Nearly three decades ago, Britain signed up to the Aarhus Treaty which guaranteed a ‘right to access environmental justice’. This treaty sets up an exception to the legal convention that being unsuccessfully sued by an individual gets you off the hook for the legal fees spent fighting the case - put simply, the convention that if you sue me and lose, you have to pay my lawyers.

The treaty has been operationalised in Britain as a cap on the legal costs a developer can claim back from a litigant when their lawsuit is unsuccessful. Individual costs are capped at £5,000, while organisations (such as groups which have come together to oppose a project - or several) have a slightly higher cost cap of £10,000.

The combination of the Aarhus cost caps with crowdfunding websites has made it dramatically cheaper to mount legal challenges to projects. Even when lawsuits are unsuccessful they can have a chilling effect on similar projects, National Highways is effectively forced to price in delays. At the margin, it means some otherwise good viable projects don’t get funded.

One option the Government could take would be to direct judges to raise the caps when they deal with repeat litigants (groups who take multiple infrastructure projects to court and lose). A more radical option would be to scrap the caps altogether and treat environmental lawsuits like any other.