West Berkshire Council v UK Land Holdings: court upholds injunction over Aldermaston traveller site

The High Court has ruled that an interim injunction restraining residential occupation of land south of Reading Road, Aldermaston, should continue in full, after finding that only one family was genuinely in occupation when the order was first granted, with dozens of others having since moved onto the site in deliberate breach of it.

Handing down judgement in West Berkshire District Council v UK Land Holdings 1 Ltd & Ors [2026] EWHC 2304 (KB), HHJ Sylvia de Bertodano, sitting as a Deputy High Court Judge, dismissed an application by represented defendants to vary the terms of an injunction originally granted without notice by Cotter J on 18 December 2025 and continued the following month. The application followed unauthorised works and an invalid planning application for thirteen traveller pitches on the land, which West Berkshire District Council said had since expanded, without permission, to around twenty two occupied plots.

The central factual dispute was who had actually been living on the land before the original injunction was served on 19 December 2025. The defendants argued that many families were already settled by that date and that the injunction therefore amounted, in substance, to an eviction order made without proper regard to their Article 8 rights. The council's case, supported by the evidence of a senior planning enforcement officer who had visited the site repeatedly from early November, was that only the family of one defendant, John Jude O'Brien, was in settled residential occupation at the relevant date, with the rest of the site showing signs of construction activity and storage rather than habitation.

Having heard evidence from a number of defendants and reviewed contemporaneous photographs, planning contravention responses and correspondence, the judge found the defendants' accounts of early occupation unconvincing, noting the absence of any supporting documentary, photographic or digital evidence despite the ready availability of mobile phones. She held as a fact that only the O'Brien family had been in occupation when the injunction took effect, meaning all subsequent arrivals had established residence in breach of a court order.

The judgement also addressed the land's location within the Detailed Emergency Planning Zone surrounding AWE Aldermaston, one of the UK's nuclear warhead facilities. Evidence from the Office for Nuclear Regulation and emergency planning witnesses indicated that increased population density on the site could place unsustainable pressure on the facility's Off-Site Emergency Plan, a factor the judge treated as relevant, though not determinative, to the overall assessment.

Applying the framework in the Supreme Court's Wolverhampton City Council ruling on newcomer injunctions, together with established authority from South Bucks District Council v Porter and subsequent Court of Appeal decisions on planning injunctions, the judge concluded that continuing the injunction was proportionate. She emphasised the well established principle that defendants who deliberately breach a court order and then rely on the resulting hardship to justify its discharge should not be permitted to profit from that conduct, and that the best interests of the children now living on site did not outweigh the wider public interest in upholding the order, given the absence of any evidence that families could not return to where they lived before moving onto the land.

The judge indicated that those in breach of the original order would be given twenty eight days to leave the land, with a final compliance date expected in early October, subject to brief further submissions on timing from both sides.