Publication
Publication
The Government has set itself some ambitious goals: delivering 1.5 million homes and fast-tracking 150 major infrastructure projects by the end of this Parliament. Seeking to turn ambition into reality, the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 (the “Act”), which received Royal Assent on 18 December 2025, is intended to help deliver those ambitions by streamlining planning approvals, boosting investment in infrastructure and resetting sustainability standards. In parallel, on 16 December 2025, the Government published a consultation on a draft updated National Planning Policy Framework (“NPPF”), proposing broad reforms to the planning system in England. The consultation is open until 10 March 2026.
In this article, we highlight the key proposals and explain what developers, landowners and investors need to know about them – and the opportunities and challenges they bring.
With the UK facing a housing shortfall of 4.3 million homes by 2035, the Act aims to tackle delays head on by removing some of the structural bottlenecks that slow decisions and create uncertainty for applicants.
The Act enables the introduction of a national scheme of delegation, setting out which applications will be determined by planning officers and which must go to planning committees. Over time, this is likely to move more routine decisions away from local political debate and into officer hands, with the aim of more consistent and timely outcomes.
Planning committee members will have to complete mandatory training in order to sit on committees and determine applications; only trained members will be able to make planning decisions. This is designed to improve the quality and robustness of decisions, and may help reduce the scope for successful legal challenge based on procedural failings.
The Act gives Local Planning Authorities (“LPAs”) the power to set their own planning fees within certain limits, and to ring fence the income for determining applications. In practice, this is likely to mean higher application fees, particularly for larger or more complex schemes. For many developers, higher fees may be acceptable if they translate into better resourced planning teams and shorter determination times. For smaller schemes, the increased upfront cost could impact viability, making early feasibility analysis more important.
The Act empowers combined authorities with expanded planning powers to set region-wide housing priorities, improving coordination across local councils. To unlock sites for new housing at scale, it also strengthens development corporations, which are statutory bodies set up to facilitate development in areas that need large-scale coordination of investment and planning, by giving them greater powers to assemble land and grant development consent.
Strategic planning authorities will be required to produce “spatial development strategies” (“SDSs”), which will form part of the development plan that LPAs must use when determining planning applications. An SDS may specify the volume or location of housing needed in particular areas, and/or identify strategic locations for development. For investors and developers, early engagement with emerging SDSs will be important, as they are likely to influence land values, pipeline strategy and the level of policy support available to particular sites.
Overall, these measures are intended to create a planning system that is more professional, more consistent and better resourced. The trade off for applicants is higher upfront cost and, in some cases, less scope to rely on local political discretion where proposals are controversial.
“The swift moves to address the failings in the planning system are a very welcome and positive step towards increasing housing supply.
Removing blockages, speeding up the decision-making process and ensuring local planning departments have the capacity to process applications effectively will be essential to getting more sites up and running.”
– Neil Jefferson, Chief Executive of the Home Builders Federation
Nationally significant infrastructure projects (“NSIPs”) – including nuclear power plants, large renewables, grid infrastructure and national transport networks – are central to the net zero and growth agenda. The Act seeks to make the consenting pathway for these projects more predictable and less vulnerable to delay.
National policy statements (“NPSs”), which set out the policy framework for NSIPs, must now be reviewed at least every five years. This is intended to keep policy aligned with evolving Government objectives, particularly on energy transition, security of supply and climate.
Projects that align with up to date NPSs stand to benefit from streamlined consultation requirements. In principle, this should shorten pre application periods and reduce consultation fatigue for both communities and developers.
The Act responds to long standing criticism that the Development Consent Order (“DCO”) regime is costly and slow. It introduces new tools to reduce the impact of “meritless” court challenges and speed up approvals, aiming to limit tactical litigation primarily aimed at delay. If these measures are applied consistently, sponsors of major infrastructure projects should see more certainty on timing.
A notable change is the new power for the Secretary of State to direct that certain projects do not need to be approved under the DCO process but instead can proceed through the normal planning application route. For some projects, particularly large but relatively self contained ones, this could provide a faster and less expensive path to consent.
For others, losing the “one stop shop” of a DCO and dealing with multiple consents and authorities may increase interface risk. Sponsors and funders may wish to revisit consenting strategies for pipeline projects and consider modelling both the DCO route and the town and country planning route at an early stage.
Collectively, the reforms aim to preserve the benefits of the DCO system where it adds value, while avoiding forcing every large project through a process that may not always be proportionate.
