The UK Court of Appeal ruled in favour of the challenge, brought by legal charity Plan B, after deciding that the plans were incompatible with the 2015 Paris Environmental Agreement, which the UK government has signed up to.
Legal challenges were also brought by London Mayor Sadiq Khan, various borough councils and environmental groups including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth against the new runway, which MPs had voted in favour of in 2018.
Last year, Virgin Connect – the company due to be formed out of the sale of Flybe to a consortium of three companies – announced that it planned to relaunch services between Heathrow, Jersey and a number of other regional destinations, if a third runway was built. Work had been due to start in 2021 with the new runway open by 2026.
If flights had resumed it would have been the first Jersey-Heathrow service since BMI pulled out in 2009, citing ‘deteriorating market conditions’.
Virgin had hoped the plan would boost regional connectivity to Heathrow and said International Airlines Group – the owner of British Airways, Iberia and several other airlines – had been dominant at the airport ‘for far too long’.
A judgment published yesterday by the Court of Appeal said: ‘The government, when it published the ANPS [Airports National Policy Statement], had not taken into account its own firm policy commitments on climate change under the Paris agreement.
‘That, in our view, is legally fatal to the ANPS in its present form.’
However, the court did not veto the expansion altogether and dismissed all other challenges to the airport’s plans, including on noise and air quality. A spokesperson for Heathrow said yesterday that they would appeal to the Supreme Court on the one remaining issue of climate change and were ‘confident’ they would be successful.
The Court of Appeal’s ruling is the first time that the Paris agreement’s goal to limit global warming has been deemed legally binding and could have far-reaching implications for future planning decisions.
Friends of the Earth described the judgment as ‘a massive climate justice win for present and future generations’.
