Misleading, seriously flawed and procedurally unfair

In what has caught me by pleasant surprise, Greenpeace has won a High Court ruling that the Government's 3-month consultation process last year to build a new generation of nuclear power stations had gone radically wrong in terms of being a full public consultation that had been promised in the 2003 energy white paper.

The consultation outcome has now been quashed, and a new consultation process will have to be undertaken before planning for new nuclear build can begin. In the words of the judge:

"There was therefore procedural unfairness and a breach of Greenpeace's legitimate expectation that there would be the fullest consultation before a decision was taken."

The Government, of course, has responded that the decision was about the process, rather than the principle, which is of course correct - but process matters, and you can't conclude on a principle without taking the process into account.