England planning rules extend Ramsar site protection

On 20 May 2026, the Government made a new set of regulations under the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025. The title is a mouthful, but the change is quite clear once you strip away the legal wrapping: from 21 May 2026, most of a new package of habitat rules starts in England. According to the explanatory note published on legislation.gov.uk, the big change is that Ramsar sites now have to be treated in the same way as European sites when authorities carry out Habitats Regulations assessments. If you care about how planning decisions affect wetlands, that is the line to hold on to.

If Ramsar sites are unfamiliar, they are wetlands recognised as internationally important under a 1971 treaty signed in Ramsar, Iran. These places matter for birds, water systems and biodiversity, and many are already well known to local communities even when the legal wording around them feels far away. **What this means:** a site that may once have depended more heavily on policy protection now gets firmer treatment in the statutory assessment system. In plain English, planners and decision-makers in England must now check Ramsar impacts through the same legal frame used for European protected sites.

This regulation is not the whole Act coming into force at once. It is what lawyers call a commencement regulation, which is really just a start-date order. The legislation.gov.uk text says this is the third commencement regulation made under the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025. That matters because big Acts often switch on in stages. Here, Part 1 of Schedule 5 starts on 21 May 2026, but paragraph 14(2) is left out for now. If you have ever wondered why an Act can exist before all of it actually applies, this is a very good example.

The other half of the instrument is about transition. New rules do not always apply to old decisions, and this regulation draws that line quite carefully. The changes to the Habitats Regulations do not apply to projects authorised by planning permission granted before 17 August 2020. They also do not apply to projects authorised by what the regulation calls a general consent if the relevant date fell before 21 May 2026. That sounds technical, but it is basically a way of saying some developments approved through broader planning orders or schemes stay under the earlier position.

One detail is especially easy to miss. If a planning permission was granted under section 73 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, the date that counts is not the later section 73 decision. The date that counts is the earlier permission sitting behind it, which the regulation calls the previous permission. For general consents, the clock works differently. If the development needed prior approval, the relevant date is the date that approval was given, the date the authority said no approval was needed, or the date the time limit for making that decision ran out. If no prior approval process applied, the relevant date is when the development began.

So what changes in practice? For many future planning cases in England, Ramsar wetlands now have a stronger place in the legal assessment process. Decision-makers will need to treat them as if they were European sites when applying Part 6 of the Habitats Regulations 2017. **What it means for you:** if you are trying to work out whether the new protection applies to a local scheme, the first question is not only where the project is, but when its permission or approval was first secured. Older permissions, and some developments covered by older general consents, are carved out by the transitional rules.

This is a procedural instrument, signed by Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook on 20 May 2026, so it may not grab attention in the way a major planning reform would. But procedure is often where environmental protection becomes real. A date in a commencement regulation can decide which rules a wetland gets. The simplest way to read a text like this is to ask three questions. What has started? On 21 May 2026, most of Part 1 of Schedule 5 did. What is the practical effect? Ramsar sites are now treated like European sites in habitat assessments. Who is outside the new rule? Some older permissions and certain general consents. Once you have those answers, the legal fog lifts quite a lot.