From 31 October, most planning applications can never go to committee. Here is what that means for your scheme.

On 31 October 2026 the way planning decisions are made in England changes more than at any point in a generation. The national scheme of delegation, created by the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 and its 2026 Regulations, takes the decision on who decides out of each council's hands and writes it into law, the same for all 317 local planning authorities, including every London borough.

The rules in plain English

If your scheme is 1 to 9 homes on a site under half a hectare, a householder application, minor commercial development, a permission in principle or reserved matters on a non-phased outline, it will be decided by a planning officer. Not "probably". There is no route to committee for these applications at all. Ward councillors lose the power to call an application in, and the government explicitly rejected the council lobby's request for an exceptional-circumstances override.

Everything else can still reach committee, but only through a double lock: the application must meet a statutory significance test, and the council's chief planning officer and a nominated committee member must both agree, in writing, that it should be heard. Committees themselves shrink to a maximum of 13 members.

How much actually changes

We hold the largest evidenced archive of London committee decisions, so we can measure it rather than guess. Across the last twelve months, of the London committee decisions in our archive whose application type is classified, 61 per cent (599 of 983) were minor residential or householder applications, exactly the categories that from 31 October must be decided by officers.

In some boroughs the committee agenda as it exists today effectively disappears.

At one end, Waltham Forest, Bromley and Harrow saw the overwhelming majority of their committee caseload in categories that will now never reach members. At the other, Bexley spent only 14 per cent of its classified decisions on such applications, because it already delegates almost everything small.

What it means if you are bringing a scheme forward

The uncertainty that mattered most on a small scheme used to be political: would a neighbour's objection and a ward councillor's call-in put your application in front of a committee. That risk is now abolished by statute. What replaces it is a named human being: the case officer.

Officers are not interchangeable. Our data shows measurable, persistent differences between officers in the same borough on approval rates, the number and weight of conditions attached, and how Section 106 requirements are handled. From 31 October, for every small scheme in London, the single most useful thing you can know before you commit is who is likely to assess it and how they have behaved on schemes like yours.

From 31 October you can know how your decision will be made on day one. The developers who do will price risk better than the ones who don't.

The one question to ask before you buy or design

Will this scheme be officer-decided or committee-possible? Under the new rules that question has a definite answer on day one, from unit count, site area and application type. We now flag it on every site we assess, with the matching intelligence attached: officer behaviour where the officer decides, committee and member dynamics where a committee is still possible.