dr Andrew Boswell’s High Court challenge to road building schemes in Norfolk will be held on Wednesday 10 May and Thursday 11 May 2023. Dr Boswell is challenging 3 schemes on the basis that the cumulative impact of carbon emissions from the schemes has not been considered. He also argues that the licensing relating to the Norfolk colony of barbastelle bats has not been done correctly.
The three road schemes are:
Changes to the Thickthorn Roundabout junction on the A11 on the edge of Norwich
Dualling of the A47 from Blofield to North Burlingham
Dualling of the A47 from Easton to North Tuddenham
The above schemes were approved by the secretary of state in 2022, but Dr Boswell says the decisions were unlawful - hence the challenge.
The hearing is now just 10 weeks away and lawyers are drafting their arguments. Bringing a case like this is expensive so if you are able to contribute please go to the
crowdfunder link:
Dr Andrew Boswell says:
This week’s update follows Mark Harper, Secretary of State for Transport announcing delays to several large road schemes in the second roads programme (RIS2) yesterday. Whilst road campaigners have widely welcomed this, the decision was made solely on economic grounds – what Mr Harper called “headwinds”: inflation, the Ukraine war, and supply chain disruption.
Like so much with this Government, the elephant in the room – the Climate Emergency - was ignored. Mr Harper should have been thinking of the catastrophic impact on the climate that these schemes would have. If he had, he would have cancelled them completely.
The Government are acting in denial - as if they had never introduced the UK net-zero legislation. They deny that carbon generating road schemes damage the climate and even claim that they don't impede delivering net-zero. This is a false claim possible only because of the sneaky assessments of carbon emissions for road projects which systematically underestimate the climate impacts, and which I am legally challenging.
For example, in my legal cases, four new big roads are planned close to Norwich which will dramatically increase carbon emissions, but the climate impacts have been deliberately underestimated for planning by considering each scheme in isolation. As in this Guardian article, “You’ve got an ideal situation here where you should do a cumulative [carbon] assessment … but they have gone to every length to salami-slice it and look at each scheme’s emissions separately.”
My cases show this breaches the law, and it is happening on every scheme in planning in the UK, so the cases supported by this crowdfunder are of national importance: if successful, they would put an end to this deliberate downplaying of the impact of road building on climate change.
Our atmosphere is already overloaded with carbon emissions. We simply cannot afford any additional emissions if we are to avoid ever-increasing climate change impacts such as the heatwaves and wildfires experienced last summer, and on-going droughts affecting food production. This means the carbon emissions from each new road scheme must be properly assessed.