The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 received Royal Assent on 18 December 2025. A striking number of conversations since have treated that date as the moment the law changed. It was not.
An Act receiving Royal Assent means Parliament has finished with it. It does not mean the provisions are in force. The Act commences in stages, and a good deal of it depends on secondary legislation that sets out how the new machinery actually works.
What that means in practice
If you are planning around a provision of the Act, the question to ask is not what the Act says. It is whether that particular section has been commenced, and whether the regulations it depends on have been made. Those are three separate facts and they are frequently different.
The check worth doing before you rely on it
For any provision you are counting on: find the commencement regulations, find the date, and find whether the implementing regulations exist yet. A provision that is in force but has no regulations behind it can be as unusable as one that has not commenced at all.
The parts worth watching
The reintroduction of strategic planning through spatial development strategies is the structural change with the longest shadow. It reinstates a tier of planning that was removed, and authorities will spend years working out what it means for them.
The new powers for authorities to set and reinvest their own planning application fees matter sooner and get discussed less. A better resourced development management team is worth more to an applicant than most policy changes, and the authorities that move first on this will be noticeably easier to deal with than the ones that do not.
On 27 November 2025, the Minister of State for Housing and Planning confirmed further detail on the new local plan system intended to begin operating during 2026. That timetable is the one to track, because it governs when authorities have to move rather than when they may.
Why this is worth being pedantic about
Planning runs on dates. A scheme built around a provision that turns out not to be in force is not early, it is wrong, and the cost of finding out late is measured in months.
Sources
- Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025, Royal Assent 18 December 2025.
- Royal Town Planning Institute, Planning and Infrastructure Act becomes law, reshaping local planning powers.
- Minister of State for Housing and Planning, statement on the new local plan system, 27 November 2025.