The Planning and Infrastructure Act: much-needed reforms

The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 represents a turning point in governance, providing essential support for reform of the planning system. 

For far too long, projects have been delayed within planning backlogs, often impacting viability and slowing the delivery of nationally important infrastructure and housing schemes.

Designed to help accelerate development through a more streamlined and efficient planning process, the Act is seen as a key enabler in supporting the UK government's ambition to deliver 1.5m new homes and critical infrastructure upgrades.

Rider Levett Bucknall (RLB) welcomes these reforms as well as the ongoing electricity connections reforms being implemented through the national Energy System Operator (NESO), Ofgem and the wider transmission framework.

In particular, Connections Reform Part 1 seeks to address Transmission Entry Capacity (TEC) constraints and the speculative 'queue blocking' currently affecting the grid connection process, while Part 2 is intended to address demand-side queue reform and prioritise projects that demonstrate genuine deliverability.

Importantly, these reforms are intrinsically linked. The connections reform process increasingly requires developers to demonstrate planning progression and project readiness as part of the transition from Gate 1 to Gate 2.

The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 therefore acts as a key facilitating mechanism in enabling viable projects to progress through the reformed connections regime and reach the market more quickly.

This creates artificial scarcity, distorts land and power valuations and deters investment in viable projects.

The TEC amnesty allows projects holding TEC that are unlikely to progress to voluntarily exit the connections queue without incurring the usual termination liabilities.

This process is intended to reduce the number of speculative or inactive projects occupying capacity, thereby helping to reduce the queue and allow viable projects to progress through the connections process.

Reform needed to focus not just on consent but on financing, planning and physical delivery capability.

Revision to the existing 'first ready, first connected' approach will hopefully give the industry the boost it needs and allow stakeholders to progress projects that are ready, rather than incentivising early speculative applications.

However, there is still a need to ensure that these reforms are implemented transparently and consistently by the NESO and distribution network operators, and readiness tests need to be consistent.

The new Act also created NSIP provisions as part of critical national infrastructure (CNI) within the UK Government Resilience Framework. NSIPs provide a centralised planning route for delivering critical energy infrastructure such as transmission networks and substations that unlock developments like data centres and industrial hubs.

Through a policy-led Development Consent Order (DCO) process, NSIPs enable government to prioritise and accelerate strategically important projects, ensuring power infrastructure is delivered as a coordinated economic enabler alongside NESO's reformed, priority-based connections regime.

In addition, data centres and digital facilities are now protected as CNI sites, and with good reason.

Recent research by RLB found that operators expect to commission 42% more capacity in 2026 than 2025 – a staggering 318% increase since 2023. Change was therefore needed to ensure this momentum is not strangled.

Using the NSIP process could help streamline and simplify the current fragmented town and country planning system, freeing up the capacity for other mixed-use projects or wider regeneration and placemaking plans in urban or rural areas.

Clearer national policy direction would help improve investor confidence and bring greater certainty for larger projects such as hyperscale and strategic industrial developments, which need extensive investment and involve huge risks. 

NSIP reforms need to streamline project review timelines and not just shift the consenting route. Moreover, resourcing of NSIP governance capacity must match the increased demand, to ensure further bottlenecks do not occur.

While granting additional powers to development corporations will help accelerate larger-scale projects, planning consents are only part of the puzzle and are not always the primary bottleneck for large, energy-intensive projects.

The greatest challenge for most sits in strategic transmission reinforcement and grid capacity availability.

Grid buildout, reinforcement of power and long lead times for transformers, switchgear and high-voltage cable remain significant delivery risks.

And of course, shortages of skilled labour across power engineering and commissioning also constrain acceleration. Environmental permitting and outage coordination can also further extend programme timelines.

This isn't to say that additional powers for development corporations wouldn't improve coordination of land, planning and infrastructure phasing, with stronger land assembly and compulsory purchase powers in turn reducing early-stage delays.

But while development corporation powers may streamline the process, they cannot resolve physical grid and supply chain constraints on their own. Centralised master-planning is essential to better align utilities, transport and social infrastructure. 

Before projects enter the planning ecosystem, developers and consultants need to understand their energy demands and accurately assess whether or not they are truly ready for consent planning.

Ensuring that the freed-up capacity is used for those really viable projects that have investment and deliverable design maturity means the country can move forward rather than stand still on meeting its ambitious targets.