Outline Webinar: The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025

In this session Trevor Ivory and Ian Graves discuss the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025, which got Royal Assent on 18 December 2025. They looked at:

1. Changes to the Planning Act 2008 process for nationally significant infrastructure projects including:

• Removal of statutory pre-application consultation requirements, replaced by a requirement to have regard to best practice guidance.
• Powers for the SoS to direct schemes out of the Planning Act 2008 development consent order (DCO) so schemes that don't require compulsory land acquisition can be consented by standard planning permission. This may be useful for data centres and adds to the existing flexibility to direct schemes into the DCO regime.

2. Changes to Town and Country Planning Act 1990 processes, including:

• Allowing planning authorities to set planning fees locally, with a nationally set floor and a cap at the cost of delivery of the planning service.
• A surcharge on planning fees to cover the costs of statutory consultees on planning applications.
• Training for local councillors before they can take part in planning decisions.
• Standardising local authority schemes of delegation for planning decisions, so each council has to consistently decide similar applications at officer and committee level.
• Useful extensions of time limits for implementation of planning consents where there are legal challenges.
• Spatial development strategies to provide frameworks for strategic planning for the whole country.
• Environmental Delivery Plans to be prepared by Natural England, allowing EDP development to pay a nature restoration levy to fund strategic scale mitigation instead of site-by-site Habitats Regulations assessment. Natural England is already preparing EDPs relating to nutrient neutrality areas and great crested newts.

Overall, they discussed their views on how well the Act addresses its stated aim to streamline and speed up infrastructure delivery and housing delivery.

The appeal decision on s106 and legal fees mentioned in the session is Recovered appeal: Court Lane Industrial Estate, Court Lane, Iver (ref: 3337981 - 6 December 2024) - GOV.UK. This was discussed in Outline 34: Data Centre Special - 15 January 2025 - YouTube

Nutrient neutrality was discussed in Outline 30: Habitats Regulations Masterclass - 24 May 2024