The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025: key changes and what they really mean

The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 (‘the act’) which came into law on 18 December 2025 represents a central pillar of the government’s mission to accelerate housing delivery, modernise infrastructure consenting, and unlock economic growth.

Whilst the act introduced various planning reforms, including changes to electricity grid connections and nationally significant infrastructure projects, below are four measures that have been introduced which are most likely to affect the day-to-day running of the planning system and local authority departments.

Planning committee training

The act introduces mandatory training for planning committee members: councillors will have to complete prescribed training before participating in planning decisions to ensure a greater understanding of planning law, policy interpretation, material considerations and standards of probity.

This appears a welcome measure, albeit one that is unlikely to have a transformative effect in terms of planning decision-making. That said, the committee decisions are often subject to appeals and legal challenge, particularly when departing from an officer recommendation, so the hope will be that such measures, can at least in part, improve the quality of decision-making.

National scheme of delegation

The legislation also provides for a national scheme of delegation, under which regulations will prescribe which categories of application should be determined by officers and which require committee oversight.

Currently each local planning authority (LPA) will set out in its own scheme of delegation, so introducing a nationally mandated scheme should achieve greater consistency across England on the division of decision-making responsibilities between officers and committees.

Ultimately, this provision is aimed at shifting more routine decisions to experienced officers rather than elected committees – again this seems a sensible measure, albeit one that is perhaps unlikely to yield a dramatic effect on determination time scales if planning departments also remain largely under-funded and under-resourced.

Planning application fees

The act allows for the introduction of regulations allowing LPAs increased flexibility to set planning fees locally. This would be subject to these costs not exceeding the cost of actually performing the service (i.e. LPAs cannot make a profit on application fees) and that the additional income being reinvested into planning services.

Whether, in practice, increased fees translates into measurable service improvements will remain to be seen. However, in principle, increased investment into planning departments is welcome and we envisage that many developers would be content to pay moderately higher application fees, if that ensured their applications were processed more efficiently.

Environmental mitigation

The act also establishes Environmental Delivery Plans (EDPs) and a Nature Restoration Fund, which is intended to address certain environmental mitigation (such as nutrient neutrality) in a more strategic and coordinated way. Ultimately, when brought forward, this will mean that developers will be able to pay a ‘nature restoration levy’ to discharge the environmental impact from their proposed developments, rather than having to mitigate on a site-by-site basis.

Whilst it will not necessarily mean that all environmental impacts can be offset simply by paying this levy, this will go some way to addressing some of the underlying issues that have been experienced due to, for example, residential developments having to demonstrate nutrient neutrality.

Conclusion

Whilst a number of the provisions in the act appear sensible and may, in combination, result in some notable improvements to the operation of the planning system, unfortunately they do not appear to amount to the type of fundamental reform that many have been crying out for – or believe are so desperately required to speed up delivery of the planning system.

Stephen Jefferson is a partner at national law firm RWK Goodman