The Daily Telegraph ran an interesting article this week on how Chris Todd uses “lawfare” to challenge road building schemes. His activities have cost several hundreds of millions of pounds and caused numerous delays while generally being unable to ultimately thwart most developments.

How can he afford such challenges? Mainly because the UK is a party to the Aarhus Convention which limits the costs that can be incurred on challenges based on environmental issues. This limits an individual’s legal costs to £5,000 while the Government can run up legal costs of many times that amount in defending trivial challenges.

The Telegraph article is a good summary of examples where needless delays and costs have been incurred. See https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/09/chris-todd-britains-costliest-nimby/

The regulations need reform and we need to withdraw from the Aarhus Convention to stop pointless and expensive legal challenges.

Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://x.com/Drivers_London )

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