Climate campaigners are challenging the UK’s approval of the first new coal mine in the country in three decades, with the High Court beginning hearings on the case on Tuesday.
The UK’s previous Conservative government approved in December 2022 the Woodhouse Colliery project in Whitehaven, northwest England, developed by West Cumbria Mining.
Earlier this year, West Cumbria Mining (WCM) said that it “continues to focus on preparatory works prior to commencement of real construction activity, no later than early 2025,” when it announced that the High Court would hear on July 16-18 a challenge by two parties against the Government’s approval of planning.
The project to mine metallurgical coal, the one used for steelmaking, will be required to support steelmaking throughout the transition to Net Zero over the next few decades, WCM said at the end of 2023.
However, the new Labour government in the UK pulled last week its support for the project and said that it would no longer defend the case at High Court. The UK’s new Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Angela Rayner, has accepted there was an “error of law” in the approval from December 2022.
This could help the case of the climate campaign groups, which had filed two separate – but related – legal challenges against the government’s permission for the coal mine. Friends of the Earth and South Lakes Action on Climate Change (SLACC) are challenging the permit and the High Court is hearing the case this week.
The government’s move follows a landmark Supreme Court judgment last month, which ruled that a local council unlawfully granted approval to an onshore oil drilling project as planners must have considered the emissions from the oil’s future use as fuels, in a landmark case that could upset new UK fossil fuel projects.
“Justification for this polluting and unnecessary coal mine is rapidly evaporating, and even the government now concedes that the decision to allow it to proceed was unlawful. We hope the court agrees and quashes planning permission,” Friends of the Earth senior lawyer, Niall Toru, said in a statement.
Maggie Mason of SLACC said “We cannot let this go unchallenged. New coal mines are not climate neutral.”
