Planning reform takes up a significant part of the UKREiiF 2026 programme. The breadth of sessions covering housing delivery, land value, strategic infrastructure, and new settlements reflects an industry that has a great deal it wants to say on the subject and a great deal it wants to hear.
The scepticism about whether reform will translate into actual delivery is understandable. There have been plenty of reform conversations over the years, and the relationship between policy change and site-level outcomes has not always been as direct as the announcements suggested it would be.
What I will be listening for this year is whether the people closest to the planning system have arrived at a more coherent shared view on what actually unlocks sites than they had twelve months ago.
What reform is actually trying to do
The current wave of planning reform is more substantial than some of its predecessors. Changes to the National Planning Policy Framework, the reintroduction of mandatory housing targets, proposed reforms to the development management process, and the evolution of strategic planning through spatial development strategies all represent meaningful shifts in the framework within which land and planning decisions are made.
The question is not whether the intent is serious. It is whether the system has the capacity to translate that intent into outcomes at the pace the housing delivery targets require. Local planning authorities are under significant resource pressure. The pipeline of applications waiting for a decision has not shortened. The skills and capacity needed to assess and determine complex major applications are not uniformly present across the authorities now being asked to process them more quickly.
Land value and the viability question
The land value conversation is one I expect to run through multiple sessions at UKREiiF this year. The relationship between planning policy, land value, and development viability is one of the central tensions in the housing delivery debate, and it has not been resolved by previous rounds of reform.
The core problem is a familiar one. Land is priced on the expectation of planning permission. That pricing often makes development viability difficult to achieve once infrastructure costs, affordable housing obligations, and build cost inflation are factored in. Reducing that tension requires either changes to the way land value is captured, through mechanisms like land value capture or the Infrastructure Levy, or changes to the cost base of development, or both.
The sessions at UKREiiF that address this with genuine specificity rather than broad aspiration are the ones worth attending. Planning directors and housebuilders who are working through these calculations on live sites tend to have more nuanced and more useful views than the policy conversation usually reflects.
New towns and strategic masterplanning
The new towns conversation is one of the more interesting additions to the UKREiiF programme this year. The government's ambition to deliver new settlements at scale sits alongside the planning reform agenda as a recognition that incremental development within existing settlement boundaries will not on its own produce the housing numbers the country needs.
What the new towns sessions will need to address honestly is the delivery timeline. New settlements of meaningful scale require land assembly, infrastructure delivery, and planning processes that operate over decades rather than parliamentary cycles. The risk that new towns become a long-term aspiration that displaces attention from near-term delivery on more straightforward sites is a real one. That tension is worth highlighting at UKREiiF rather than glossing over it.
Whether alignment is growing
What I am most interested in at UKREiiF is whether there is more alignment between planning directors, local authority leaders, and housebuilders on the practical steps that make a difference than there was a year ago. Not alignment on ambition, which has never been the problem, but alignment on the specific decisions, processes, and relationships that get sites moving.
The land and planning community at UKREiiF tends to be direct about what is working and what is not. That directness is the most valuable thing the conference produces on these themes, and it is what I will be looking for across the planning sessions in Leeds.
Talk to me at UKREiiF
Planning reform, land value, and development viability are conversations that benefit from the kind of direct exchange that UKREiiF makes possible. If you are attending and want to discuss how the current planning environment is affecting sites you are working on, let’s catch up.
Contact [email protected] to arrange a meeting, or join us at our fringe event at the Black Cat Club for a more informal conversation about land, planning, and development. Email [email protected] or fill out the form below to register your interest.
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