Row over 200,000-bird Shropshire chicken farm to be heard at High Court today

Shropshire Council granted permission for a 200,000-bird poultry unit at Felton Butler, near Oswestry - 400 yards away from an existing site thought to hold 500,000 chickens.

The River Action campaign group has funded a legal challenge, and the case will be heard today (Wednesday, April 30) at the High Court in Cardiff.

Protestors in chicken masks are expected to be outside the court holding placards before the hearing.

Campaigners say the legal action aims to stop the spread of intensive poultry production in Shropshire and the River Severn catchment area, and is part of a nationwide campaign by River Action to prevent river pollution caused by intensive agricultural practices. 

Dr Alison Caffyn, of the River Action board, said before the hearing: “There are now nearly 65 chickens for every person in Shropshire – and the council is allowing even more. “We believe huge volumes of chicken muck are leaching into our rivers. They need to call a halt to it.”

Permission for the unit was initially refused after Natural England advised that three nearby protected sites, Shrawardine Pool, Lin Can Moss and Fenmere, could be impacted by aerial pollutants.  

Council officers also raised concerns over the lack of detail on how the development would handle chicken manure without an anaerobic digester – a large sealed vessel used to break down organic materials. 

However, the plans for the development were approved after LJ Cooke & Son proposed exporting manure to a third party anaerobic digestion unit.

The arguments which the court will consider are whether or not the council failed to fully and lawfully assess the environmental impacts of the development and, in particular, the effects of spreading manure on land; and if the authority acted unlawfully by imposing a condition which failed to prevent the spreading of manure on land - and so failing to address concerns that the council itself raised about environmental effects

It will also look at whether or not the authority failed to carry out a lawful assessment before granting the permission by determining the significance of some of development’s impacts by reference to thresholds, by failing to carry out a lawful, cumulative assessment of those impacts, and by assuming incorrectly that a key form of mitigation in the form of air scrubbers would be continually operational. 

River Action will be represented in court by lawyers from Leigh Day, the firm which represented Shrewsbury residents in the row over land at Greenfields in the Supreme Court. In a landmark judgment, the court ruled in favour of a resident who claimed a statutory trust created in 1926 gave residents rights of recreation over a piece of land even after Shrewsbury Town Council sold it to a housing developer.