Mike Reader has challenged a call for Britain to withdraw from the Aarhus Convention, arguing that domestic judicial review rules have been the relevant obstacle to development.
The Labour MP for Northampton South made his intervention in an original statement on 7 October, responding to a proposal to leave the environmental agreement.
Reader pointed to changes introduced by the Labour Government through the Planning and Infrastructure Act. His argument was that reforms to Britain’s own legal process offered a route to tackling delays.
The Government has already introduced changes intended to reduce repeated challenges to nationally significant infrastructure projects where claims lack merit.
A separate consultation launched in July considered extending reforms beyond those projects. That consultation is closed, but its proposals should not be described as an implemented wider settlement.
Reader’s statement is a political intervention about the relationship between environmental obligations and planning rules. It does not announce withdrawal from the convention or establish that environmental protections have no effect on individual cases.
