Ask a housebuilder what’s actually stopping a site right now and grid connection comes up as often as anything in the planning system. It’s a strange constraint to explain to a client: the homes are consented, the design is fixed, and the thing holding it up is a substation upgrade with a date three years out.
There’s a small consultation open at the moment that’s aimed squarely at one corner of that problem, and it closes soon.
What’s proposed
On 6 August 2026, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero published a consultation on new permitted development rights for ground investigations and surveys carried out to support electricity network infrastructure projects in England. It was flagged to every local planning authority in the Chief Planner’s Planning Update Newsletter of 18 August 2026, which asked councils to engage with it.
The proposal is narrow. It would introduce a permitted development right for certain temporary, low-impact ground investigations and surveys undertaken by electricity network developers — specifically the distribution and transmission network operators licensed to carry out works relating to electricity networks. It does not grant permission for the infrastructure itself.
The consultation is open until 4 September 2026.
Why a survey PD right matters to a housing programme
This looks like a technical change for utilities, and in the strict sense it is. But it sits on a chain of events that developers wait on.
Before a network operator can design and cost a reinforcement — a new substation, a cable route, an upgraded feeder — it needs ground information: trial pits, boreholes, geophysical and environmental surveys along the route. If each of those needs its own planning application, the front end of the process gains weeks or months before any design work starts, and every one of those weeks lands somewhere in a connection date that a housebuilder is planning around.
Bringing that survey work inside permitted development is an attempt to take that step off the critical path. It’s a modest change. But delays of this kind compound, and this is the sort of unglamorous fix that shortens programmes without changing the substantive planning tests on anything.
It also fits a pattern. In April 2026 the government confirmed it will raise the permitted development threshold for electricity substations in England from 29 to 45 cubic metres, bringing England into line with Scotland so network operators can deliver capacity upgrades with less administrative friction. This consultation extends the same logic upstream, to the investigation work that precedes the design.
The Future Homes Standard connection
This matters more from 24 March 2027 than it did before.
Under Approved Document L 2026, new homes will no longer use fossil fuel heating. Heating and hot water move to electricity — heat pumps or heat networks — with on-site renewable generation under the new PV requirement. Which means a new development’s electrical load profile is fundamentally different from a gas-heated equivalent: higher peak demand, heat pumps and EV charging, and PV export back onto the network.
In other words, the Future Homes Standard makes every new site a bigger ask of the local network at exactly the point when connection queues are already the binding constraint. Anything that shortens network reinforcement lead times is, indirectly, a Part L delivery measure.
The new NPPF chapter on securing clean energy and water, published 17 August 2026, made the same point from the planning side: policies W1 to W4 put network capacity into plan-making and give substantial weight to the infrastructure that fixes it. This consultation is the deregulatory half of the same argument.
Should you respond?
If you’re a housebuilder or developer with sites where a connection date is driving the programme, this is a short consultation with a specific question, and the case for it is one you can evidence better than most people — you know what a slipped connection date costs.
Worth saying plainly: this is a proposal about surveys, not about capacity. It will not conjure headroom on a constrained network, and nobody should tell a client it will. But the front end of a reinforcement is one of the few parts of the chain where planning reform can actually move the date, and the consultation is open for another week and a bit.
Local planning authorities have been asked to engage with it directly. If you deal with an LPA that has been vocal about grid constraints in its local plan evidence base, it’s worth checking they’ve seen it.
The consultation closes on 4 September 2026.
If you’re planning around a Future Homes Standard changeover and want to know where your plots sit on the 24 March 2027 and 24 March 2028 transitional dates, get in touch — that’s the deadline we get asked about most, and the definition of “commenced” catches people out.
Sources: Letter from MHCLG to Chief Planning Officers — Planning Update Newsletter, 18 August 2026 (PDF) · Planning guidance letters to chief planning officers, GOV.UK · Electricity network infrastructure: consents, land access and rights — government response, GOV.UK · DESNZ publishes a consultation (until 04/09/2026) relating to permitted development rights for ground investigations and surveys for electricity network infrastructure, The Planning Jungle, 12 August 2026