Host councils can charge NSIP fees from 8 June 2026

At first glance, this looks like one of those tiny legal tweaks that only planning specialists will spot. But it matters because it changes who can recover costs when a very large infrastructure scheme lands in a council area. According to legislation.gov.uk, the Infrastructure Planning (Fees) (Amendment) Regulations 2026 were made on 13 May 2026, laid before Parliament on 15 May 2026, and are due to come into force on 8 June 2026. (legislationtracker.co.uk) Put simply, host local authorities will be added to the list of bodies allowed to charge fees for certain work on nationally significant infrastructure projects. The rules extend to England and Wales, and to Scotland only in the narrow case of some cross-country oil or gas pipelines that run across the border. (legislationtracker.co.uk)

That phrase nationally significant infrastructure projects, or NSIPs, can sound distant, so it helps to translate it. These are the big schemes that are judged important enough to be decided through the Development Consent Order system rather than through ordinary local planning permission. GOV.UK guidance says NSIPs cover areas such as energy, transport, water, wastewater and waste, with examples including power stations, offshore wind farms, major roads, railway lines, airports and reservoirs. (gov.uk) Local councils do not make the final decision on these projects, but they are far from bystanders. The Planning Inspectorate’s advice for local authorities says councils provide local evidence, take part throughout the process, and may later monitor, enforce or discharge parts of the order if consent is granted. (gov.uk)

What changes in law is actually quite narrow. The 2026 regulations add definitions of the land and local authority into the 2010 fees rules, then insert a local authority in whose area the land is situated into Schedule 2, the list of prescribed public authorities that can charge for relevant services. In everyday language, that means the council or councils hosting the site can recover fees for work connected to the project. (legislationtracker.co.uk) That matters because the 2024 amendment had already opened fee charging to eight national bodies, including the Environment Agency, Natural England, National Highways, the Health and Safety Executive and Natural Resources Wales. Host councils were not in that earlier list, so this new instrument closes a gap rather than creating a brand-new fee system from scratch. (legislation.gov.uk)

If you are wondering why government is doing this, the answer is mostly about time and staffing. In its 2024 planning consultation, GOV.UK said local authorities had told ministers that NSIP work can be time-consuming and resource-intensive, while councils had no statutory power to charge for that work and often had to rely on planning performance agreements that could be uncertain and slow to negotiate. (gov.uk) The policy trail also shows this was not a surprise move. A later GOV.UK consultation on reforming the statutory consultee system said ministers had already committed to bring forward secondary legislation so host local authorities could recover costs for relevant services on NSIP applications. (gov.uk)

**What this means in practice:** this instrument does not set a single national fee for every council and every project. The wider fees framework, set out in GOV.UK guidance on the 2010 regulations, says prescribed public authorities can only recover costs that are reasonably incurred and must publish a statement on their website explaining the services charged for and the fee or the way the fee is calculated. Because the 2026 rules add host local authorities to that prescribed list, the same basic approach appears to apply to them as well. (gov.uk) The services covered can stretch across the life of an application, from pre-application advice and consultation responses through examination work and into post-decision implementation such as the discharge of requirements. For developers, that means another formal project cost. For councils, it means a clearer legal route to recover staff time instead of absorbing it into already stretched budgets. (gov.uk)

For readers trying to place this in the bigger picture, think of it as a housekeeping change with real-world consequences. Better resourced councils should, in theory, be in a stronger position to test evidence, flag local impacts and stay involved after consent, which matters when projects can reshape traffic, habitats, construction patterns and local services. That is an inference from the new charging power and the existing role councils already play in the NSIP process. (gov.uk) It is also worth noting what the regulation does not do. It does not hand councils the final say over nationally significant projects, and the explanatory note says no full impact assessment was produced because no significant effect on the private, voluntary or public sector was foreseen. So this is a small legal amendment, but one that tells you something bigger about modern planning: even when decisions are made nationally, local capacity still has to be paid for. (legislationtracker.co.uk)