Mr Justice Julian Knowles
Case No: QB-2022-001317
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
KING'S BENCH DIVISION
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
Caroline Bolton and Natalie Pratt (instructed by Sharpe Pritchard LLP) for the Claimants
The Defendants did not appear and were not represented
Hearing dates: 12 July 2024
Approved Judgment
This judgment was handed down remotely at 10:30 on 11 October 2024 by circulation to the parties or their representatives by e-mail and by release to the National Archives.
Introduction
Following a hearing on 12 July 2024 I granted the continuation of an injunction granted by Foster J on 27 January 2023, and made other orders, against Persons Unknown. Foster J's order was itself the continuation of an injunction initially granted by Ritchie J in April 2022, and then subsequently renewed. These are my reasons.
The Claimants did not at the hearing seek a final injunction against the remaining named Defendants. There is to be a hearing in October 2024 in relation to them and the order of Foster J will remain in effect until then pursuant to an order of Collins Rice J dated 19 Aril 2024. There are now in fact only a relatively small number of named Defendants remaining; most have reached settlement with the Claimants by way of undertaking.
Background
Events from April 2022
The Claimants bring these claims pursuant to the Local Government Act 1972, s 222 and the Highways Act 1980, s130(5). Thurrock Council (Thurrock) is the Local Highway Authority for the Borough. Essex County Council (ECC) is the Local Highway Authority for the County.
The claim is brought in response to protest activity in the administrative area of Thurrock (the Borough) in April 2022 by those associated with the Just Stop Oil group (JSO). As is well-known, JSO is one of a number of groups who protest about environmental concerns and climate change by engaging in direct action, often against infrastructure which it regards as being involved with fossil fuels such as fuel storage facilities, pipelines, and airports. For example, over the summer of 2024 the High Court granted a number of injunctions on the applications of airport operators to prevent apprehended trespass and nuisance at their airports which Just Stop Oil and others had threatened to carry out.
The Borough is especially attractive to this group as a venue for protest as it houses several COMAH (Control of Major Hazards) sites, namely fuel/oil terminals. These are:
a. The Navigator Fuel Terminal, Oliver Road, West Thurrock RM20 3ED. The main entrance to the site is off Burnley Road/Oliver Road in West Thurrock. There is a secondary exit from the site on Oliver Close;
b. The Esso Fuel Terminal, London Road, Purfleet RM19 1RS. The primary access route to the site is off the A1090, London Road, Purfleet; and
c. Exolum Storage Ltd, off Askews Farm Lane, London Road, Grays RM17 5YZ.
The Oikos fuel terminal is also located nearby in Canvey Island, which is within the administrative area of Essex (the County). As I shall explain, protesters have targeted fuel supplies to these terminals and sought to disrupt them.
The injunction sought on this continuation application is the sort of ‘newcomer injunction’ which have been granted by the courts in protest and other cases in recent years. The evolution of this sort of injunction, and the relevant legal principles, were set out by the Supreme Court in Wolverhampton City Counciland others v London Gypsies and Travellers and others [2024] 2 WLR 45. I will refer to this as Wolverhampton Travellers case.
Recent examples of such injunctions are: Jockey Club Racecourses Ltd v Persons Unknown [2024] EWHC 1786 (Ch); Exolum Pipeline System Ltd and others v Persons Unknown [2024] EWHC 1015 (KB); Valero Energy Ltd v Persons Unknown [2024] EWHC 134 (KB); Multiplex Construction Europe Ltd v Persons Unknown [2024] EWHC 239 (KB); High Speed 2 (HS2) Limited v Persons Unknown [2024] EWHC 1277 (KB); Arla Foods Ltd v Persons Unknown [2024] EWHC 1952 (Ch), [75]; and Wolverhampton City Council v Persons Unknown [2024] EWHC 2273 (KB). The legal basis for newcomer injunctions, and the principles which guide whether they should be granted in a particular case, are therefore now firmly established.
The Claimants seek the continuation of the injunction against the seven above-defined categories of Persons Unknown. They rely upon the Third Witness Statement of Adewale Adesina (Senior Emergency Planning and Resilience Officer with Thurrock) dated 26 June 2024 (Adesina 3) and Detective Superintendent Stephen Jennings of Essex Police, dated 23 March 2024 (Jennings), as well as the historic evidence filed in support of the earlier applications. There is also a short updating statement from Adam Rulewski, a lawyer with the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, concerning events which occurred shortly before the hearing involving Just Stop Oil.
The matter first came before the Court on 24 April 2022, when the Claimants made an out of hours and without notice application for interim injunctive relief against (a) the 222 named Defendants set out at Schedule 1 to the Claim Form; and (b) the seven categories of Persons Unknown. The application was granted by Ritchie J (the Injunction Order). This application was made following a first wave of protests in the Borough.
The acts of protest experienced by the Borough are set out in detail in the First and Second Witness Statements of Adewale Adesina and Temporary Detective Chief Superintendent Cronin of 23 April 2022 (Cronin). By way of short summary, the protests commenced on 1 April 2022, and events of protest were attended by Essex Police on 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 11, 13 and 15 April 2022. In that time, there were several hundred arrests made in the Borough alone for offences that are alleged to have been committed in the course of, and incidental to, the protests. The vast majority of those arrests were for obstruction of the highway and interfering and/or tampering with motor vehicles (those vehicles being fuel transport tankers).
As T/DCS Cronin explains in his witness statement, the modus operandi of the protestors is often to:
a. sit or lay in highways, and often to glue themselves to the road or other road furniture, and obstruct the highway;
b. intercept fuel tanker lorries, climb aboard the same, and often glue or affix themselves, again obstructing the highway;
c. there were at least two instances of tunnelling adjacent to and underneath the highway (I note from the updating evidence, two significant tunnelling incidents occurred during the course of the August 2022 protests, which I will come to).
Over the Easter weekend (15–18 April 2022), the focus of the protest movement appeared to shift to central London. The protest groups associated with protest in the Borough announced a moratorium on protest/direct action on 19 April 2022, to last until 25 April 2022, upon which the protestors threatened to escalate their activity to ‘phase 2A’ (which was understood would include the obstruction of petrol forecourts (Cronin, [67]–[69]), should the Government not meet the protestors' demands. On the basis that the Government had not complied with the protestors' demands, the Claimants apprehended a recommencement and escalation of protest activity/ direct action on 25 April 2022, and sought urgent interim injunctive relief accordingly.
Both Mr Adesina and T/DCS Cronin...
