Infrastructure Planning Blog

DCO progress

Following the 2024 general election, the Labour government set a target of 150 Development consent order (DCO) decisions this Parliament. So far, we are about 44% of the way through a full five-year Parliament and 45 DCOs have been consented (about 30% of the target), with a further 25 in the pipeline. Applications will need to speed up if the target is to be met, but progress is not too far off.

My (and for the benefit of the internet, not serious) suggestion of making the DCO thresholds much lower - e.g. energy projects of 50kW and above instead of 50MW - would mean the target would easily be reached but seems to have fallen on deaf ears.

The making of applications is not, of course, in the gift of the government but they can make the ground more fertile for doing so, and they have certainly been working on that. Changes take time to enact and then work through the system, however, so it is no wonder that things have not yet sped up. The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 (PIA) was introduced as a bill on 11 March 2025, around eight months after the election, and received royal assent on 18 December of that year. The provisions about nationally significant infrastructure projects came fully into force by 24 July 2026 (apart from section 12 on changes to DCOs, not yet in force) and guidance was also published on that date. Only since then can applications really benefit from the changes.

PIA implementation

The first application since the changes came into force has now been made, for the Lighthouse Green Fuels project, following a slightly worrying three-month gap in applications. However, it had already completed statutory consultation months earlier, meaning much of the work was carried out under the previous regime. When the application documents are published, it will be interesting to see whether any amendments were made to reflect the new requirements, though the answer may well be none. There is likely to be a transitional period as new applicants feel their way around the changed regime and will gradually have been less subject to the old regime over time.

The full impact of the changes will not really be known until one or more applications do not undergo statutory consultation and work their way through to a decision.  Similarly, questions around the application of biodiversity net gain to DCOs will not be answered until an application is made on or after 2 November, decided some time in 2028 and its legal challenge period ends.

Not a new development but likely to become more typical as a result of the Government's response to the Nuclear Taskforce (see the bottom of page 37 here) and changed guidance (see e.g. paragraph 4.43 here), the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero discharged a requirement relating to offshore wind turbine effects on Ministry of Defence radar pursuant to the Norfolk Boreas DCO this week. The approval can be found here. What bodes well for this route is that this requirement was discharged in less than two weeks.

However, there is one new thing to report: the first section 48 notice in the post-statutory consultation world was published this week, for the SDC M40 Campus, a data centre and possible gas-fired power station - the first data centre project to take advantage of the opt-in power introduced at the start of the year.  The notice can be found here. Don't forget that s48 is still an obligation even though other statutory consultation-related sections have been repealed.

You will see that it starts off with a pretty standard description of the project but then has just three further paragraphs, saying it is environmental impact assessment development (no mention of a preliminary environmental assessment report), saying where documents can be found with a start date but no deadline, and saying that hard copies can be purchased. That's it. Contrast that with a recent pre-changes notice here, which has 12 paragraphs and a table of inspection locations after the project description. The brave new world is here!

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