The UK’s ‘shabby and mean-spirited’ costs regime has halted more than half the cases referred for judicial review by an environmental charity, a report has revealed.

The Environmental Law Foundation (ELF), a charity that helps people use the law to protect and improve their surroundings, said in its Cost Barriers to Environmental Justice report that 56% of the 97 cases it advised to proceed to judicial review between 2005 and 2009 failed to do so because claimants were afraid of the cost of litigation.

This was despite the Aarhus Convention, ratified by the UK in 2005, which requires governments to provide inexpensive procedures for challenging development plans that could damage the environment, ELF said.

The report concluded that the denial of access to environmental justice on the grounds of costs was ‘shabby and mean-spirited in a modern democracy’.

ELF chief executive Debbie Tripley called on the government to implement the Aarhus Convention and change its costs rules in the interests of ‘fairness and compliance’.

She said nearly 45% of the charity’s clients earned less than £10,000 a year.