The government has today (17th August 2026) published its new National Planning Policy Framework for England and its response to the consultation. We have analysed the changes against our consultation response.
Tom Chance, CEO of the Community Land Trust Network, commented:
This new planning framework is a missed opportunity for communities. The new Prime Minister has spoken of bringing power closer to communities, but this framework gives them no new or enhanced powers over the future of their place. We welcome some policy tweaks that will help CLTs at the margins, and the changes that may reduce costs and delays in the system. But the government has missed a bigger opportunity to back the builders bringing good growth to their own postcodes.
In our consultation response, and discussions with officials, we set out an ambitious and workable set of policies that would give communities a ‘right to grow’ on their own terms, grounded in policies pioneered in Local Plans. Communities should have a stronger role in allocating sites for development, shaping how they could best meet local needs. Planners should be assessing the demand for community-led development, and requiring them to be partners on major development, taking stewardship of all public goods that the local authority won’t adopt. If a community-led development is proposed to meet the needs of that local community, including in the green belt or a protected landscape, it should have permission in principle, and be able to apply for detailed permission to check off other policy requirements.
Instead, the planning system continues to sideline and ignore community voice, and require community-led developers to jump through expensive, risky and protracted hoops like any speculative private developer.
Analysis of the new NPPF
We have pulled out a few notable changes in the new NPPF, and comments in the government’s consultation response.
The government will develop a suite of model planning conditions, and template s106 agreements. We welcome this, and have suggested these could include agreements specific to community-led development and exception sites. In our consultation response we noted that this could reduce costs and delays.
The government has added community-led development to the types of housing need that should be met on allocated sites in the Local Plan. But it has omitted community-led development from the prior assessment of local needs. Which raises the question — how can planners evidence that a need has been met, if they don’t assess that need?
The government has made minor clarifications to rural exception sites (RES) and community-led exception sites (CLES), but has still not given any clarity as to the difference. We had discussed adding that CLES might include land uses other than affordable housing, and expanding the latter to include medium sites, but neither was included in the end. On the bright side, the policy is now clear that the size cap on both RES and CLES is one hectare, or 5% of the existing settlement, whichever is greater. Some local planning authorities had been interpreting it as ‘whichever is smaller’, so this will bring consistency and more opportunity for CLTs.
Policies for development in the Green Belt and on protected landscapes remain largely unchanged, from a CLT point of view. Neither specifically references community-led development or the CLES policy. The protected landscapes policies rightly reference protecting the environmental interests and beauty of landscapes that cover one quarter of England’s land area. But they still fail to reference the social and economic needs of the 1 million people who live within them, and clearly tilt the balance against any development. We don’t want inappropriate speculative development in these landscapes, but community-led development to sustain communities within them should be supported, with the social and economic benefits given equal weight to environmental considerations and then weighed up in the balance.
We were pleased to see that the government dropped its proposal to allow cash payments in lieu of on-site delivery of affordable housing on medium sites, which would have damaged CLTs ability to deliver affordable housing and would have especially impacted small rural and coastal communities
The health policy continues to reflect strong evidence of the public health benefits of community life, social connections and having a voice in local decisions, all of which can be fostered by the way that planning and development take place, as much as whether there are sufficient GP surgeries and walkable streets.