HS2 Ltd & SSfT v Persons Unknown & Ors
Approved Judgment:
return to the levels of unlawful activity experienced prior to the interim injunction if it is allowed to lapse and asserts that the interim injunction has been remarkably successful in reducing direct unlawful action against HS2 land and saving taxpayers money. 24. John Groves is the chief security officer for HS2 and gave evidence that the costs of the unlawful direct action to date to the taxpayer, through HS2, have totalled £121,000,000. He asserted that the September 2022 interim routewide injunction had had a dramatic effect by reducing direct action, which diminished the quarterly security expenditure from over half a million down to just £100,000. He produced a forecast of the costs of future unlawful direct action of £7 million for phase two, ending in 2024, due to increased security. He said that activists had started campaigning for other causes but they may believe they can cancel the whole of the HS2 scheme. He asserted that unhappy land owners, whose land was taken away in phase 2, may get involved. He asserted that the Claimants need the deterrence of the injunction or the Claimants might need to spend another £12 million on protection. He was concerned about attacks on bridges over motorways as a potential weak spot in the project. He asserted that activity was still continuing despite the injunction but relied solely on the evidence of Mr Dobson. 25. Julie Dilcock, the in house lawyer for HS2, set out a history of the claims and then the rationale for the various alterations needed to the draft order. Robert Shaw gave evidence which assisted in various tidying up operations that are going to be needed. 26. I take into account what D6 set out in his written reasons. He was content to take no further part in the claim and agreed that the Claimants could no longer maintain an injunction against him. He asserted that, according to the Civil Procedure Rules, the Claimants had to issue notice of discontinuance, obtain the Court's permission and, by implication, pay his costs under CPR part 38, if they wished to discontinue against him. However, in my judgment, this was wanting his cake and to eat it. He asserted that, because he would still be bound by the injunction under the umbrella of the term “PU”, he could still make submissions at the hearing and I permitted him to do so. His submissions were that the terms of the injunction should be modified so that it no longer covers the land relating to phase 2A of the project because the Prime Minister has announced that the project is not going ahead on phase 2 and therefore the protesters have achieved what they wanted. He suggested that the geographic scope of the injunction should be reduced so that it does not cover the purple land set out in the 2021 Act. He also raised the point that this is an interim injunction binding the world and that the Claimants were under a continuing, onerous, responsibility to disclose relevant matters to the Court as they arose. He asserted that the Claimants had failed, in a timely way, to inform the Court of the Prime Minister's announcement in October 2023 that phase 2 was being abandoned and therefore had failed in their responsibilities and that the sanction for this should be the discharge of the whole interim injunction.
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