Efficient land assembly is a critical enabler of both housing and major infrastructure, and the Act makes targeted changes to the compulsory purchase order (“CPO”) regime to bring CPO practice more in line with modern expectations.
It streamlines aspects of the CPO process to speed up land acquisition for development, including allowing for more delegated decisions and electronic service of documents. This may improve fundability, particularly where land assembly risk has previously been a constraint on investment or delivery timetables.
The Act introduces a new approach to grid connections for clean power, prioritising the most advanced and deliverable projects on a “first ready, first served” basis as part of a broader push to cut emissions and fast-track the transition to clean energy. For key clean energy infrastructure, the Government has suggested that this could cut potential wait times for grid connections by up to seven years.
This may favour well capitalised sponsors who can invest early in technical work to reach “ready” status ahead of competitors. Developers may need to revisit the sequencing of development expenditure to make sure they are not left behind in the queue.
The Act establishes the “Nature Restoration Fund” (“NRF”), a fund from which Natural England may draw to implement state-approved environmental development plans. Developers will be able to pool their contributions into the NRF, allowing them to fulfil certain environmental responsibilities more quickly and, in some cases, potentially exempting them from conducting detailed site-by-site environmental assessments themselves.
This is an innovative move away from project by project mitigation towards a more strategic, landscape scale framework. If implemented effectively, it could reduce costs and delays for developers while improving overall environmental outcomes. However, critics argue that it risks weakening local environmental protections, particularly where adverse impacts are felt locally but mitigation is delivered elsewhere.
In practice, developers will need to understand not only the cost and timetable benefits of relying on the NRF, but also the potential for increased scrutiny by regulators, non governmental organisations and communities. Funders may also look closely at how use of the NRF interacts with environmental, social and governance expectations and reputational risk.
Some measures in the Act will take effect quickly, while others depend on further detail being set out in secondary legislation.
One example of an early change is the reform allowing developers an additional year to implement a planning consent that has been the subject of a judicial review. This provision comes into force on 18 February 2026 and is intended to reduce the risk that a consent is undermined simply because a challenge delays implementation.
Many other provisions will require secondary legislation, and in some cases further consultation, before they have full practical effect. Developers, landowners and investors will need to track how the detail emerges to understand precisely when and how the new tools become available.
Alongside the Act, the Government is consulting on a significant reform of the National Planning Policy Framework. The draft NPPF proposes to restructure current plan making policies and introduce national development management policies (“NDMPs”), which will apply nationally and override any inconsistent local policies, which will be given very limited weight.
The intention is to establish a comprehensive suite of national policies on general planning matters, applying across the country. In broad terms, this is designed to make planning policy more “rules based and certain”, reducing scope for local variation that undermines national objectives, and giving applicants more consistency between local planning authorities.
The Government’s Chief Planner’s Newsletter highlights a range of proposed changes, including:
Taken together, these changes point towards a system where national policy has greater primacy and where more of the key parameters for development – including contributions and density expectations – are fixed earlier and at national level. Many developers will welcome increased consistency and reduced late stage negotiation, but the trade off may be less flexibility to agree bespoke local solutions for complex schemes.
The consultation document includes an annex on data centres and onsite energy generation, with a series of consultation questions, and refers to the recently confirmed position that data centre projects can be directed into the DCO consenting regime by the Secretary of State.
The Government is seeking views on whether the proposed reforms are sufficiently flexible to enable the co location of energy and data centres, which is increasingly seen as important to facilitate delivery of large scale, power intensive digital infrastructure. For sponsors and investors in this sector, the emerging policy framework may influence site selection, grid strategy, and the choice between town and country planning and DCO routes.
Separately, the Government is preparing a consultation on a proposed National Policy Statement for data centres. Once in place, this would give data centre developments a clearer national policy context, particularly where they are treated as nationally significant infrastructure.
The NPPF consultation closes at 11.45pm on 10 March 2026. Developers, funders and landowners with interests in housing, energy, minerals or data centres may wish to engage with the consultation process to help shape the final form of national policy.
If you would like specific advice on how the Act and the proposed changes to the NPPF could impact you or your developments and projects – for example, which consenting route to pursue, or how to position schemes within emerging strategic plans and approach environmental and grid changes – please reach out to your usual Linklaters contact.
Authors: Imogen Jones, Christopher Stanwell