A St Andrews woman facing a £173,000 bill for challenging development plans is prepared to take her legal battle further.
Penny Uprichard has been told she owes Scottish ministers £58,000 and Fife Council around £60,000, on top of her own expenses of £55,000, for legal fees incurred during her bid to overturn the Fife structure plan at the Court of Session in Edinburgh.
The campaigner has warned the Fife town faces a ”tsunami” of development which will ruin its historic character.
At the court on Tuesday the Lord Justice Clerk, Lord Gill, found Miss Uprichard liable for the substantial costs.
In September the senior judge threw out her appeal against the ministers’ decision in May 2009 to approve the Fife Structure Plan 2006-2026. She had claimed that under the Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act 1997 the decision was invalid.
Speaking to The Courier, Miss Uprichard said she is still considering how she will meet the huge costs. She had accepted she would be liable to pay back ministers, but had challenged the council’s motion for expenses.
However she said it had not put her off taking the matter further and was considering an appeal to the Supreme Court.
”I knew obviously there would be an enormous cost but didn’t know for some time that I would have to pay both parties. I don’t understand how a second party can wade in for expenses,” she said.
“Unfortunately the majority of people don’t realise there is going to be a tsunami of development. I’m considering appealing to the Supreme Court.”
Miss Uprichard, who has received pledges of about £33,000 towards her own costs in the action, said the prohibitive costs of challenging developments meant ordinary people are priced out of taking a stand.
Lord Gill, who heard the expenses motion with Lord Hodge and Lord McEwan, said the court was given a note on Miss Uprichard’s income from pension and investments, but no information about her capital, meaning the legal fees could not be waived under the Aarhus Convention, which intended to spare litigants from a prohibitive burden of costs in environmental cases.
The judge said: ”Those who challenge decisions of this nature enter into litigation with their eyes open. They have to expect that if they should fail, the normal consequence will be that they will be liable in expenses.
”It would be reckless for a litigant to embark on a case of this kind in the hope that if he should fail, the court would relieve him of his liability for the expenses that he caused thereby.”
The court heard Miss Uprichard was voicing the concerns ”of a significant section of the local community” and was litigating for ”the good of St Andrews”. She was ”a lady of some means” but was ”not a person of great wealth”, said Lord Gill.
It was argued on her behalf that the action was a challenge to the reasons of the Scottish ministers rather than to the substance of the structure plan and they alone had a direct interest in opposing it.
Lord Gill said: ”The council had to oppose the application if it was to maintain the integrity of its structure plan.”
Miss Uprichard submitted a letter of objection in 2009 on the structure plan asking how the imposition of 1,000 houses, a bypass and business park on a town of about 6,500 homes could be justified.
In rejecting her appeal, Lord Gill earlier said: ”The historic town of St Andrews is a major tourist centre in Scotland. It is a town of great beauty.
“As is invariably the case in such towns, there are conservation bodies committed to preserving its amenity. Many residents are understandably reluctant to see further development on the fringes of the town. They seek to limit the scope of any such development and its impact on the landscape.
”It is probably inevitable that in the formulation of development plans there will be tensions in certain locations between amenity considerations as they are perceived locally and the broader policy priorities of the planning authority.”
Miss Uprichard has previously taken legal action over parking ticket machines in the town and was part of a challenge to a multi-million pound golf course development at St Andrews Bay.