National law firm Irwin Mitchell is expanding its Planning and Environment team with the recruitment of Pamela Chesterman as a new partner.

The appointment takes Irwin Mitchell’s specialist Planning and Environment (P&E) team to thirteen. The team has this year been boosted by the recruitment of Jill Crawford, Senior Associate and environmental specialist in February, which was hot on the heels of Tracy Lovejoy joining as a planning senior associate in Birmingham and Victoria Tague as a planning associate in Manchester.

The P&E Team sits within Irwin Mitchell’s Property Division which will now number 28 partners and over 150 qualified lawyers.

Pamela joins from Brabners where she was Legal Director and Head of Planning and prior to that was Head of Planning at Prosperity Law. She has experience across a wide area of environmental and planning law, in particular to the development sector, advising on housing and commercial led development as well as on local government issues, having spent a considerable period working at various local authorities in the Northwest.

She helped one of the UK's largest house builders deal with local authorities’ non-determination of applications which threaten to undermine their schemes, working closely with them to negotiate amicable solutions without having to resort to legal actions and to make informed decisions. Currently she is  also retained by a large car park management company to provide planning and advertisement legal advice - acting as their Agent in applying for planning permission, advertisement consent and listed building consent, where necessary, for large heritage estates which wish to use their service to provide remote parking solutions to existing car park sites.

Pamela has considerable contacts across the Northwest and will be based in Irwin Mitchell’s Liverpool and Manchester offices, supporting Irwin Mitchell’s clients in that region and nationally. Irwin Mitchell has recently opened an office in Liverpool.