UK Planning and Infrastructure Bill What It Changes

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill, introduced to the House of Commons in March 2025, represents the most ambitious attempt to reform England's development consent system since the Planning Act 2008 created the regime for nationally significant infrastructure projects. The government's ambition is to accelerate housing delivery, streamline the consenting process for major infrastructure, and reduce the legal and procedural complexity that has made the existing system slow, expensive, and adversarial. Whether it will achieve those objectives, or whether it will shift decision-making power in ways that reduce democratic accountability without delivering the promised housing, is a genuinely contested question.

England built approximately 220,000 new homes in 2023-24, according to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government's housing supply statistics. The government's target is 1.5 million homes over the Parliament, implying approximately 300,000 per year. The Planning and Infrastructure Bill is the primary legislative mechanism through which the government intends to bridge that gap, alongside the National Planning Policy Framework update that took effect in December 2024 and the GB Energy investment programme.

Why the Planning System Is Being Reformed

The English planning system has been the subject of reform proposals from successive governments for over 2 decades. The core diagnosis is consistent: the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 framework, which established the principle of planning permission as a prerequisite for development and created local planning authorities as the decision-making body, has accumulated decades of case law, procedural requirements, and political risk that make it slow and expensive to navigate.

The independent review of the planning system conducted by Sir Oliver Letwin in 2018 and the white paper 'Planning for the Future' published in 2020 identified 3 specific structural problems: the planning application process is too slow and too uncertain, particularly for large sites; the viability-based negotiation system for developer contributions to infrastructure and affordable housing is opaque and frequently contested; and the appeal system creates a backstop that is expensive for both appellants and local authorities, consuming resources without delivering certainty.

The Barker Review of Housing Supply (2004) estimated that England needed to build approximately 70,000 additional homes per year above the then-prevailing rate to address the backlog of housing need. Over the 20 years since that review, housing delivery has consistently fallen short of assessed need, and the resulting affordability crisis, documented by the Resolution Foundation, has disproportionately affected younger households, lower-income workers, and renters in high-demand urban areas.

Planning Committee Reform

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill proposes to reform the composition and decision-making rules of local planning committees, the bodies within local authorities that determine planning applications. Under the Bill, planning committees will only be required to consider applications that are 'genuinely contested' by local members, rather than all applications above certain size thresholds. Applications that conform with an approved local plan are intended to be processed by planning officers under delegated authority, without referral to the full committee.

This provision has generated the most political controversy of any in the Bill. The Planning Officers Society has broadly supported delegation as consistent with effective administration. The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) and several backbench MPs have argued that removing planning committee oversight of conforming applications reduces democratic accountability for decisions that have significant local impact, and that the system of planning officer delegation is already compromised by underfunding of planning departments.

The government's response is that the current system of universal committee referral is inconsistent: identical applications in different local authorities may face committee scrutiny in one and delegated determination in another, based on local procedural norms rather than on the genuine complexity or controversy of the application. Rationalising committee referral criteria is presented as a process improvement, not an accountability reduction.

Compulsory Purchase and the Infrastructure Levy

The Bill proposes significant reforms to compulsory purchase order (CPO) powers. The current compensation framework, which requires the acquiring authority to pay the market value of land including its hope value, has been criticised as making public-interest land assembly prohibitively expensive. The Bill proposes to modify the compensation basis so that CPOs for housing and infrastructure purposes pay less than full market value, removing some of the planning permission premium from the land price.

This is a politically and legally complex change. Landowners and their representative bodies have argued that compulsorily purchasing land at below market value violates property rights protections in the European Convention on Human Rights as retained in UK law through the Human Rights Act 1998. The Joint Committee on Human Rights is expected to scrutinise this provision carefully. The government's position is that the compensation framework can be reformed within the existing legal framework by redefining the statutory basis of assessment.

The Infrastructure Levy, proposed as a replacement for both the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) and Section 106 developer contribution agreements, is designed to create a more transparent and locally-controlled mechanism for capturing development value for public benefit. Under the proposed system, a nationally set rate would apply to developments above a threshold, with local authorities able to set their own rates within a national framework. The levy proceeds would be ringfenced for infrastructure and affordable housing spending.

The Accountability Question

Critics of the Bill from across the political spectrum have raised a common concern: that accelerating the planning system will reduce the opportunities for communities to influence decisions that fundamentally affect their environment. Planning permissions for residential developments, energy infrastructure, and transportation projects are among the most consequential public decisions that affect local communities. A system that is faster may also be less consultative.

The government's answer is that speed and accountability are not necessarily in tension: a system with clear rules, competent officers, and well-resourced local authorities can make better decisions faster than a system that is slow, under-resourced, and subject to strategic use of appeal processes by well-funded developers. The Planning and Infrastructure Bill's reforms to the planning application process are accompanied by commitments to increase planning department funding and to simplify the local plan adoption process, which currently takes an average of 7 years according to the Local Government Association.

Whether the Planning and Infrastructure Bill delivers the government's housing targets will depend not only on the legislative changes it contains, but on whether the associated reforms to planning department capacity, infrastructure investment, and mortgage market conditions are also delivered. The legislation removes some planning system friction. It does not resolve the construction industry's skills gap, the cost of building materials, or the financing conditions that determine whether consented sites are built out. The NAO's ongoing review of housing delivery performance will be the independent benchmark against which the Bill's real-world effect is eventually measured.

Fun fact: England's current planning system, based on the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, was introduced by the post-war Attlee government as part of the same settlement that created the National Health Service. Planning permission as a concept, where the state must authorise what owners can build on their own land, dates from 1948 and is therefore roughly the same age as universal healthcare in Britain.

What to Watch

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill is expected to complete its Commons passage in 2025, with Lords scrutiny following in 2025 to 2026. The compulsory purchase compensation provisions and the planning committee delegation rules are the provisions most likely to face significant amendment in the Lords, where crossbench peers with planning and property expertise have signalled close attention. The government's ability to hold together its backbench coalition on the committee delegation provisions, where several Labour MPs with strong local authority backgrounds have expressed reservations, will determine whether the Bill that reaches Royal Assent resembles the Bill as introduced.