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The Government has published its new National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) for England, which finally appears to have laid the foundations for planning authorities to give “substantial weight” to the benefits of “maintaining or improving network coverage, capacity, reliability and resilience” of modern gigabit broadband and 5G mobile networks.
The NPPF is designed to set out a foundation for how the government’s policies for plan-making and for making decisions on development proposals in England are expected to be applied. Mobile operators in particular have long called for an updated policy that clearly prioritises telecommunications infrastructure, ideally by helping to reduce the number of applications requiring full planning or prior approval to ease pressure on local authorities and their own plans (here and here).
However, despite their lobbying, the government’s Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 largely seemed to ignore mobile networks, preferring instead to focus on other sectors, such as energy, housing and transport. But the recent 10-Year UK Infrastructure Strategy (10YIS) did signal a change by pledging to “remove barriers to digital infrastructure deployment“.