Infrastructure Planning Blog

This week's blog covers the publication of updated Planning Inspectorate advice, news on data centres and the curious case of a house elf's 'grave'.

Advice

The Planning Inspectorate has carried out a review of its advice to coincide with the recent changes made to the regime via the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025. The suite of advice pages can be found here. However, when you look at the change log it says that a further detailed review will commence from summer 2026, so presumably is under way.

Almost every page in the advice for applicants, local authorities and members of the public sections is dated 29 or 30 July 2026, the only ones that aren't are Advice Note Fifteen: drafting Development Consent Orders, dated 24 March 2025 and Advice on working with public bodies in the infrastructure planning process Annexes which is dated 16 November 2012, nearly 14 years ago.  That may be when the page was created, but most of the annexes it links to were updated in 2025 and 2026 when most of the bodies were able to charge for advice. Only the annexes for the Health and Safety Executive and Evidence Plans for Habitats Regulations Assessment still date back to the original publication date.

The advice pages in the 'environmental matters' section were mainly updated this week, on 11 and 12 August.

Some advice pages have been withdrawn altogether: advice on the consultation report, advice on rights of entry to land under section 53, pre-application advice on environmental impact assessment.

I checked a sample page for changes (the one on cumulative assessment). It is much the same, but text like 'The approach should be agreed with the relevant consultation bodies' is changed to 'The applicant is encouraged to agree the approach with relevant stakeholders'.  Essentially more directive text has been watered down to encouragement, mentions of consultation are changed to discussions and engagement, and statutory consultees to stakeholders.

Data centre queue

Similar to reform of grid connections for electricity generation projects and enabled by section 14 of the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025, Ofgem is consulting on two measures to prune (or 'curate') the queue for data centre grid connections. These have very large electricity demand requirements and so place significant burdens on the queue. The consultation document can be found here and the consultation closes on 16 September.  The first measure is to introduce high costs to stay in the queue, which get refunded if the project goes ahead. As one of the examples given (see paragraph 4.1), a project that will use 100MW of electricity could have to pay up to £71.3 million to stay in the queue, which is a non-trivial amount.

The second measure is to require developers to provide evidence of reaching certain milestones, namely identifying an end-user, procuring long-lead electrical equipment (that's equipment with a long lead-in time to order, not consisting of long leads) and financial and technical capability evidence.  Failure to meet the milestones on time could lead to 'ejection'.

Meanwhile, two large data centres have been given planning permission in west London - one in Hounslow and one in Ealing at the former Honey Monster Food Factory - bites to bytes? Those come hot on the heels of a planning appeal giving permission for one in east London at the site of the former Truman Brewery in Shoreditch, the appeal decision of 29 July is here.

My colleague Matt Grimwood has just recorded a podcast on data centres that covers the latest issues as part of TLT's Energise 2030 series and it can be found here.

Dobbed in

A story that actually happened five years ago has been in the news this week because it was revealed on a podcast last week. An electricity interconnector from Ireland was granted permission on 15 July 2020 and was due to make landfall across the Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire. This would have been where the death of Dobby was filmed for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, and is now a tourist attraction. The route was moved to avoid it - it was a town and country planning application to the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority and this appears to have been discovered post-consent. Presumably the limits of deviation (divination?) were wide enough to allow a suitable diversion.  Headlines that fans 'forced' the project to move are possibly a little overblown.

Muggles like us don't have the benefit of deluminators or the "Lumos" spell to keep the lights on so it may be worth considering whether the wizarding world gives enough respect to the muggle Town and Country Planning and development consent regimes.  When the Quidditch World Cup was held, was planning permission obtained for the stadium? At the same event, did the Ministry of Magic make highways stopping up applications before placing charms to force Muggles to walk away? Does the Hogwarts board make a change of use application each time the Room of Requirement changes its purpose and function? Was Salazar Slytherin even aware of the planning enforcement notices for unauthorised swimming pools in Chelsea before he decided to construct the entirety of the Chamber of Secrets? When Harry crashed into the Whomping Willow (which, as we understand it, has the benefit of a Tree Preservation Order), did he obtain consent?

If you have access to Spotify you can listen to the podcast here, this story starts at about 17 minutes.

In Ireland, Iceland and Northern Ireland it is not unheard of for infrastructure projects to avoid folklore-related sites, so in a way, this is nothing new - see this article. Closer to home and more closely related to novels, a hedge said to be the basis of one that featured in Jane Austen's Persuasion received special treatment when crossed by the Southampton to London Pipeline, e.g. see page 4 in this document.

This publication is intended for general guidance and represents our understanding of the relevant law and practice as at August 2026.  For more information see our terms & conditions.