The government's plans to turn Stansted airport into one of Europe's biggest international hubs face a potentially lengthy delay following a high court judgment that ministers acted illegally in prescribing the location of a new runway.
Mr Justice Sullivan ruled yesterday that the transport secretary, Alistair Darling, had short-circuited the planning process by publishing a map showing the precise position of an extra landing strip at the Essex airport.
To the relief of the government, the judge stopped short of entirely throwing out Mr Darling's policy on aviation, refusing to support a claim that the commercial viability of new runways was flawed.
The ruling is the first time a white paper has fallen foul of a judicial review. It left the government with the embarrassing prospect of paying a six-figure sum for the legal costs of Essex's Conservative-controlled county council. The judge also criticised a senior government official for failing to tell "the whole truth".
Stansted is central to the government's policy of expanding airports to cater for the appetite for cheap flights. Mr Darling announced in December 2003 that the airport's capacity was to go from 25 million passengers annually to a maximum 82 million by 2030.
The judgment is likely to mean that a new runway will undergo scrutiny at a planning inquiry, of a length and at a level of detail Mr Darling was keen to avoid. It will hearten campaigners at other airports including Heathrow, Birmingham and Edinburgh.
Essex county council's leader, Lord Hanningfield, said it could push back the opening date of a new landing strip at Stansted from 2012 to 2016.
"The government has got to go right back to the drawing board. They will have to think again on whether Stansted is the best site in the south-east for a new runway," he said.
The judge also ruled that Mr Darling over-reached his powers by giving the green light for an expanded runway at Luton without consulting local people.
Government officials insisted that the defeats, on two out of four challenges, would make little difference.
Speaking on Radio 4's World at One programme, Mr Darling said he accepted that the "exact position" of a runway should be "a matter for a local inquiry".
"What we were trying to do in the white paper is to set out a strategic direction for air transport over the next 30 years. The judge was specifically asked to quash that; he rejected it, as indeed he rejected the arguments against expansion at Heathrow."
One of Mr Darling's officials, Mike Fawcett, was criticised for his reluctance to reveal grave doubts at the Treasury.
Mr Justice Sullivan said government officials "should remember that their obligation to tell the truth to the court does not mean that the court need only be told so much of the truth as suits the department's case, and that inconvenient parts of the truth may be omitted from their evidence".
