Planning and environmental

Our planning and environmental team prides itself on the provision of high quality, specialist advice and representation on all aspects of planning and environmental law to a breadth and standard not often found in a regional context.

Our team is sought after by developers, land owners and local planning authorities alike. We support a strong property practice at Birketts but our team is equally established in its own right, and offers a full service encompassing all aspects of planning and environmental law. More than anything, our priority is to pinpoint the legal issue as quickly as possible and provide you with the right advice which is both technically accurate and pragmatic. We do not get carried away with the beauty of an argument - instead, we prefer to focus on outcomes and opportunities, applying our legal skills to help our clients meet their objectives.

Of course we deal with S.106 Agreements and Planning Appeals, and are delighted to act in connection with them, but a measure of our specialism is reflected in work we have been involved with recently, examples of which can be found below.

Examples of our planning and environmental team’s recent experience:

• Acting for a local planning authority in a S.288 High Court Challenge to a decision to grant an appeal against refusal of a Certificate of Lawfulness
• Acting for a local planning authority in a judicial review challenge to a grant of an Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control Permit.
• Advising and representing a defendant in respect of an environment agency prosecution following a major river pollution incident.
• Appealing on behalf of our client an enforcement notice requiring the receipt of waste at a waste transfer station to cease.
• Acting for a farmer client in defence of an injunction being sought to restrain the use of farmland as an airfield.
• Quashing on our client’s behalf a planning authority’s assertion of non implementation of a planning consent to a barn conversion after the expiry of the time limit for implementation and in light of a revised local plan that would have made the reissue of such a permission impossible.