The Ministry of Justice received a sharp warning from the Law Society of England and Wales in August 2026: don't extend judicial review restrictions designed for major infrastructure projects to housing consents until you've proved the first set of reforms actually work. The consultation response, submitted before the 26th August deadline, argued that Section 12 of the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 had been applied only once since commencing in February 2026—far too thin an evidence base to justify rolling compressed deadlines, oral-only permission hearings and reduced appeal rights across the housing sector.
For conveyancers, residential developers' legal advisers and proptech firms tracking planning risk, the stakes are concrete. If government proceeds despite Law Society objections, judicial review of housing consents will become faster and harder to pursue. That means fewer post-exchange planning reversals, but also weaker legal checks on local authority decisions at a time when planning departments are under-resourced and error rates may be climbing.
What the reforms would change
The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 introduced a tighter judicial review regime for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects—large energy and transport schemes that already faced parliamentary scrutiny and detailed environmental assessment. The consultation proposed extending elements of that regime beyond NSIPs, with housing explicitly mentioned as a candidate.
The NSIP reforms included oral-only permission hearings, compressed court timetables and loss of appeal rights for unsuccessful claimants. The Ministry of Justice consultation framed the measures as targeting "weak and meritless challenges" that delay nationally important projects. No published data on success rates, case durations or costs from NSIP judicial reviews before or after the February 2026 commencement was cited in the consultation or the Law Society response.
The Law Society's response noted that housing development is "a far larger and more heterogeneous class than the energy and transport categories identified" and that challenges most commonly arise from "residents and community groups directly affected—precisely the population who lack significant resources, for whom oral-only permission, compressed deadlines and the loss of appeal rights would be most burdensome."
Mark Evans, Law Society president, stated: "Before further restrictions are introduced, the government should publish clear data on whether comparable delays exist in other planning regimes and evaluate the impact of the existing reforms."
The operational and compliance consequence
Conveyancers handling residential transactions may see fewer planning consents overturned post-exchange if challenge windows are compressed and permission hearings become harder to secure. That reduces one source of abortive work and title defect insurance claims. But the risk shifts rather than disappears.
If local authorities approve housing schemes under procedural pressure, with fewer opportunities for legal correction, unlawful consents may survive longer and surface later—during enforcement action, retrospective challenge by successor authorities or when environmental obligations under the Aarhus Convention are tested. The UK remains a signatory to Aarhus post-Brexit, and the convention mandates public participation in environmental decision-making and access to justice in planning. Compressed timelines that price out community groups may put government in breach, inviting challenges to the secondary legislation or court rules implementing the reforms.
Developers and housebuilders gain from faster finality on consents, but their advisers need to track whether planning officers are cutting procedural corners to meet approval targets. A consent obtained in compliance with streamlined judicial review rules may still be defective if the underlying local authority decision was unlawful. Judicial review does not permit courts to second-guess the merits of a development—it considers only whether the decision was taken in accordance with law. Restricting the mechanism for testing lawfulness does not make unlawful decisions lawful.
Proptech providers offering planning risk scoring, judicial review monitoring or development pipeline tools may need to recalibrate models if reforms proceed. A lower volume of challenges does not necessarily signal lower planning risk—it may signal that meritorious challenges are being priced out, leaving defects undetected until later in the transaction chain.
What the evidence supports and what it doesn't
No independent data has been published on the frequency, cost or duration of judicial reviews in housing cases compared to NSIPs. The Ministry of Justice consultation did not cite comparative figures, and the Law Society response noted their absence. Without that baseline, the claim that housing consents face comparable delay problems to major infrastructure projects remains unsubstantiated.
The single application of the NSIP regime since February 2026 provides no published case outcome, hearing length, cost or resource impact data. Whether that constitutes sufficient evidence for formal evaluation is a matter of judgement, but no evaluation timeline or methodology has been published by government.
The consultation response does not identify which other bodies responded or whether the development industry, local government or environmental groups took opposing positions. The Law Society's objection may be an outlier or part of a broader pattern—the Ministry of Justice response, expected in late 2026 or early 2027, should clarify.