Practice Summary

David Smith was awarded the Philip Teichman Scholarship by the Inner Temple and the Poland (Treasurer’s) Prize when called to the Bar by the Inner Temple in 1980. He served as a member of the Supplementary Panel of Junior Counsel to the Crown (Common Law) from 1992 to 1999.

His advocacy and advisory work on behalf of both the public and the private sectors now focuses on planning and related matters having developed from a specialism in both landlord and tenant and planning.

His planning inquiry work embraces both shorter and longer public inquiries. For the longer inquiries this tends to involve multi-disciplinary teams of consultants ranging from the technical to the creative. His inquiry and advisory work covers a wide range of topics and has embraced a considerable number of mineral proposals (both deep mine and opencast), many road proposals, a number of deep sea ports, several major airport inquiries, and a proposal for a large intermodal freight exchange. David’s inquiry work also features many aspects regularly found in complex Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) cases, such as air quality & emissions/depositions, noise, blasting, ecology & habitats, waste, flooding and water quality.