The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 received Royal Assent on 18 December 2025 and is the most ambitious attempt to restructure the English planning system in a generation. The government has staked the credibility of its target to build 1.5 million new homes by the end of this Parliament in 2029 on what the Act will deliver. Supporters describe it as unlocking housebuilding, grid connections, reservoirs, and clean energy. Critics describe it as a weakening of the environmental and community-consent safeguards that have defined the English planning system since the Town and Country Planning Act 1947.
This article sets out what the Act actually does, what has already commenced and what awaits secondary legislation, and where the live political and environmental disputes sit four months after Royal Assent. The Act is long, structurally dense, and was subject to significant parliamentary contestation in the Lords. The provisions that most directly affect what gets built, and where, are the ones that will determine whether the government's delivery ambition is realistic.
What the Act actually does in five parts
The Act is structured in five main parts, each targeting a distinct friction point in the current planning system. Part 1 overhauls the consenting regime for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects, removing the statutory requirement for section 42 pre-application consultation with affected individuals and statutory bodies, with the government estimating that this will cut an average of 12 months from the timetable for major infrastructure. Part 2 covers electricity and grid, giving the Secretary of State and Ofcom expanded powers to amend electricity licences to improve connection management and creating community benefit payment schemes for residents near new or existing transmission infrastructure.
Part 3, which has attracted the most political attention, establishes Environmental Delivery Plans (EDPs) and the Nature Restoration Fund (NRF) and is examined in its own section below. Part 4 introduces reforms to local planning authority procedures, including a national scheme of delegation to ensure that smaller planning decisions are taken by officers rather than by planning committees, a power for local planning authorities to set and retain their own planning application fees, and a duty for councils to produce a Spatial Development Strategy that local plans must then conform to. Part 5 modernises the Compulsory Purchase Order regime, enabling electronic communications, simplified newspaper notice requirements, faster land vesting, and in specified circumstances authorities confirming their own CPOs with directions that disregard hope value.
The judicial review provision running across several Parts is the constitutional change with the longest reach. The Act limits legal challenges to major infrastructure decisions deemed 'totally without merit' to one court attempt rather than the current three. The government has presented this as closing a tactical loophole; critics, including several former Court of Appeal judges who contributed to the Lords debate, have argued it materially narrows access to judicial review in the planning context.
What the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 does
The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 speeds up housebuilding and infrastructure delivery by removing statutory pre-application consultation for major projects, creating a Nature Restoration Fund for developers to fund environmental improvements strategically, restricting repeat judicial reviews, modernising Compulsory Purchase Orders, and requiring local planning authorities to prepare Spatial Development Strategies that local plans must follow.
That summary covers what the Act is designed to do. What it will actually deliver depends on the secondary legislation still being drafted, the capacity of Natural England to produce Environmental Delivery Plans at the scale required, and the willingness of local planning authorities to adopt the delegation scheme in practice. Four months after Royal Assent, the Act is a framework whose outputs are still in negotiation.
The Nature Restoration Fund and why it is contested
Part 3 of the Act creates a new mechanism by which developers can meet certain environmental obligations by paying into a Nature Restoration Fund rather than by delivering on-site mitigation. Where an Environmental Delivery Plan (EDP) applies to a development, the developer can request to pay a nature restoration levy, set by Natural England on a charging schedule specific to that EDP. Payment of the levy legally substitutes for obligations under specified provisions of the Habitats Regulations 2017, the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, and the Protection of Badgers Act 1992. Section 72 of the Act sets out the legal basis; in some categories of development the levy payment becomes mandatory rather than optional.
Natural England, led by Chief Executive Marian Spain, notified the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on 19 December 2025 of its intention to prepare 16 EDPs for nutrient-polluted catchments and 7 EDPs for great crested newts. Ministers made a commencement order on the same date activating the relevant NRF provisions. Consultation on the first EDPs is expected in spring and summer 2026, with the earliest EDPs expected to be made before the end of the year.
The argument for this structure is that it addresses a well-documented delivery problem. Nutrient neutrality rules, introduced after the Dutch Case ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union on the Habitats Directive, have in practice blocked tens of thousands of otherwise consented homes in catchments where waste water treatment works add nitrogen and phosphorus to rivers that fail ecological status. A strategic levy-funded approach, the government argues, delivers better conservation outcomes than the site-by-site mitigation it replaces.
The argument against is that the Overall Improvement Test, the statutory requirement that conservation measures in an EDP must 'materially outweigh' the negative effect of development, is weaker than the existing Habitats Regulations test. The Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management described the Act in December 2025 as 'a regression of environmental protections', and one senior planning barrister called Part 3 a 'licence to kill' during the Bill's Lords stages. Peers tabled amendments to strengthen the environmental safeguards in November 2025, which were defeated on the government's majority.
