Can planning reform keep pace with the UK’s infrastructure ambitions?

The UK infrastructure pipeline now totals more than £700bn of planned investment over the next 10 years, an increase of around £200bn since the data on committed infrastructure projects was last published in July 2025.

These figures indicate a healthy and growing pipeline of infrastructure projects across the UK. But given the well-documented risks and challenges surrounding infrastructure delivery, how can the industry help translate planned investment into reality? Here, we focus on the planning stage, often cited as a significant delivery hurdle and a potential barrier to infrastructure investment.

Investor confidence

Private investment is essential to bridging the funding gaps inherent in infrastructure development. Where investor returns cannot be modelled with confidence, however, project funding, and by extension, project delivery, is placed at risk.

Securing planning or development consent is a critical component of this equation. Whilst planning risk can never be eliminated entirely, clear and consistent policy and regulation, combined with an efficient planning system, play an important role in enabling costs, timescales and risks to be anticipated at the consenting stage. Greater predictability here is key to building investor confidence.

However, over recent years infrastructure planning and consenting has come under increased scrutiny, criticised for being too slow, complex, expensive and unpredictable.

Infrastructure planning reform

Addressing planning risks and delays and driving infrastructure investment has been a central focus for the government, primarily to drive economic growth, but also to support energy security and net zero targets.

Since taking office in 2024, the government has embarked on a dedicated programme of planning reform for both infrastructure planning (under the Planning Act 2008) and conventional planning (under the Town and Country Planning Act 1990) so that the planning system can deliver these ambitions.

Key milestones already reached include the publication of the new 10-Year Infrastructure Strategy in June 2025 and the passing of the landmark Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 in December 2025. This act introduces a range of legislative changes aimed at streamlining and accelerating the consenting of infrastructure projects, among the most significant of which is the introduction of mandatory updates to national policy statements (NPSs), supported by a more streamlined Parliamentary scrutiny process to bring those updates into effect more swiftly.

NPSs serve as the primary basis upon which decisions on major infrastructure projects are taken. Ensuring they remain current is therefore critical, as outdated policy has historically been a significant disruptor of infrastructure planning, giving rise to legal challenges that have caused extensive delays, escalating costs, and investment uncertainty.

Outside the infrastructure planning regime, the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), which is the framework within which local authorities and decision-makers must determine planning applications and prepare local development plans, is also undergoing significant reform to be more pro-delivery.

The updated NPPF, currently under consultation and expected to come into force in summer 2026, will better align planning policy with infrastructure investment and sustainability objectives, providing more consistent policy support for infrastructure development proposals. This will be of particular benefit to infrastructure schemes consented under the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and will support more predictable outcomes. It may also assume greater importance in infrastructure decisions if the secretary of state exercises a new power to direct individual projects out of the infrastructure planning regime where the conventional consenting route is considered more appropriate.

Can more be done to keep pace with the UK’s infrastructure ambitions?

Yes. Infrastructure planning operates within a statutory and policy framework that seeks to address long term national needs. Whilst there has been a concerted effort to progress reforms at pace through changes to legislation, policy and guidance, geopolitics, climate and demographic changes and technological advancements are ever shifting the macroeconomic and societal landscape.

The government’s planning reforms, particularly those to the infrastructure planning regime, are designed, in part, to meet this reality: that the country’s infrastructure needs will inevitably evolve over time. Taken together, these reforms, and particularly the practical adjustments made at each stage of the infrastructure planning process, should produce a consenting regime that is more flexible, proportionate, predictable and efficient, one better and more robustly equipped to deliver infrastructure and able to adapt to changing circumstances.

These changes should ultimately strengthen investor confidence. Sustained political will, continued adaptability, and close collaboration between public bodies and private investors will be essential to ensure the UK infrastructure pipeline translates into actual, timely delivery on the ground.

Christian Drage is a partner at BCLP