The thirty month local plan timetable and what it means

The thirty month local plan timetable is the headline of the plan-making reforms in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023: a local plan should be prepared, examined and adopted in around two and a half years instead of the seven or more that many authorities have taken. For anyone following a plan as a resident, a parish councillor or an objector, the practical change is not the total duration. It is that the points at which you can influence the plan are compressed and moved earlier, and that some of the scrutiny happens before the document is published for the final time.

The enabling powers are in the Act. The operational detail sits in regulations and guidance that have arrived in stages, so the commencement position for any particular element should be checked against what is currently published.

What the reformed process is meant to do

Three problems were being targeted.

Length. Plans took so long that the evidence base was out of date before adoption, which fed arguments about housing land supply and weakened the plan at appeal.

Complexity. Plans grew into several hundred pages, much of it repeating national policy, which made them hard for anyone outside the profession to use.

Late failure. Under the previous system a plan could reach examination after four years of work and be found unsound on a matter that was identifiable at the outset, sending the authority back to the start.

The response is a shorter plan, standardised data and digital presentation, national policy carried nationally rather than restated locally, and checks during preparation rather than only at the end.

The stages and where the thirty months go

Broadly, preparation divides into three blocks of roughly similar length.

The first is scoping and evidence. The authority defines what the plan will cover, gathers the evidence base, assesses needs, and consults early on issues and options. Under the reformed approach this stage carries more weight than it used to, because decisions taken here are tested before the plan is drafted in full.

The second is drafting and consultation on the draft plan. Policies and allocations are written, the sustainability appraisal runs alongside, and the public consultation on the draft takes place. This is the stage at which most people engage, and under a compressed timetable the window is short.

The third is submission, examination and adoption. The plan goes to examination, hearings are held where needed, modifications are made, and the plan is adopted.

For a resident the useful consequence is simple: the opportunity to argue about whether a site should be allocated arrives earlier than it used to, and arguing about it at the examination stage is less likely to succeed.

Gateway checks during preparation

The reformed system introduces checks at points during plan preparation rather than relying on a single examination afterwards. The purpose is to test whether the evidence, the scope and the emerging approach are capable of supporting a sound plan, while the authority can still change course without losing years of work.

That changes the character of plan making in two ways. It front-loads the technical argument, so the quality of the housing need assessment, the transport modelling and the landscape evidence matters earlier. And it creates documented checkpoints, which are useful to anyone following the process because they produce published material explaining what was questioned and what the authority did about it.

The number of checks, their timing and the body conducting them are set out in regulations and guidance, and those have been issued in stages. Confirm the arrangements for the specific plan you are following rather than assuming a general pattern, in the same way you would with other reforms waiting on commencement.

The duty to cooperate and what replaces it

The duty to cooperate under section 33A of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 required authorities to engage constructively on strategic cross-boundary matters, and failure was a free-standing ground on which a plan could be found unsound. It had become a procedural trap, and several plans failed on it without anyone being much clearer about the substance.

The 2023 Act provides for its removal and for an alignment requirement in its place, intended to focus on outcomes rather than on evidencing the process of cooperation.

The substance does not go away. Housing need that cannot be met within an authority's own boundary, strategic transport infrastructure, waste and minerals, and catchment-scale environmental issues such as nutrient neutrality all cross boundaries. An authority that ignores them will still have an unsound plan. What changes is the route by which that is tested.

National development management policies

This is the reform with the longest reach, and it gets less attention than the timetable.

The 2023 Act provides for national development management policies, issued nationally, which prevail over the development plan where the two conflict. Under section 38(6) of the 2004 Act, determination has to be made in accordance with the development plan unless material considerations indicate otherwise, and the plan-led principle has been the architecture of English planning since 2004.

For plan making, the effect is that local plans stop restating national policy and concentrate on what is actually local: allocations, site-specific requirements, design codes, local designations and locally justified standards. For decision taking, it means the national policies carry a status closer to the plan than the Framework has traditionally had.

If you follow planning as a community representative, the practical lesson is to stop looking for a local policy on every question. Increasingly, the answer on general development management matters will be national.

What happens to plans already in progress

Transitional arrangements decide this, and they turn on how far a plan had progressed by a specified date. A plan submitted for examination before the cut-off generally continues to adoption under the previous system. A plan still in preparation moves to the new system, which in practice can mean reworking the evidence base and the consultation sequence.

Authorities have taken different views about whether to push to submit under the old arrangements or to restart, and that decision has large consequences for how long a plan takes and how much of the existing evidence survives. A fuller account of the choices sits in what happens to emerging plans, and it is worth reading before you form a view about whether your own authority has handled it well.

Check the authority's local development scheme, which has to be published and kept up to date. It states which documents the authority intends to produce and the timetable for each.

Consequences for housing land supply arguments

An up-to-date plan is the strongest defence an authority has against speculative applications, because the presumption in favour of sustainable development in the Framework (August 2026 edition) bites hardest where policies are out of date or the authority cannot demonstrate an adequate supply.

The reform is intended to make up-to-date plans the normal condition rather than the exception. If it works, the familiar argument about whether a council can demonstrate its supply becomes less central, and site-specific merits matter more.

While plans are in transition, the opposite is true. An authority that restarts its plan can spend an extended period with ageing policies, and applications come forward in that window relying on it. Residents following a contested site should watch the plan status as closely as the application itself.

Tracking your authority's programme

1. Find the local development scheme on the council's planning policy pages and note the published milestones.
2. Join the planning policy consultation mailing list, which is separate from application notifications.
3. Note the evidence base documents as they appear, since allocations are usually visible in the site assessment work long before the draft plan.
4. Diarise consultation windows as soon as they are announced, because a compressed timetable means short periods.
5. Follow the authority's annual monitoring report for the housing supply position.
6. Keep an eye on the planning law timeline for the national changes that feed into local plans.

None of this is difficult, and most of it is published. The reason people miss plan consultations is that they are watching applications, which is the stage at which the decisions have already been made.

If you are on the other side of the counter and preparing an application against a plan in transition, scoping the documents an application needs early is worth the time, because policy churn tends to add requirements rather than remove them.

This is general guidance, not legal advice; check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it.