A legal challenge to Shropshire Council over its decision to give planning permission for a major intensive poultry unit aims to halt the further spread of industrial scale chicken farming both in the county and the wider catchment of the River Severn, according to a news release from the British Free Range Egg Producers Association. 

The application for judicial review was initiated and is funded by environmental campaigning group River Action which is waging a legal fight to fully enforce regulations to prevent pollution by intensive agricultural practices in the River Wye catchment area.

River Action says the Wye catchment area has been devastated by the failure to enforce anti-pollution regulations and it is determined to help prevent similar ecological damage to the neighbouring catchment of the River Severn.

The claimant, Alison Caffyn, who lives in Shropshire and is a member of River Action’s advisory board, is represented by the environment team at law firm Leigh Day.

She is challenging Shropshire Council over its decision in May 2024 to give planning permission for an application by LJ Cooke & Son for a poultry production unit that will include four poultry rearing buildings, each over 100m long, and a biomass store with boilers at North Farm, Felton Butler, Montford Bridge, Shropshire. The unit would house 230,000 birds, just 400m from an existing poultry site which is believed to house nearly half a million birds.

Permission was initially refused after Natural England advised that three protected sites, Shrawardine Pool, Lin Can Moss and Fenemere, could “be sensitive to impacts for aerial pollutants” and council officers said the plan did not detail proposals for handling chicken manure without an anaerobic digester.

However, the plan was approved after LJ Cooke proposed exporting manure to a third-party anaerobic digestion unit so that the digestate could be spread on farmland.

Critical objections to the application raised by Caffyn and other local residents were disregarded. These included both the fact that the processing of manure at an off-site anaerobic digestion unit would not cut nitrate and phosphate groundwater pollution as the digestate would still be spread on farmland and that the Hencott Pool and Fenemere protected sites were both in “unfavourable condition” and the development should only be permitted if the “imperative reasons of overriding public interest test” could be satisfied.