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The government introduced a suite of reforms primarily through its Planning and Infrastructure Act, which became law in late 2025, to address delays in the NSIP regime.

These measures aim to reduce the average pre-application period from two years to 12 months and shorten examination times to less than six months.

At a Westminster Forum on 2 February, Planning Inspectorate professional lead Pauleen Lane spoke about how the agency is making this promise a reality.

“We’re going through a huge amount of change and it may seem that absolutely everything is changing simultaneously – and to a certain extent that is true,” she said. “But then it’s also inevitable in a world in which you have fast-changing technology expectations and indeed demands on the system.”

To keep up with the ever-changing landscape of major infrastructure planning, Lane detailed the many changes the Inspectorate is making to its services, including how it “can customise things a bit better”.

“Some parties will have taken part in the applicant’s portal design review, which took place recently and work is ongoing to bring that to fruition,” Lane said.

“In the meantime, we’ve more widely adopted the use of the SharePoint site for uploading information and that does mean that we can accept information which is bigger, you’re not going to have to cut things up into smaller chunks to go through e-mail, for example.

“They can be uploaded directly and also the format in which they’re offered can be more varied than some of the previous arrangements.”

A number of these changes came off the back of a formal review that was conducted on the first six months of the service.

The agency is now running a survey for feedback on its new approach and portal design.

As Lane explained, for the moment, “the SharePoint site upload should meet most of the technical requirements” needed for NSIP applications.

Beyond the portal design, the Inspectorate is further thinking about how it can “modernise the handling of applications and what happens with them”.

“We are in an era of big data,” Lane continued.

“It is true that we have both bigger schemes and we also have significant numbers of parties registering. So, for example, for the first of the recent [power] grid [connection] projects there were around 6,500 parties registered for the project.

“We haven’t had that number for a while.”

Lane further explained how some other grid projects had yielded record-breaking numbers of affected persons.

“We’ve been moving into an era where we want to think about information less as line by line, standalone, long form explanation and more into formats which are expressed in databases and linked very clearly to geospatial approach and integrated with its source,” Lane said.

An example of this is how large projects now will have a land rights tracker, “which is a more integrated form of information than the book of reference”.

For example, on National Grid’s application for its Norwich to Tilbury power overhead power line upgrade, the Planning Inspectorate “consolidated representations into a single file rather than having to read them line by line off the website”, Lane said.

“We think there’s more to go at there.”

As the Planning Inspectorate continues to grow its prowess in consenting NSIPs quicker it is increasingly collating data into tables for easier digestion.

Lane gave the example of solar projects, where the Inspectorate reports on the best and most valuable land and the different categories they sit within.

“That’s usually done in a tabular form, which can then go straight into the overarching database on energy projects,” she said.

“We are thinking about streamlining information through processes, changes in technology and the efficiency of what is currently on offer as new technology comes on stream.”

With the Planning Inspectorate harnessing these changes in technology and the way it processes information, a key challenge remains: government policy keeping up with the technology that developers are using to create their applications.

“I’m afraid I think that is a bit of a challenge,” Lane said. “We’re not necessarily doing that as well as we ought to be and […] the external pressure continues to push the envelope.

“That’s something that we do spend some time thinking about as to how much we need to try and keep ahead.

“Hopefully this year is going to see quite a lot of catch up in government regulation and advice.”

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