“We don’t take that approach to social ills like gang violence or drug dealing – they are dealt with through the criminal courts [alone] … Nobody’s looking at the wider picture and thinking, ‘Could this actually have gone too far?’”
“The threat of costs in injunction proceedings is one of, if not the, biggest chilling effects on protests in Britain at the moment,” said Paul Powlesland, a barrister at Garden Court Chambers and founder of the environmental pressure group Lawyers For Nature.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports
The UK’s largest law firm sought £1.1m in legal fees from climate campaigners to cover the costs of preventing their protests, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal.
DLA Piper, a multibillion-pound law firm, tried to recoup eye-watering costs, including fees of £350 per hour for providing legal advice to its clients HS2 and National Highways Limited (NHL) – both publicly owned bodies. Other costs it tried to reclaim included £75,000 for a single hearing and £2,500 to prepare a document listing its own fees.
The firm brought injunctions – court orders prohibiting certain actions – against more than 200 campaigners, primarily from Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain. Most obeyed the NHL injunction and did not take part in the prohibited protests, but still each faced bills of thousands of pounds.
In two of the cases, judges criticised the firm’s costs as “disproportionate” or “not … reasonable” and significantly reduced the amount it could claim, in one case by more than half.
Barristers told TBIJ that costs incurred by City law firms such as DLA Piper far exceed those incurred by in-house solicitors at public bodies or local authorities, ratcheting up the risk of large costs being foisted onto protestors.
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