Local plan reform under the 2023 Act

The Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023 rewrites how local plans are made in England. Plans would be produced to a target timetable measured in months rather than years, tested at gateway points during preparation rather than only at the end, stripped of policies that merely repeat national ones, and supported by supplementary plans in place of supplementary planning documents. National Development Management Policies would sit above local policies where the two conflict.

Most of that is in the Act. Much of it depends on commencement regulations, secondary legislation and national policy that follow it, and the timetable has moved more than once. Check the commencement position on legislation.gov.uk and the current guidance on gov.uk before you advise on any specific plan, because the answer changes by authority and by date.

The new plan making framework in outline

The Act amends the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, the statute that has governed plan making since 2004.

Four changes matter most to practitioners. National Development Management Policies are given statutory status, with precedence over the development plan where there is conflict. The duty to co-operate is removed, to be replaced by an alignment arrangement set out in policy rather than statute. Plan content is narrowed so that local plans deal with locally specific matters rather than restating national policy. And supplementary plans replace supplementary planning documents, with a defined status.

The first of those is the structural change. A plan-led system in which a national policy statement overrides a locally adopted policy is a different system from the one section 38(6) has described for two decades, and the practical effect depends entirely on how widely the national policies are drawn.

Timetables and the proposed gateways

Government has proposed that local plans be prepared within a target period of around 30 months from the start of the process to adoption, against a recent record where plans routinely take twice that.

The mechanism proposed to achieve it is a set of gateway assessments during preparation, carried out at defined points rather than leaving all scrutiny to the examination at the end. The intention is that problems with the evidence base, the housing figure or the site selection surface early, when they can be fixed, rather than at an examination that then suspends for a year.

For anyone promoting a site, gateways change when your representations matter. Under the current system the heavy lifting happens at regulation 19 and at examination. Under a gated system the influential moments move earlier, towards the evidence gathering and site selection stages, which is where a promoter's technical work has to be ready.

What plans would and would not contain

The narrowing of plan content is the change most likely to alter day-to-day drafting.

Shorter plans are easier to examine and quicker to adopt. They also leave less room to argue a locally distinctive case, which is a real loss on sites where the local plan policy was doing work that national policy will not do. That tension has not been resolved by anything published so far.

Supplementary plans replacing guidance

Supplementary planning documents have always sat awkwardly in the system. They carry weight as material considerations but are not part of the development plan, so their status is argued in every appeal where one matters.

Supplementary plans are intended to fix that by giving the document a defined statutory route, with consultation and, in defined circumstances, independent examination. In exchange, authorities would no longer be able to keep adding supplementary planning documents indefinitely.

The practical question for anyone holding a site affected by an existing supplementary planning document is what happens to it during transition. Expect a period in which older documents continue to apply as material considerations while new ones follow the new route, and expect arguments about the weight of an ageing document that was never examined.

Transitional arrangements for plans in preparation

Transitional provisions are where the practical answers live, and they are set in regulations rather than in the Act.

The pattern proposed has been that plans reaching a defined stage before a cut-off date continue and are examined under the existing system, while everything else starts again under the new one. Cut-off dates in this area have been extended before. What that means for an authority part way through plan preparation is a decision with real consequences: push to submit under the old system, or pause and restart under the new one, with a gap in plan coverage either way.

For site promoters the consequence is uneven. Authorities that submitted in time will adopt plans on the old basis and then sit on them for years. Authorities that paused will have an ageing plan and a weak supply position in the meantime, which affects how the presumption in favour of sustainable development bites on decisions in their area. Where an authority's position weakens, the argument shifts onto the presumption itself, which the piece on grey belt and what the term means in practice touches on for one category of site.

Status at the date of writing

Be precise about this in any statement you produce, because a client who is told a reform is in force when it is not will make a bad decision.

Royal Assent does not bring provisions into force. Much of the plan making part of the 2023 Act requires commencement regulations, and the accompanying framework needs regulations on plan content and procedure, National Development Management Policies to be consulted on and published, and revised national guidance. Each of those has its own timetable.

So the safe formulation in a planning statement is to describe what the Act provides, state that the relevant provisions are brought into force by regulations, cite the commencement position you have verified and the date you verified it, and set out the consequence both ways. That is more useful to a decision maker than a confident assertion that turns out to be six months premature. Recent statutory changes are tracked on the planning law timeline.

Advising on a site during transition

Practical advice during a transition is about hedging rather than predicting.

1. Establish which system the relevant authority's plan is being examined under, and the cut-off date it relied on.
2. Check whether the adopted plan's policies are the ones a national policy would supersede if National Development Management Policies come into force as drafted.
3. Build the case on evidence that survives either system: site suitability, deliverability, access, constraints and design quality.
4. Front-load technical work where a gated process would test evidence early.
5. Track the supplementary planning documents affecting the site and their age, since their weight is the first thing to be argued.
6. Keep the tilted balance analysis current, because an authority that pauses its plan may lose its supply position.

The fifth point is the one most often missed. Where a site's viability turns on a parking standard or a space standard set in a document from years ago, the status of that document during transition is worth resolving early rather than at committee.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. Check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it, and verify the commencement status of any provision before you cite it.

Browse the 66 report types on PlanScope to see which documents a site promotion or application needs while the plan making position settles.

PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.