Ministers ‘inadequately briefed’ on alternatives to Stonehenge tunnel plan, lawyers argue

Ministers were “inadequately briefed” by officials on alternative schemes before approving a road tunnel under Stonehenge for a second time, lawyers for campaigners have argued in the high court, in the latest legal attempt to stop the scheme.

Campaigners argue that the proposed two-mile (3.3km) road tunnel, part of a new eight-mile dual carriageway for the A303 road costing at least £2.5bn, would destroy a large area of the heritage site around Stonehenge – including ancient monuments and listed buildings – and increase emissions.

Related: Stonehenge likely to be put on world heritage danger list over tunnel plan

The hearing is the latest chapter in a long legal battle since Grant Shapps as transport secretary gave the go-ahead for the scheme in 2020, a decision that was overturned by judges in 2021 . In July 2023 the then transport minister Huw Merriman granted a second development consent order (DCO) on behalf of the transport secretary at that time, Mark Harper. Campaigners lost an initial high court challenge against that decision in a ruling handed down in February .

In a three-day hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice that started on Monday, lawyers for the Save Stonehenge World Heritage Site alliance are seeking to appeal against the judgment on up to eight grounds and again seek a judicial review of the Department for Transport’s decision.

Lawyers for the campaigners will focus on the advice given to ministers and whether the judge was correct to rule that Merriman did not need to reconsider material from Shapps’s original decision, which granted a DCO despite planning inspectors finding that the project would cause “permanent, irreversible harm” to the area.

The appeal also argues that Merriman ignored fresh evidence that the scheme would put Stonehenge’s status as a world heritage site at risk , and acted unlawfully in his approach to the international conventions.

David Wolfe KC, for the campaigners, told the court in opening: “It is the minister who has responsibility for the decision, not his officials.”

Wolfe said: “We argue that the decision was taken after an exercise that filtered out too much.” He added: “The minister misunderstood what we were asking for … in part because he was not informed of what we were asking for.”

Wolfe said it meant ministers had not personally considered alternatives including longer tunnel options, but were satisfied simply that National Highways had looked at other options for the road and bypass. “That is not the same as them considering the merits of alternatives,” he said.

Wolfe said some expert evidence submitted to the consultation “would have been a policy gamechanger [but] was not evaluated”.

The hearing continues until Wednesday.

National Highways, the sponsor of the project, has said the tunnel and wider road project will remove traffic from around Stonehenge. Bottlenecks frequently occur on the short single-lane stretch of road on the A303, a major route to south-west England that is otherwise mainly dual-carriageway.

Historic England, another co-respondent in the case, has described the scheme as “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to restore this internationally important landscape”.

Unesco’s world heritage committee is meeting in Delhi later this month to decide on a recommendation made in June to put Stonehenge on an endangered list , putting it closer to potentially losing world heritage status altogether.

Campaigners have called on the new Labour government to ditch the project, regardless of the court case. Tom Holland, a historian, broadcaster and author who is the president of the Stonehenge Alliance, said: “Any scheme that manages to be at once ineffective, hugely damaging and grotesquely expensive is ripe for cancellation. The new government should seize the opportunity to consign the Stonehenge tunnel to the dustbin where it belongs.”

The alliance will hand a petition with 240,000 signatures from 147 countries to Labour’s transport and culture secretaries on Monday afternoon, urging them to drop or reconsider the scheme, possibly building longer tunnels further from the site instead.