Judge rules on battle to save bugs on Isle of Grain

Judge rules on battle to save bugs on Isle of Grain A charity devoted to protecting Britain’s creepy-crawlies has won a High Court victory of sorts over plans for a new business park on Kent’s Isle of Grain that it claims will threaten protected species. Although Judge Anthony Thornton QC stopped short of quashing Medway Council’s decision to grant outline planning permission for the 500,000 sqm business park in Grain Road, he said that Buglife had succeeded in its claim and ordered the council to pay the charity its costs. He said that the permission had been granted for the “barest of bare outline applications” and that the council will have to carry out a staged environmental impact assessment (EIA) each time an application is made for approval of the scheme’s finer details. He said that the council’s contention that it had completed its EIA obligations was untenable because an environmental statement produced prior to the decision “did not provide sufficient details of the development… or of the invertebrate assemblage, [or] the bee population”. It had also failed to provide other key details. However, he said that he did not need to issue a quashing order in respect of a development that will be subject to a multi-stage EIA process. Buglife, which is the only organisation in Europe devoted to protecting all invertebrates will be able to participate in the EIA process at each stage. The charity argued that the council had granted permission in March 2010 on the basis of an inadequate environmental statement provided by National Grid Property. It claimed that the statement, which had been conducted in a single day rather than over a longer period, was so deficient as not to constitute an environmental statement under national and European law. In that one day, Buglife claimed, the statement unearthed vulnerable species of bugs that warrant protection, including the white eye-stripe hoverfly, the brown-banded carder bee and Mellet’s downy-back beetle. It argued that a proper environmental statement would have included many other endangered species found on the site. R (on the application of Buglife – The Invertebrate Conservation Trust) v Medway Council and ors Administrative (Judge Anthony Thornton QC) 30 March 2011. Robert McCracken QC and Rebecca Clutten (instructed by Richard Buxton Environmental and Law, of Cambridge) appeared for the claimant; Neil Cameron QC (instructed by the legal department of Medway Council) for the defendant; Rupert Warren (instructed by DLA Piper LLP) for first interested party (National Grid Property Holdings Ltd).