The 2026 NPPF: what the new rules mean for consultation, engagement and evidence

When the reforms were proposed in 2024, most of the coverage went to mandatory housing targets, Grey Belt release and the government's ambition to speed up decisions. We wrote at the time that citizen engagement would keep playing an important part in spatial planning.

Now the new Framework is here, and there is a second story in it that has had far less attention. Engagement and evidence are not confined to one chapter on consultation. The document covers plan-making, development management, design, transport, healthy communities, minerals and the historic environment, and these themes turn up again in the glossary and the information requirements at the back.

Here’s what we know so far.

Engagement is expected to start earlier

The general principles for plan-making ask plan-makers to engage positively with communities and key stakeholders "at appropriate points", using a "range of methods", so that issues are identified and addressed early.

Both of those phrases are plural. Points, methods. That describes a programme rather than a single consultation event.

The policy on initiating plan-making goes further, asking authorities to set out from the start how the plan will be "consulted on throughout its preparation", alongside regular engagement with key stakeholders. A separate policy on cooperation opens a second continuous thread, asking authorities to engage "proactively and regularly" with infrastructure providers, neighbouring authorities and other relevant bodies on cross-boundary matters.

Ultimately, we expect engagement to feed the development of the plan upfront rather than to test a plan that is already written.

The Framework asks what came out of engagement, not only that it happened

The policy on major development says proposals should involve early engagement with neighbours, communities, local planning authorities, statutory consultees, infrastructure providers and social housing providers. It then says the planning statement must record the outcome of that pre-application engagement, and the extent to which the proposal changed in response.

Engagement stops being an activity you complete and becomes something whose results you have to be able to show. It is not buried in narrative policy either, that same expectation reappears in the national information requirements at the back of the document, which govern what an application has to contain.

Two other passages point the same way. The policy on determining proposals requires authorities to take account of matters raised through engagement and representations. And in the section on examining spatial strategies, where long-term infrastructure delivery is uncertain, examiners can assess whether reasonable assumptions rest on adequate engagement with infrastructure providers. Engagement there forms part of what makes an assumption defensible at examination.

For planning teams, the practical questions become: who did we hear from, what did they tell us, and what did we do about it? Those answers need to be retrievable at the point the planning statement is written, which can be a long way from when the engagement took place.

Evidence gets its own policy, with conditions attached

The evidence policy for plan-making asks for a baseline understanding of needs, opportunities, constraints and context, underpinned by information and data that is relevant, proportionate, reliable and sufficiently up to date.

The operational points that follow are the interesting part. Existing evidence should be used or updated before new evidence is commissioned. Authorities should consider evidence produced by other plan-makers, and prepare evidence jointly where that is useful. New evidence introduced after submission for examination is restricted.

The direction is towards reuse, currency and provenance rather than volume, and the stakes are set out plainly in the policy on examining local plans: a sound plan must be based on "proportionate evidence".

Reuse depends on retrieval. Consultation responses, survey findings, stakeholder correspondence and earlier engagement exercises are often held in separate systems and by different teams, and where that is the case the barrier to reusing evidence is locating it rather than anything in policy.

There is a useful precedent elsewhere in the document. The policy on Historic Environment Records expects authorities to maintain or access a record holding up to date evidence that feeds both plan-making and decisions. The Framework is comfortable with the idea of a maintained, structured evidence repository. It asks for one in the heritage context, and the same logic applies to engagement.

Community insight is treated as evidence

Planning evidence is often assumed to mean datasets, modelling and technical reports but the Framework is broader than that.

The transport policy asks for early engagement with communities, transport authorities and providers, operators and promoters, so that proposals reflect both "local views" and "evidence relating to accessibility, capacity and transport service provision". The two sit in the same sentence. The connectivity provisions go further, accepting relevant quantitative or qualitative evidence alongside the Connectivity Tool.

The healthy communities policy does something similar for community and public service infrastructure, asking authorities to understand deficits and future needs through both quantitative and qualitative aspects, while proactively engaging communities and service providers. The policy on community and public facilities is more concrete still: where appropriate, communities, including children and families, should take part in designing proposals so they reflect user needs.

Design policy makes the same move, asking that guides, codes and masterplans be shaped by effective community engagement so local aspirations are taken into account.

If qualitative material is going to carry evidential weight, it needs to be collected in a form that supports analysis and citation.

Statutory consultation has not gone anywhere

None of this replaces the formal consultation process. What the document shows is that statutory consultation is just one part of the process.

There are the general plan consultation and examination requirements. There is engagement with statutory consultees before an application is submitted, and there are statutory consultee deadlines at the decision stage. There are specialist regimes on top: Mineral Consultation Areas, where non-mineral development in a designated area triggers consultation with the mineral planning authority, and safeguarding, major hazard and nuclear zones, where proposals can only be supported once the relevant consultation bodies have been consulted.

Supplementary plans, in the Framework's own words, "must undergo consultation and independent examination". And the glossary defines a local plan as one drawn up by the authority "in consultation with the community", with the same wording used for minerals and waste plans. Consultation is written into the definition, not bolted on after it.

Formal consultation remains the backbone. It now sits inside a wider process of early engagement, pre-application discussion and evidence gathering.

A checklist for planning teams

1. Can we engage before formal consultation opens?
2. Can we use different methods for different communities and stakeholders?
3. Can we keep a record of engagement across every stage of a plan, over several years?
4. Can we bring quantitative and qualitative material together in one analysis?
5. Can we show what people said and what changed as a result?
6. Can we retrieve previous engagement and evidence instead of starting again?
7. Can we produce a clear audit trail if a plan or decision is examined or challenged?

What this means in practice

The new Framework does not make public consultation less important. It makes the work around consultation more important.

Engagement is expected earlier, across more stages and with more stakeholders. Qualitative insight sits alongside technical evidence. Existing evidence is expected to be found and reused rather than recommissioned. And for major development, the outcome of engagement and its influence on the proposal has to be written down.

The Framework nowhere announces a legal duty of "continuous engagement". That phrase is ours, and it is a reading of where these policies point when you put them side by side rather than something the document declares.

That reading has a practical consequence, though. If engagement, evidence and reporting are going to be examined together, it helps if they live together. Citizen Space is built for that: running formal consultations and earlier engagement in one place, collecting structured quantitative and qualitative responses including map-based feedback, analysing and coding what comes back, and keeping a searchable record of what was heard, what was published and what changed.

Planning consultation does not start and end with a survey, and we're ready to support all the phases of engagement that planners need.