The Government is ambitiously targeting 150 major infrastructure project decisions by the end of this Parliament, as part of its December 2024 ‘Plan for Change.’ A primary objective of the Government’s flagship Planning & Infrastructure Bill (“the Bill”) is to streamline the process for consenting nationally significant infrastructure projects (“NSIPs”).
One of the key measures in the Bill to this end is the removal of the statutory requirement for pre-application consultation within the NSIP process, something which the Government considers could save NSIP promoters up to 12 months at the pre-application stage and save over £1 billion on the pipeline of projects to be determined over the course of this Parliament. Notwithstanding that the Bill is still passing through Parliament (with a raft of late amendments having just been published), the Government has simultaneously been running a consultation on the guidance that will be replacing the statutory requirement for pre-application, underlining its intentions in this regard.
Taking account of the Government’s late amendments to the Bill on 14 October 2025, this article considers the details of its proposals for the NSIP pre-application process in both the Bill and the Government’s related consultation and sets out our thoughts.
The Statutory Requirement For Pre-application Consultation And The Reforms In The Bill
The statutory requirement for pre-application consultation within the current NSIP process is contained in section 42 of the Planning Act 2008. The Bill essentially removes this requirement and introduces the following:
- A new requirement on applicants to have regard to any guidance issued by the Secretary of State to assist them on the pre-application steps that they might take; and
- An associated duty on the Secretary of State to issue such guidance.
In other words, the current statutory requirement is effectively being swapped out for Secretary of State guidance.
The Bill also contains a number of related amendments to the NSIP process. Probably the most significant of these was the adoption of a new test for the acceptance of a DCO based on its suitability to proceed to examination. However, following the Committee Stage of the Bill in the House of Lords, the Government has published 67 late amendments. One of these abandons the Government’s proposed changes to the acceptance test – or as the Government puts it in its explanatory letter dated 14 October 2025 returns “the acceptance test language to “satisfactory standard” instead of the proposed new test of “suitable to proceed to examination””.
The Government’s late amendments also included the following changes to the NSIP process:
- Removal of the ability for PINS to delay acceptance for up to 28 days where minor changes are required; and
- A requirement for PINS to publish reasons when it rejects a DCO application.
The Government’s Consultation
The Government launched a consultation on streamlining infrastructure planning on 1 September 2025 (“the Consultation”).
Running to 27 October 2025, a large part of the Consultation is, in reality, a pre-emptive consultation on the guidance that will be replacing the statutory requirement for pre-application once this has been removed by the Bill. In this respect, the Consultation seeks views on:
- Guidance for applicants preparing DCO applications, including the benefits of non-statutory consultation and engagement;
- Guidance and documents to support acceptance, examination and decision; and
- The notification and publicity of proposed applications (particularly in view of the fact that this is currently linked to the requirement for statutory pre-application consultation).
Part of the Consultation also concerns the Government’s proposed changes to the acceptance test. As set out above these changes have now been abandoned.
Concluding Thoughts
From the perspective of the Government’s pro-growth agenda, the removal of the statutory requirement for pre-application consultation within the NSIP process would appear to be a “no brainer” to speed up the DCO regime – after all, who can argue with anticipated savings of up to 12 months at the pre-application stage of the NSIP process and over £1 billion on the current pipeline of projects?
The fact that the Government has ploughed on with the Consultation ahead of the Bill completing its passage through Parliament provides a very strong signal of the Government’s intentions in this regard. However, given that the statutory requirement for pre-application consultation was a key element of the consenting regime and process that the Planning Act 2008 introduced, its removal is not without consequence for the remainder of the NSIP process; it is rather like pulling at a thread that runs through the whole jumper. This is reflected by the associated provisions in the Bill.
Ultimately both the Consultation and some of the Government’s late amendments to the Bill show the Government publicly grappling with the question of what the NSIP process should look like once the statutory requirement for pre-application consultation has been removed. The Government’s recent row-back on its proposed changes to the acceptance test within the NSIP process is particularly significant in this regard, with the Government citing stake-holder concerns that its original proposals could have had the practical effect of hindering or delaying the acceptance of applications.
There is clearly a balance to be struck with any reforms to process and it is notable that the Consultation actually makes a very good case as to why pre-application consultation is advisable and the potential downfalls if such consultation is not undertaken. It appears from the Consultation that the general thrust of the new Government guidance will be that promoters should continue to do it, albeit that there will be more flexibility around how. So, whilst pre-application consultation is being removed as a statutory requirement, it is not the Government’s intention that it should fall away in practice; rather the Government’s hope is that this reform will facilitate a more flexible and proportionate approach to pre-application consultation, which in turn will speed up the NSIP process.
For some DCO promoters this may mean that nothing really changes; for others there may be an opportunity to shorten their pre-application stage. What is not clear from the Consultation, however, is what will happen under the reformed process if someone takes a minimal approach. In these circumstances, conceivably there can only be two alternative outcomes within the NSIP process: either PINS refusing to accept the DCO application on this basis or the application being accepted regardless with associated risks then being assumed later in the process (either around the examination and/or in terms of legal challenge risk).
No doubt the Government will want to avoid false economies of this nature if it can and there are, of course, some age-old tensions that sit under the surface of these reforms – not least between the speed and quality of decision-making and public involvement. However, as the Consultation and the Government’s late amendments to the Bill show, the resolution of such matters is not straight-forward.
