Join us on Thursday 20 November for UKELA South West's first ever event with Legal Voices for the Future! Together we will be hosting a hybrid event at Burges Salmon's offices in Bristol discussing the environmental permitting regime (EPR) and the way in which the EPR will be impacted by the ever changing world we live in. Our experienced panel of both legal and technical minds will be discussing a number of wide ranging examples where our panel predict there to be friction between the regime and the requirements, from data centres to water quality monitoring.
Meet our panel:
Lord Banner KC
Charlie Banner is a barrister at Keating Chambers and a working peer in the House of Lords. His main specialisms include planning and environmental law. He was voted the No. 1 planning KC in Great Britain in the Planning Magazine’s Legal Survey and is ranked as a leading silk in 8 practice areas in Chambers & Partners UK Bar and Legal 500 UK Bar. He was ‘Highly Commended’ in the ‘Barrister of the Year’ category in the Lawyer Awards 2025 and the Times’ Lawyer of the Week in March 2024. From 2017 until 2024 he was a board member of the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, latterly as Chair, and he is a former Trustee of UKELA. He is currently a Committee Member of the Planning and Environment Bar Association.
Jo Pope
Jo is the Environmental & Permit Assurance Manager within Pennon, bringing over 20 years of experience in environmental permitting, regulatory compliance, and assurance across complex operational landscapes. Her career is grounded in environmental governance and reporting, with a strong focus on integrating environmental management systems to drive continuous improvement and ensure alignment with evolving UK legislation. She leads on environmental permit assurance and training ensuring operational activities meet legal obligations. Her expertise spans the full lifecycle of permitting – from application and variation to compliance monitoring and risk mitigation – across both waste and water sectors. Jo played a leading role for South West Water in the water industry’s appeal of Environmental Permitting Regulations (EPR) conditions for water discharge activities, contributing to national dialogue on regulatory clarity and operational feasibility. She is a Chartered Member of CIWEM and a Chartered Environmentalist.
Marcus Reynolds
Marcus Reynolds is a Senior Managing Consultant at Ramboll and has over 20 years of experience within EHS compliance assurance including environmental permitting, auditing within a range on industrial sectors including data centres, chempharma, upstream and downstream oil and gas, and general manufacturing. Marcus has particular specialties in Environmental permitting, EHS compliance auditing, environmental due diligence, health & safety due diligence, environmental management systems and fire risk assessments.
Chair: Nina Pindham
Nina Pindham is Chair of UKELA and a barrister at Cornerstone Barristers specialising in environmental and planning law. As an undergraduate she studied environmental science and her undergraduate thesis research, a water quality assessment of three economically important rivers, was published and led to revised government policy. At the Bar she has appeared as junior counsel in a number of leading environmental law claims, including Finch v Surrey County Council and the successful challenges to the UK Government’s Carbon Budget Delivery Plan and Net Zero Strategy. She has also appeared before the United Nations and Inter-American Court of Human Rights. She is ranked as a Tier 1 barrister in the Legal 500, a leading junior in Chambers and Partners, and has featured in The Planner’s Women of Influence list and the ENDS Power List of the most influential environmental professionals: “she is one of, if not the, leader in her field”. She was awarded a Global Leadership Award during COP27.
Registration starts from 6pm, where we will have refreshments and the panel discussion will take place from 6:30-8pm. For those of you joining us in person this will be followed by 30 mins of networking or alternatively you can join the discussion online. The event, will be held at Burges Salmon’s Bristol offices (see directions).
Tickets are FREE.
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