UK Coal Mine Planning Consent Quashed

In December 2022, planning permission was granted by the secretary of state for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities ("SoS") to extract coal from a coal mine in Whitehaven, Cumbria, England. The project would have been the UK's first new deep coal mine in more than 30 years.

Following the grant of permission, Friends of the Earth and South Lakes Action on Climate Change filed court applications seeking statutory review of the UK government's decision (as discussed here). In September 2024, the High Court quashed the permission, ruling that the statutory challenge was successful on four grounds.

The decision comes after the groundbreaking Supreme Court ruling in Finch vs Surrey County Council ("Finch"), which found that the grant of a planning permission for oil production in Surrey was unlawful for failing to assess the "downstream" greenhouse gas ("GHG") emissions that would inevitably arise from the combustion of fuel (as discussed here). Following a similar