It is said that ‘the only constant is change’ - a maxim that certainly applies to national planning policy, which changes regularly in response to economic, environmental, societal and political changes.
Since 2023, planners in England have become accustomed to a lot of this change taking place over the Christmas period. In the dying embers of the last Conservative government, a series of anti-housebuilding policies were introduced in December 2023 by the then Secretary of State Michael Gove MP, through changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (the NPPF).
Come Christmas 2024 and there was further change, but this time from the new Labour government, revoking the damaging ‘Gove changes’ to create a more positive planning and development environment.
A Policy Reset: Why This NPPF Is Different
In 2025 the Government gave the industry the ‘heads up’ that a further revised draft NPPF would be published before Christmas. With that in mind, planning consultants and lawyers across the country had computer software at the ready to allow a speedy comparison of the new draft document against the current one.
On this occasion, however, most of us were caught out. The draft ‘NPPF: Plan-making and national decision-making policies’, published on 16 December 2025, is a very different beast. Whilst some existing text has been carried forward, it is a much longer and unashamedly new document that adopts a fundamentally different structure, approach, presentation and content. Meaningful side by side comparison of old with new is impossible.
The draft NPPF (which has in practice always been an expression of Government policy rather than guidance) now more clearly and purposefully expresses itself as a series of national plan-making and development management policies, rather than descriptive text under thematic headings as was the case previously. It is an expression of the new pro-growth, ‘rules-based’ approach to which Matthew Pennycook MP has made repeated reference in recent months, an approach that is intended to provide greater clarity / certainty.
