Protesters camping at a potential fracking site in Sussex have been told they can stay in place until early October, following a high court ruling on Monday.
The Balcombe protesters were challenging an eviction notice from the local council, and gained a partial victory as the court ruled that the notice from the council was flawed, and adjourned proceedings.
Hundreds of protesters gathered at the site over the summer, with numbers reaching thousands during the most intense period of the protest.
Cuadrilla is exploring for oil in Balcombe, at a site abandoned by Conoco in the 1980s. The company, the first to embark on hydraulic fracturing in the UK, has no immediate plans to frack the area but will seek permission to do so if its current conventional drilling for oil does not succeed.
The company has suffered a series of setbacks in its UK operations, including the protests at Balcombe which forced it to stop work temporarily, and small earthquakes at its Blackpool fracking site in 2011 which halted work there for more than a year.
The Balcombe case has been adjourned by the judge until 8 October, and the council must decide by then whether it is in the public interest to proceed. Many local people are opposed to fracking and support the protest, but others are "fed up" with the inconvenience of the protest camp on their doorstep.
The council and Cuadrilla did not immediately comment.
Vanessa Vine, a local resident who helped to set up the Balcombe protest camp, said: "We are delighted to see sanity and justice prevailing for the Balcombe protectors. When will West Sussex county council take action to evict those who are genuinely posing a threat to the local community – those within the gates of the drill site who are putting us at grave risk, for short-term ecocidal corporate gain?"
