Planning Consultation Requirements: Are Councils Ready?

England’s planning reforms are not just about speeding up decisions. They are changing who is accountable for how consultation is conducted, how representations are handled, and how that evidence withstands scrutiny. Three specific changes create immediate legal and governance exposure for local planning authorities that have not updated their processes.

The reform direction across development management, plan-making, and nationally significant infrastructure is consistent: reduce process friction, standardise decision pathways, and make consultation more structured and more auditable. That sounds sensible. The problem is that it also transfers risk. Councils that have not updated their internal processes to match the new requirements will find the gap at the point it is hardest to fix.

What changes are already in force for English planning consultation?

The new plan-making system commenced in March 2026, bringing mandatory consultation stages, consultation summaries, and an obligation to keep a local plan timetable updated at least monthly where necessary. The plan-making regulations explainer published by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) makes plain that consultation summaries must show how the authority has had regard to representations received to date.

That last phrase is the important one. “Had regard” is a legal standard. It is not enough to publish a list of who responded. The summary must demonstrate genuine engagement with what was said. That is the fourth Gunning principle, the legal test for fair public consultation in the UK, stated in statutory form: conscientious consideration of the responses before a decision is reached. Formalising it in regulations does not make it easier to satisfy. It makes the failure easier to identify and prove.

For many authorities this is already the working standard. But the regulations formalise it and make non-compliance visible. A poorly constructed consultation summary is no longer just a missed communications opportunity. It is a compliance failure.

Alongside this, the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 enables a new national scheme of delegation and a cap on planning committee size. Draft regulations propose a two-schedule approach: Schedule 1 applications must be determined by officers; Schedule 2 applications default to officer determination unless a nominated officer and nominated member agree the proposal raises issues of sufficient significance for committee referral. Implementation is proposed for 30 September 2026. 

Where does the shift to officer decisions create consultation risk?

When fewer decisions go to committee, the public moment of accountability moves earlier in the process. Representations, previously aired in committee debate, now matter most at the point they are summarised in an officer’s report. If those summaries are thin, inconsistent, or fail to trace how each substantive point was weighed, the legal exposure moves to the delegated decision rather than the committee room.

The draft regulations are explicit on one further point. Councils must not make arrangements that limit the discretion of officers in determining delegated applications. That constrains some familiar informal practices and reinforces that the quality of the decision record, not just the outcome, is what a court will examine.

There is also a less-discussed risk in the gateway itself. The nominated officer and nominated member decision about whether an application goes to committee is a new governance pinch point. Where communities have historically expected committee consideration of a major or contentious scheme, removing that route without a clear documented rationale creates the conditions for a legitimate expectation argument. Legitimate expectation, the legal doctrine that a public body must honour representations it has made or practices it has consistently followed, is the most frequently litigated ground of judicial review in the consultation context. The gateway does not need to be wrong to be challenged. It needs to look arbitrary.

We have seen this pattern before. Consultations that were procedurally tidy but analytically weak create the same exposure as those that were poorly designed from the start. Faster throughput does not reduce that risk. It concentrates it.

One further dimension is the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED), the requirement under section 149 of the Equality Act 2010 that public bodies have due regard to equality implications when making decisions. An officer-determined decision on a housing scheme in a deprived area, where representations from protected characteristic groups were received but not individually addressed in the decision record, is exactly the scenario where PSED compliance becomes the weakest link. Lawyers know this. The LGA’s submission on statutory consultee reform noted that the first question asked in a judicial review is often not whether Gunning was satisfied, but whether the equality analysis held up.

What does the new Consultation Direction require from councils right now?

The England Consultation Direction 2026 is already in force and applies to applications not determined before 11 May 2026. It requires a local planning authority to consult the Secretary of State before refusing planning permission for development of 150 or more dwellings, to observe a minimum wait of 21 days after giving notice, and to transmit a defined evidence pack including the application documents, representations, the officer’s report, and the proposed reasons for refusal. 

The pack requirement has immediate governance implications. Representations may contain personal data. They may be incomplete, inconsistently formatted, or held across systems that were not designed for structured export. Councils without a clear procedure for trigger identification, pack compilation, redaction, and evidence handling will be assembling this material under time pressure.

There is a harder problem underneath the pack requirement. The Consultation Direction states that call-in is not available after a formal decision notice has been issued. Miss the trigger, issue the notice, and the Secretary of State’s avenue is closed. That means trigger detection cannot be treated as a back-office task. It needs a named owner, a defined workflow, and a verification step before any minded-to-refuse report is finalised. At a moment when planning teams are stretched and delegation is being widened, that is a governance control that many councils do not yet have.

A further consultation on extending similar directions to large commercial refusals at a proposed 15,000 square metre floorspace threshold, nuclear-related refusals, and certain grant triggers is currently open.  The direction of travel is toward more central oversight of local planning decisions, not less.

For nationally significant infrastructure, the picture is different but the governance lesson is the same. The Planning and Infrastructure Act removes the statutory requirement for pre-application consultation on Development Consent Order (DCO) applications, the established statutory process for nationally significant infrastructure projects. Flexibility replaces prescription. But flexibility also removes the backstop. Host authorities that relied on the statutory framework to define what adequate engagement looked like will need to set their own expectations, document them clearly, and be prepared to defend them at examination.

There is one further development worth watching. The December 2025 NPPF consultation stated openly that responses may be processed by artificial intelligence tools to analyse themes, with outputs reviewed by staff. That is a governance signal from central government about how it intends to handle high-volume responses. But any council that adopts the same approach without a clear assurance framework around it is taking a risk. AI-assisted analysis of consultation responses that cannot demonstrate how individual substantive points were identified, categorised, and considered is unlikely to satisfy the conscientious consideration standard. As our colleagues have noted in other contexts, feeding responses through an AI system, on its own, does not constitute conscientious consideration.

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How tCI Can Help

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Whether you’re preparing for a high stakes service change, building long term consultation capability, or need confidence that your evidence approach will stand up to scrutiny, we can help.

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