If you work on schemes of 10 to 49 homes, the section 106 agreement is often the thing that decides whether permission arrives in three months or nine. On 25 August 2026 MHCLG published a consultation on four standard s106 templates aimed squarely at that size of site. It runs for eight weeks, closing at 11:59 on 20 October 2026, and applies to England only.
What’s being consulted on
The consultation covers four draft documents, drafted for MHCLG by Town Legal LLP working with the Planning Advisory Service:
- Bilateral agreement — standard clauses, plus schedules for Financial Contributions and the Council’s Covenants.
- Unilateral Undertaking — standard clauses, plus a schedule for Financial Contributions.
- Affordable Housing Schedule for Full Planning Permissions, including a discretionary cascade mechanism.
- Affordable Housing Schedule for Outline Planning Permissions.
The draft templates are published alongside the consultation document, and there are 80 questions to respond to.
”Medium-sized” now has a formal definition
The threshold comes from the new NPPF published on 17 August 2026, which, as the consultation puts it, “formally introduces the category of ‘medium’ development (schemes of up to 2.5 hectares in area and between 10 and 49 units).”
That’s a meaningful change from the earlier proposal, which had floated 10–49 units on sites of up to 1.0 hectare. The area limit has more than doubled, so the templates will catch a lot more of the typical SME site than first proposed.
These aren’t optional in practice
The templates are not legally mandatory, but the new NPPF gives them real weight. The consultation points to policy DM6(4), which
“sets out … that where national model planning obligations are relevant to the development, they should be used unless there are strong reasons for using a different obligation.”
MHCLG is explicit about the intent: the templates are “intended to become the default for applications in the future, reducing time spent agreeing standard provisions and freeing up local capacity to focus negotiations on more complex obligations.” Government also says it “intends to publish further model obligations and planning conditions to support consistency in decision making in due course.”
The one carve-out is the affordable housing cascade mechanism, which is proposed as discretionary for councils to use where they think it appropriate.
The bit that matters for environmental obligations
Here’s the part worth understanding properly. The templates are content-neutral shells. Affordable housing is the only substantive obligation actually drafted. Everything else — nutrient mitigation payments, SuDS and drainage maintenance sums, biodiversity net gain contributions, open space, education, highways — is left to be inserted into Schedule 2 as a named “Contribution”.
We checked the consultation document carefully, and it does not mention energy efficiency, carbon, Part L, the Future Homes Standard, water efficiency, nutrient neutrality, phosphates or nitrates, biodiversity net gain, SuDS, sustainable drainage, flood risk, overheating or EV charging anywhere. Not once. None of the 80 questions asks about them either.
That isn’t necessarily a criticism — a template that tried to draft every environmental obligation for every catchment in England would be unusable. But it does mean the standardisation stops exactly where the technical work starts. Schedule 2 works as a repeatable pro-forma: as the consultation explains, “for each contribution, or instalment of a contribution, sub clauses (a) and (b) will need to be copied and completed with the name of the contribution and the relevant date.” For outline permissions, where the sum depends on the quantum approved at reserved matters, “the formula for calculating the contribution should be included.”
So on a nutrient-constrained site, your phosphate or nitrogen mitigation payment is still a bespoke figure that someone has to calculate, justify against the Regulation 122 CIL tests (necessary, directly related, and fairly and reasonably related in scale and kind), and drop into a blank line in an otherwise standard document.
Other practical points
- Payment triggers. Schedule 2 provides for payment before specified points such as commencement or first occupation, and MHCLG acknowledges instalments linked to build-out, occupation of a set number of dwellings, or phases.
- Indexation. There’s a dedicated indexation clause, and question 30 asks which indices are appropriate for particular types of contribution. If you’ve ever watched a nutrient credit price move between agreement and payment, that question is worth answering.
- Unspent money. The bilateral agreement’s Schedule 3 requires contributions to be used solely for the purpose secured and held in an interest-bearing account, with a default five-year repayment window for unspent sums. Question 56 asks whether councils should instead be able to spend unclaimed sums on other mitigation in the vicinity.
- Still site-specific. MHCLG is clear that “agreements must therefore be considered on a site-by-site basis to ensure that they are appropriate for a particular development.”
Why this is worth ten minutes of your time
The stated problem is a familiar one. In MHCLG’s words, s106 negotiation “has become synonymous with inefficiency and delay, which demands significant local authority resources and can have a disproportionately negative impact on Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) builders.”
If that lands with you, the consultation is a genuine chance to shape the drafting — particularly on indexation, payment triggers and how environmental contributions get expressed. Responses go through Citizen Space, with enquiries to standards106consultation2026@communities.gov.uk.
For most schemes at this size, though, the s106 was never the hard part. The hard part is arriving at a defensible mitigation figure in the first place — and on a nutrient-constrained catchment that means a nutrient budget that stands up to Natural England scrutiny, for both nitrogen and phosphorus where the catchment demands it. If you’d rather have that number settled before the s106 conversation starts, get in touch and we’ll tell you how we’d approach your site.
Sources: Standard planning agreements for medium-sized sites, GOV.UK (published 25 August 2026) · Consultation document (full text), GOV.UK · Letter from MHCLG to Chief Planning Officers, 25 August 2026, GOV.UK · The Planning Jungle summary, 27 August 2026