What has already commenced and what awaits regulations
Some provisions of the Act took effect on Royal Assent, 18 December 2025. These include the restrictions on repeat judicial review attempts, the surcharge power for Local Planning Authorities to fund statutory consultees including Natural England, the commencement order for specified NRF provisions, and several of the NSIP consenting reforms.
Further provisions are expected to commence through 2026 via commencement orders from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. The NSIP pre-application consultation changes require guidance from the Secretary of State on best practice at the pre-application stage, which was under consultation in early 2026. The EDP levy regulations and the prioritisation regulations have not yet been published, and the full NRF regime is unlikely to be operational before late 2026. The national scheme of delegation, which specifies which categories of planning application must be determined by officers rather than planning committees, awaits regulations expected in the second half of 2026.
Secondary legislation therefore does much of the Act's real work. The pattern is typical for planning legislation in England but it also creates a window of several years before the Act's delivery effects can be fairly assessed. The British Property Federation, welcoming Royal Assent in December 2025, observed that the practical changes would require sustained implementation focus and that early wins would depend on how quickly the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government can turn primary legislation into operational regulations.
Where the political question sits
The Act's most important political function is to deliver on the government's commitment to build 1.5 million homes by the end of this Parliament in 2029. The mechanism by which planning reform can accelerate housebuilding is contested among specialists. The Centre for Cities and the Institute for Fiscal Studies have both argued that planning reform addresses only part of the supply problem: the remainder turns on labour capacity in the construction sector, materials supply, developer cash flow given interest rates, and the continued reliance on private housebuilding at scale rather than on social and council housing.
The Campaign to Protect Rural England, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and the Wildlife Trusts have maintained coordinated opposition to Part 3, arguing that the Nature Restoration Fund model risks displacing environmental mitigation to distant locations where the conservation benefits do not compensate the local ecological costs. The Royal Town Planning Institute took a more cautious position, supporting the strategic-planning direction of the Act while calling for chief planners to be placed on a statutory footing and for a National Spatial Framework, neither of which is in the Act but both of which the RTPI continues to pursue via the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill.
The government responded to the Fingleton Review on 14 March 2026, accepting several of its recommendations on the regulation of planning consultancies and the management of conflicts of interest in pre-application advice. That response is one of several strands that will move through 2026 in parallel with the commencement of the substantive Act provisions.
What this means for UK householders and communities
For homeowners and potential buyers, the Act's effect on supply will not be immediate. The secondary legislation, the first EDPs, and the national scheme of delegation all require further steps before the Act's acceleration mechanisms engage. A reasonable working estimate, consistent with independent analysis by the Home Builders Federation and by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, is that the Act's supply effects will start to be visible from 2027 onwards rather than in 2026.
For communities near proposed developments, the practical effect is more immediate. The removal of statutory section 42 pre-application consultation changes the point at which local voices are heard in the NSIP process, even if the publicity requirements remain. The restriction of repeat judicial review attempts narrows the route by which community legal challenges can be mounted against major infrastructure decisions. Local planning authorities will need to decide how they operationalise the national scheme of delegation in ways that either broaden or narrow committee oversight of smaller applications.
For developers, the Act is mostly favourable but carries new commercial risks. Paying the NRF levy where an EDP applies is simpler than project-by-project mitigation, but the levy rate and the scope of any given EDP will not be clear until the relevant charging schedule and regulations are published. Developers with sites inside the 16 nutrient catchments or the 7 great crested newt areas will need to plan their pre-application work around the EDP consultation calendar, which runs through spring and summer 2026.
Fun fact: The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 runs to 260 pages of primary legislation and has been described by the Royal Town Planning Institute as the most significant structural reform of the English planning system since the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. The 1990 Act itself was consolidated from legislation that originated in the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, the post-war statute that established the planning permission principle as the central mechanism of English development control.
Conclusion
The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 is ambitious, contested, and, four months on from Royal Assent, still dependent on regulations that have not yet been drafted. The question the Act asks is whether the English planning system can be made faster and more strategic without losing the democratic and environmental safeguards it was designed to provide. The evidence on that question will accumulate through 2026 and 2027, as the first EDPs are consulted on, the NRF levy regulations appear, the national scheme of delegation is implemented, and the first housebuilding data under the new consenting regime becomes available. The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 will be judged not by what it says but by what it delivers, and that judgment belongs to the end of this Parliament rather than to its opening months.
net zero delivery architecture
Related reading: How UK Biodiversity Net Gain Works Two Years Later, Renters Rights Act 2025 explained from May 2026.
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