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There is a particular kind of political sleight of hand that works best when performed quietly. Not in the dead of night, not through scandal, but through the patient accumulation of technical changes – each one framed as modernisation, each one a little harder to object to than the last, and each one moving power incrementally away from the people who are most affected by decisions and toward those who have the most to gain from making them.
The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 is one of the most significant examples of this in a generation. It received Royal Assent on 18 December 2025. It has been welcomed with joy by developers. On the other hand, it has been largely ignored by the national press, met with only muted opposition in Parliament, and in some local authority areas, (including here in Teignbridge) embraced by the administration as a welcome opportunity to “streamline” decision-making. What it actually does is systematically dismantle the mechanisms through which ordinary people have been able to hold development decisions to account. Our local MPs are silent on this erosion of democracy.
What the Act actually does
The headline claim is straightforward enough. The existing planning system is too slow, too unpredictable, and on occasion, susceptible to obstruction. The government wants to build 1.5 million homes. It wants to fast-track major infrastructure. It wants, in the Housing Secretary’s words, to “build, baby, build.” Nobody serious disputes that the planning system has problems, or that England faces a genuine housing shortage.
But the reforms go considerably further than fixing a slow bureaucracy. What is being dismantled is democratic accountability itself.
Under the new national scheme of delegation, all domestic and minor applications (extensions, conversions, small developments) must now be delegated decisions, determined entirely by planning officers. They cannot be called to committee under any circumstances. Residents, parish councils, and local councillors can object as loudly as they like. It will make no difference. The decision will be made by an unelected officer, behind closed doors, with no requirement for public scrutiny. Challenges after the fact, can still be made, but are potentially costly to those challenging the decision. Of course, the legislation on policies applicable to developments have been weakened and therefore harder to challenge post factum.
Reserved matters – applications (the detailed follow-through on outline planning permissions) are similarly consigned to officer delegation in most cases. The only exception is where an application relates to a phase of a hybrid outline scheme, and even then, referral to committee is not a right. It requires the Chief Planning Officer and the committee chair to agree it is sufficiently significant. If they do not agree, for whatever reason, and with no right of appeal for the community, the decision is retained by officers alone.
For larger applications, the picture is no less troubling. Where a planning officer or planning committee is minded to refuse an application for 150 homes or more, the local authority must now notify the Secretary of State, who reserves the right to take the decision out of local hands entirely and determine it centrally. The message is blunt: local democracy may operate, as long as it produces the outcomes the government finds acceptable and approves of. Where it does not, residents, communities and local elected councillors will be overruled.
This is not an accidental consequence of reform, it is the explicit purpose. Labour came to power with a commitment to build 1.5 million homes in England before the next election. That is a legitimate ambition in the context of a genuine housing crisis. But the method chosen to deliver it reveals a great deal about how the government views local communities and their right to shape the places where they live. Rather than persuading communities, rather than building the political case for development, rather than ensuring that infrastructure genuinely accompanies housing, the government has instead chosen to remove the democratic mechanisms through which communities can say no.
The national target trumps the local voice. A number decided in Westminster overrides a decision made by elected representatives who know their area, their infrastructure constraints, and their residents. It is, at its core, a decision that the government’s housing ambitions are more important than the democratic rights of the people who will have to live with the consequences.
The gatekeeper problem
Even for applications that fall into the category where committee consideration remains theoretically possible, the bar for getting there has been raised dramatically. The new draft regulations introduce what officials call a “gateway” test. Only the nominated officer (expected to be the Chief Planning Officer) and the nominated member (expected to be the planning committee chair) can agree to refer an application to committee. Both must agree. Neither residents, nor parish councils, nor ward councillors have any formal role in triggering that referral. The draft government guidance is explicit… referral to committee should be “exceptional, not routine.”
This is not streamlining. It is the replacement of open democratic deliberation with a closed gatekeeper model controlled by two individuals. The community’s voice has been reduced (if not removed), in practice, to the hope that the right two people will agree it is worth hearing.
Parliamentary silence
What makes this particularly striking is how little noise it has generated at Westminster. Planning reform is rarely glamorous. The technical complexity of the legislation – its schedules, regulations, and guidance documents, creates a natural barrier to public engagement. But the implications are profound, and the Parliamentary scrutiny has been correspondingly thin. Few MPs have raised sustained objections. The legislation passed with relatively little of the organised resistance one might expect for a reform of this magnitude.
This is not entirely surprising. Both major parties have, at different moments, been frustrated by communities attempting to use the planning system to resist development. The Conservative government abolished regional spatial strategies in 2010, then spent years trying to restore something like them.
Labour has made housing targets its central domestic priority. For neither party is community opposition to planning applications a constituency worth defending. The people most affected by these changes, residents of areas facing development pressure, parish council members, local campaigners – are not an organised political lobby. They are, in the language of our earlier analysis, the people who are not heard and now not to ‘be heard’.
The local dimension for my area: Teignbridge
There is a revealing local dimension to all of this. In Teignbridge, the district council administration has expressed what can fairly be described as tacit support for the reforms, framing them as a welcome rationalisation of a cumbersome process. The word “streamlining” does a great deal of work here. It sounds neutral. It sounds efficient. What it obscures is a more uncomfortable truth.
Groups like Newton Says No, and other community campaigns that have mobilised residents to oppose specific developments and, crucially, have translated that opposition into electoral accountability – represent precisely the kind of democratic pressure that the new system is designed to manage away.
An administration that has faced organised community resistance at the ballot box has a rational, if deeply troubling, interest in a planning system that removes the flashpoints around which that opposition can organise. If controversial decisions are made by officers rather than elected members, the political consequences are diffused. There is no committee vote to campaign against. There is no councillor to unseat.
This is not a conspiracy. It is the ordinary logic of institutional self-interest operating in a system that has just handed local administrations a convenient way to insulate themselves from democratic accountability. The offer is being accepted, in some places, with something approaching relief.
The likely outcome
It would be dishonest to pretend that much can be done to reverse these changes in the short term. The Act is already law. The regulations are in consultation. The implementation timetable is set for 1st September 2026. The political will to roll this back does not exist in either of the parties capable of forming a government, nor in the Liberal Democrats who form the local authority administrations and third largest party in Westminster.
What can be done is to name what is happening clearly, resist the language of “modernisation” and “efficiency” that obscures it, and ensure that communities understand what rights they are losing before those rights disappear. Parish councils should be documenting what changes. Community groups should be tracking how officer delegation is applied in practice. Local journalists should be asking what decisions are being removed from public scrutiny and on whose behalf.
Because the deeper story here connects to a pattern we have traced elsewhere, in energy markets shaped by industry lobbying, in water companies that discharged sewage for decades before facing consequences, in driving test slots that were touted for years before anyone acted. In each case, the interests that were protected and amplified were those of the organised, the economically significant, and the politically connected. In each case, the people who waited longest for anyone to listen were those with the least institutional voice.
Planning reform 2025 follows the same logic. The people who gain most from faster, less scrutinised planning decisions are large developers and housing interests. The people who lose most are those living in communities facing development pressure, who have now had their formal mechanisms of democratic engagement quietly removed. Local democracy risks being the ‘frog in boiling water’…
They were not asked. They will not easily get them back.
