image for illustration: Birmingham, Anglo3334, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Better Planning Coalition represents over 40 organisations across the environment, housing, planning, heritage and transport sectors with one common goal: a planning system fit for climate, nature and people, and it sent a letter to the Prime Minister advocating for a reset for government for planning.
The Better Planning Coalition writes:
Our land is under pressure like never before – to deliver more homes, better water management (including new reservoirs and natural flood management schemes), to produce food, for carbon sequestration, space for nature and for people to be able to access and enjoy green spaces, all the while under increasing stress from a rapidly changing climate. We need to rebuild our country. An effective and ambitious planning system is an essential part of this task. So the organisations in the Better Planning Coalition have come together to set out a shared vision for planning and advocate for changes in the Government’s approach to planning reform.
The Coalition is focused on three main areas in 2025 – the Planning and Infrastructure Bill; English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill and forthcoming National Decision Making Policies, as well as setting out an alternative vision for how planning can better serve the public interest. Membership is open to not-for-profit groups who agree with the overall objectives set out in our vision and who work within our agreed ways of working document. Please get in touch if you would like to join. The steering group for the Coalition includes representatives from the National Trust, Royal Town Planning Institute, Wildlife and Countryside Link, Rights Community Action and CPRE. At present, it not externally funded. The Coordinator is hosted by CPRE.
Letter from the Better Planning Coalition to Prime Minister as Ministers are set to make final decisions on a new National Planning Policy Framework
The Rt Hon Keir Starmer KCB KC MP
Prime Minister
10 Downing Street
London
SW1A 2AA
cc: Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government
28 May 2026
Dear Prime Minister
Resetting the Government’s approach to planning
We are writing to you as members of the Better Planning Coalition, which brings together not-for- profit organisations working for planning in the public interest. It is possible to discern the outline of a new approach from this Government to planning and housing. Measures around compulsory purchase; limiting ‘hope value’ claims by landowners; expanding public bodies’ land assembly capabilities and ability to contract out delivery to diversify supply are all positive, as would be stronger measures to make sure developers build out what they have permission for. These measures, alongside the increased funding for the social and affordable homes programme, should support good development in the right locations.
But in the short-term, repeated weakening of planning policy is reducing environmental and other protections and leading to more speculative and poor-quality development in the wrong locations.
The impact that poor-quality development in the wrong locations has is being made worse by what is happening to housing supply as housebuilders scale back their plans in the face of higher costs and weak demand. Despite sweeping planning reforms, the latest ONS figures show private house building activity in March was almost 5% lower than a year ago, even before the impacts of the Middle East conflict take full effect with delivery expected to fall further this year.
This suggests that planning is not the primary barrier to housing delivery. Increasing land supply by weakening planning policy while housebuilders pull back delivery will result in a further drive to more profitable greenfield sites that are poorly located and, with reduced environmental safeguards, more harmful to nature. Such sites can also place extra costs on the public purse, either for new infrastructure or by increasing pressure on existing assets that then subsequently need upgrading.
This will lead to a backlash. There is a risk that this could be exploited to undermine the longer-term vision for housing and pit different groups in society against each other. We are therefore asking for a reset of the Government’s approach to planning. In particular, we call on the Government to:
- Halt the harmful and divisive rhetoric that falsely pitches development and nature as binary choices
- Reverse the recent dilution of key policies which make development better, more sustainable and which safeguard and enhance heritage, protected landscapes, mature gardens and nature (including biodiversity net gain and environmental assessment). The planning system must also ensure the mitigation hierarchy drives location decisions for new housing and major infrastructure, and that these are delivered in nature-friendly ways
- Focus on delivering social and genuinely affordable housing as a priority in new spatial development strategies and to publish the housing strategy
- Remove the loopholes in the draft NPPF, including changing the new draft presumption in favour of development so that it supports genuinely sustainable, plan-led and high-quality applications and stops speculative grey belt and other poor schemes. This includes suspending the housing delivery test given the decline in housing supply caused by wider economic drivers beyond the influence of local councils, and which if unchanged would allow for more speculative development outside settlement boundaries
- Review the implications of the standard method for housing targets to ensure the methodology can drive densification to improve economic productivity while protecting greenfield land and sites important for nature and heritage
- Put community engagement, co-design and co-production at the heart of the development of new Local Plans and spatial development strategies, for instance, through a new ‘chapter 21’ of the National Planning Policy Framework on community engagement
- The current approach risks the worst of all possible worlds. Raised but unmet expectations of affordable housing, an obsession with planning reform to increase supply while developers scale back their plans, and a planning system that can no longer ensure that development works for
nature, communities and the climate.
We look forward to hearing from you…
See full details here
See more on the Better Planning Coalition
