Quick answer: The Town and Country Planning (Discharge of Local Planning Authority Functions) (England) Regulations 2026 — SI 2026/854, made 15 July 2026, in force 31 October 2026 — set out the national scheme of delegation. Schedule 1 applications must be determined by an officer, and that schedule includes applications made under a planning condition, biodiversity gain plans, prior approval applications under the GPDO, permission in principle, and minor residential applications — one to nine dwellings on a site under 0.5 hectares. Schedule 2 applications, which is everything else of any size, go to an officer by default; a committee only sees one if the authority’s nominated member and nominated officer both agree that it raises an issue of economic, social or environmental significance to the local area, or a significant planning matter. Committees are capped at 13 members. For anyone who submits condition-discharge packs, the practical change is simple: the decision is now always made on the papers by one person.
What has actually changed
Until now, which planning applications went to committee and which were delegated to officers was a matter for each authority’s own constitution. The result was roughly 330 different schemes of delegation in England, and a genuinely unpredictable answer to the question “will this go to committee?”
Section 54(1) of the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 inserted sections 319ZZC to 319ZZF into the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, giving the Secretary of State power to prescribe that answer nationally. SI 2026/854 is the instrument that does it. It was signed by Matthew Pennycook, Minister of State, on 15 July 2026, and it comes into force on 31 October 2026 — a date that slipped from an originally indicated 30 September to give authorities time to update their constitutions and train members and officers.
The regulations apply in England only. They do not change any of the substantive tests — the development plan, material considerations, the Building Regulations, none of it. They change who decides.
Schedule 1: officer, always
Regulation 4 is short and absolute. A relevant local planning authority must make arrangements so that any Schedule 1 application is determined by an officer. There is no referral route and no discretion.
Schedule 1 contains fifteen entries. The ones most likely to appear in an Energycount reader’s inbox:
- Applications made under a planning condition — article 27(1) of the DMPO 2015. This is condition discharge, and it is the entry that matters most below.
- The submission of a biodiversity gain plan under paragraph 13(2)(a) of Schedule 7A to the TCPA 1990.
- Prior approval applications under Schedule 2 to the GPDO 2015, and determinations as to whether prior approval is required. Solar and other permitted development routes sit here.
- Minor residential applications — defined as development comprising at least one but not more than nine dwellings on a site smaller than 0.5 hectares, consisting only of dwellings and incidental development.
- Householder applications and minor commercial applications.
- Permission in principle.
- Reserved matters approval for any outline permission that is not a “large outline permission”.
- Section 96A non-material amendments.
- Certificates of lawfulness under sections 191 and 192, and section 26H of the Listed Buildings Act.
- Section 73 applications where the original permission was itself a Schedule 1 permission.
- Section 106A requests to modify or discharge a planning obligation connected with a Schedule 1 approval.
Two carve-outs apply. An application that is also of a kind listed in Schedule 2 is handled under regulation 5 instead — the explanatory note gives the example of a minor residential application that the authority considers is connected with a listed building consent application. And an own-interest application — one made by the authority, or one of its members or officers, or where the authority otherwise has an interest — is handled under regulation 6, where a referral to committee remains possible at the nominated member and officer’s discretion.
Neither carve-out reaches ordinary condition discharge. An application under article 27(1) is not an application for planning permission, and Schedule 2 paragraphs 3 and 4 both begin “an application for planning permission”. So unless the council is discharging conditions on its own scheme, a condition-discharge application from 31 October is an officer decision, full stop.
”Large outline permission” has a number on it
Reserved matters is where the schedules split on scale. Schedule 1 paragraph 13 sends reserved matters for an ordinary outline permission to an officer. Schedule 2 paragraph 8 keeps reserved matters for a large outline permission available to committee.
The regulations define a large outline permission as an outline planning permission permitting either or both of:
- the provision of 500 or more dwellings; or
- 50,000 square metres or more of floorspace created by the development.
