Richard Buxton Solicitors is the first and only dedicated environmental law firm in the country. It has taken on all kinds of matters since it was set up in 1990 – many to the highest levels of appeal: to seek justice in this area, and to develop the law to protect the environment for people and nature. 

Richard set up the practice in 1990 to help address the environmental issues which were then emerging into the public consciousness. The firm has grown steadily since he secured landmark victories on habitat protection, environmental impact assessment, and aircraft noise. It has participated in many leading cases in environmental, planning and public law in the High Court, Court of Appeal and the House of Lords/Supreme Court relating to everything from the assessment of climate change to the legal standards for private nuisance, the interpretation of national planning legislation, and marine habitat protection. Some cases have gone to the European Court of Human Rights and, before Brexit, the EU Court of Justice.

As the global threats of climate change, biodiversity loss and inequality become more pronounced, the need to enforce laws that protect the environment is critical to the challenges we face.

As the team has expanded, so has what it does. As well as a busy litigation practice, the firm is increasingly involved in planning appeals and inquiries, in the local-plan-making process, and in preparing objections to planning applications. It also takes on an increasing number of more private concerns about noise and other nuisance.

Origins

Richard’s ambition to help the environment is, he says, “in the blood”. Relatives have been instrumental in the abolition of slavery, prison reform, overseas aid, and wildlife conservation – all doing what they could to make an effective difference to people or wildlife. Legal work tends to confront bad decision-making and thoughtless or self-interested conduct.

Fortunately, the firm has over time attracted others with sympathetic interests. It now has a talented and experienced team who also want to put environmental law into practice and to provide the best representation possible to those seeking to protect their environment.

In the early days Richard worked as a consultant to the National Rivers Authority (later subsumed into the Environment Agency) on water abstraction issues.  There were two particularly important cases in the early 1990s: a dispute about night flights into the London airports (“The Department of Transport were flabbergasted – they had never been sued like that before”) which even now means that there are very limited numbers of flights in the small hours. And there was Lappel Bank – when Richard successfully took a dispute about that mudflat on the Isle of Sheppey to the European Court of Justice. For the birds, it was a pyrrhic victory, as the House of Lords refused to grant an injunction against the work without the claimants, the RSPB, giving an undertaking in damages. But it established important principles about habitat protection and was further impetus to the rule, now in the Aarhus Convention, that environmental cases must not be prohibitively expensive.

Giving ‘teeth’ to environmental law

The 1990s saw a major step forward in effective implementation of what became the EU’s directive on environmental impact assessment (EIA), with a victory in the House of Lords where expansion plans at Fulham Football Club  were decided to have lacked lawful assessment.

The Wells case, about a disused quarry in Somerset, and which was referred to the Court in Luxembourg was another landmark – Richard recalls a “wonderful moment when an Italian lawyer in the European Commission shook my hand and said ‘thank you for bringing Delena Wells’, that having an effect throughout the EU made all the trials and tribulations of work we do seem worthwhile”. And there were other cases involving fundamental principles: like Mellor, which required reasons to be given where EIA was not required, and Garner and Edwards which together with action against the UK by the European Commission led to more effective costs protection rules.

Looking forward

More recent cases have included challenges to the extraction of fossil fuels as part of climate change coming centre-stage, Government plans for a Holocaust museum in Victoria Tower Gardens (“right idea, wrong place”), work offshore to prevent habitat damage, and continuing efforts to protect the English and Welsh countryside from development of all kinds. The approach may not be to oppose things on principle, but identification of legal errors often means that there is something substantively wrong with what is proposed, and can bring a better result all round.

Richard sees a bright future for the firm: “We are the only firm devoted exclusively to this type of work. We like acting for people and organisations who come to us cross about the way government and big business treat their environment to show what the law can do. There will still be lots of challenges for a business like ours, taking often difficult and risky cases. Some we win, others not. But right tends to win through, and anyway it is important to try.”