Blog 6th April 2026

Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025

In this blog, I consider the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025, what It means for Local Planning Authorities (LPAs), and how Councils should prepare.

The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 represents one of the most significant shifts in the planning landscape for over a decade. Its aim is clear: to speed up delivery of homes and critical infrastructure while enabling LPAs to operate on a more sustainable financial footing. The Act introduces major reforms to planning processes, resourcing, and infrastructure delivery and its implications for planning departments are both far‑reaching and immediate.

This blog summarises the key provisions of the Act, highlights the guidance being developed by the Local Government Association's Planning Advisory Service (PAS), the role that I am playing in this through preparing financial models and templates, and the implications of the Act for the future management of planning services.

Overview of the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025

The Act received Royal Assent on 18 December 2025 and introduces ‘seismic planning reforms’ particularly aimed at streamlining decision‑making and removing barriers to development. Key elements include:

• Localised Fee‑Setting Powers: For the first time, LPAs will be able to set their own planning application fees—moving away from nationally fixed charges. This marks a significant departure from decades of centralised fee regulation and is designed to ensure that planning services can achieve full cost recovery.
• Faster Consenting for Infrastructure: The Act streamlines the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP) regime, including reduced pre‑application burdens, updated requirements for National Policy Statements, and measures to reduce judicial review delays. These reforms seek to accelerate nationally important energy, transport and water projects.
• Structural and Governance Changes: The Act also introduces national schemes of delegation, environmental delivery plans, and new mechanisms for long-term spatial development strategies.

LGA PAS Guidance and Support to Councils

The LGA PAS is playing a central role in helping councils prepare for these reforms as follows:

• Localised Fee Setting and Cost Recovery Guidance: PAS is delivering masterclasses and developing tools to help authorities to understand the new rules; capture direct, indirect, and overhead costs; build defensible hourly rates; forecast fee income and develop robust local fee-setting models. This aligns with the Government’s proposed move to a new national default fee schedule and local variation model, currently under consultation.
• NSIP Cost Recovery: PAS is also preparing detailed guidance on NSIP‑related cost recovery, including transparent costing methodologies; templates for Planning Performance Agreements (PPAs); time‑recording tools; and advice on reasonable fees and commercial structures. This mirrors the statutory framework enabling public authorities to recover NSIP‑related costs under amendments to the Planning Act 2008 and associated regulations.
• Modelling and Financial Rigour: The PAS costing toolkit draws on CIPFA principles, including:
• Mapping service budgets to CIPFA SEA categories; Separating direct, indirect, and overhead costs; and developing transparent, auditable cost bases for fees. These approaches are also reflected in sector‑wide research such as the LGA survey of planning application costs and fees (2025), which emphasises the gap between statutory fees and true service costs.

I am supporting PAS and local authorities by devising financial models and templates that:

• Establish Baseline Service Costs using CIPFA‑aligned methodologies to: Analyse departmental budgets; Identify NSIP and Development Management (DM) costs; Allocating overheads and on‑costs; and constructing credible baseline cost models.
• Convert Costs into Defensible Fees. This includes developing: Chargeable hourly rates; Fee-setting models based on time estimates or application types; and NSIP and DM costing frameworks incorporating staffing, consultant and legal inputs.
• Support Practical Implementation: I am working on local fee schedule design and NSIP charging mechanisms.

The governance, consultation and publicity requirements of the Act’s intervention powers require evidence bases for Secretary of State oversight. The goal is to provide authorities with a transparent, defensible and practical system and not theoretical guidance.

The PAS team of which I am a member are now travelling the country speaking with planning practitioners about the implementation of the Act and the relevance of the guidance and financial models that are being prepared by PAS.

Stockport and Chelmsford are two places that have been visited by the PAS Team

Conclusions

What may seem at first sight to be an exercise in management accounting including costings and pricings is something more fundamental for planning services.

First, it requires planning services to identify their total costs, calculate hourly charge-out rates for their staff and calculate prices for everything from routine planning applications to Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects. For many authorities this will be a new approach.

Second, it enables government, developers and taxpayers to compare planning costs in different local authorities. If an authority finds itself with relatively high fees it may find its costs being questioned or challenged.

Third, it moves planning services from a situation where they have a fixed establishment that must organise itself to process whatever level of planning applications come forward, to one in which it can increase its resources to meet increased demand because that increased demand will automatically result in increased funding. However, the other side of this coin is that a reduction in the number of applications will lead to a reduction in funding.

Fourth, because of this it may result in planning authorities being obliged to change their approach to management with a fixed establishment geared towards the minimum level of applications with temporary staff or sub-contractors used to support peaks in workload.

This means that planning departments will need to become more commercial. The direction of travel is unmistakable. Between localised fee‑setting powers, NSIP cost recovery mechanisms, greater emphasis on transparent modelling, and increased scrutiny from Government, applicants and communities, planning departments will need to operate with a more commercial mindset.

This includes adopting robust pricing strategies, managing risks in PPAs, developing financial governance processes, and demonstrating efficiency and consistency—much like other chargeable public services.

To navigate the 2025 reforms successfully, councils should begin:

• Reviewing their planning budgets.
• Mapping costs using the PAS template when it is available or another suitable method.
• Testing local fee-setting scenarios.
• Developing NSIP charging schedules and PPA frameworks.
• Training staff in time‑recording and project accounting.

Therefore, councils must prepare for a more business‑like operating environment, where financial resilience depends on accurate cost recovery rather than centralised fees.