That is a high bar. On the overwhelming majority of outline sites — including most strategic allocations — reserved matters will now be determined by an officer.
Schedule 2: officer by default, committee by agreement
Schedule 2 covers full applications for planning permission that are not householder, minor commercial or minor residential; listed building consent and section 19 variations; section 73A retrospective permissions; section 73 applications flowing from a Schedule 2 permission; section 106A modifications connected with a Schedule 2 approval; advertisement consent; and tree preservation order consent.
Regulation 5 sets the default: any Schedule 2 application not referred to committee must be determined by an officer. A referral requires the authority’s nominated member and nominated officer to agree, and they may only refer where in their view the application raises:
- one or more issues of economic, social or environmental significance to the local area; or
- one or more significant planning matters having regard to the development plan and any other material considerations.
Both must have regard to guidance issued by the Secretary of State under section 319ZZE(4). Authorities may nominate different members and officers for different purposes, and may appoint substitutes.
There is also a quiet but important provision in regulation 2(2). Where an application falls to an officer under regulation 4, 5(2) or 6(3), the authority must not make arrangements that limit the officer’s discretion as to how to determine that application. A council cannot delegate the decision and then bind the outcome.
Finally, regulation 7 caps any committee determining an application under these regulations at 13 members, and regulation 8 requires the Secretary of State to review the regulations and publish a report by 31 October 2028.
What this means if you produce compliance evidence
Most of the commentary on the national scheme of delegation has been about democratic accountability and committee culture. The consequence for technical consultants is more prosaic, and it cuts both ways.
The upside is predictability. Pre-commencement conditions — drainage, energy, water efficiency, overheating, materials, BNG — have always been vulnerable to being pulled into a committee cycle, usually because a scheme was locally contentious rather than because the condition itself was. That route is now closed. From 31 October, a condition-discharge application goes onto a case officer’s list and is determined there. On a scheme where commencement is waiting on a soakaway design or a drainage strategy, removing the possibility of a committee slot removes weeks of uncertainty from the programme.
The downside is that nobody will explain your evidence for you. A committee report is a summary written by an officer who has already read the file. An officer decision is the file. There is no presentation, no debate, no chance for a consultee to elaborate. Whatever you submitted is what gets weighed.
That puts more load on three things:
- Self-contained submissions. The pack has to answer the condition on its own terms, in its own covering note, without requiring the reader to reconstruct the argument from appendices.
- Stated assumptions. Where a calculation depends on a value that could reasonably be challenged — an infiltration rate, a ψ-value, a ventilation rate, an occupancy assumption — say where it came from, in the document, with a date and a source.
- Internal consistency. An officer working through a file alone will notice a number that appears differently in two places long before they will notice a good argument buried on page 40.
None of that is new advice. It is simply that from 31 October it is the only mechanism you have.
Dates worth writing down
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| 15 July 2026 | SI 2026/854 made |
| 31 October 2026 | Regulations come into force; national scheme of delegation applies |
| 31 October 2028 | Secretary of State must publish a review of the regulations |
Applications submitted before 31 October but undetermined on that date will fall to be handled under the new arrangements once they are in force, so there is little value in trying to time a submission around the date. There is value in knowing, for each outstanding condition on your sites, who will be reading it.
Getting the drainage condition right first time
The most common pre-commencement condition on a residential site is surface water drainage, and the most common reason a discharge application stalls is that the infiltration evidence does not stand up on its own — a BRE Digest 365 test with no record of the ground conditions it was taken in, a rate quoted without the three trials, a soakaway sized against a rate the site will never see in February.
That is exactly the kind of gap an officer reading alone will find, and now there is no committee to talk it through with. Our soakaway calculator does the BRE Digest 365 calculation properly — three-trial infiltration rates, storage volumes, half-drain times — and produces output you can put straight into a condition-discharge pack. If the ground conditions your test was taken in are part of the argument, this year’s soil moisture deficit figures are worth quoting alongside it.