Infrastructure Planning Fees Add Host Local Authorities

On paper, this looks like a tiny change to a set of planning fee rules. In practice, it tells you something useful about how major infrastructure projects are handled. In the statutory instrument published on legislation.gov.uk, the Government says that from 8 June 2026, a local authority where the relevant land sits will be included in the fee framework for certain nationally significant infrastructure projects. That means host local authorities are being added to the list of prescribed public authorities able to charge fees for relevant services. The regulations were made on 13 May 2026, laid before Parliament on 15 May 2026 and signed by housing minister Matthew Pennycook.

To make sense of that, it helps to slow down. This is a statutory instrument, which is a form of secondary legislation. Instead of building a brand-new planning system, it amends an older set of rules: the Infrastructure Planning (Fees) Regulations 2010, made under the Planning Act 2008. The Planning Act 2008 is the law used for certain nationally significant infrastructure projects. So this is not about an ordinary house extension or a small local planning application. It sits in the separate system used for very large schemes, where the consent process happens at national level.

Here is the key idea. A host local authority is the council for the area where the land involved in the project is located. Even when the final consent process is national, that council still has work to do. It may need to review documents, comment on local impacts and provide information about the area that nobody else can supply as well. **What this means:** before this amendment, the fee rules already named certain public authorities that could charge for relevant services. From 8 June 2026, the host local authority joins that list too. In plain English, councils directly affected on the ground now have a named place in the charging rules.

The legal drafting is narrow, but it matters. One regulation adds definitions of 'the land' and 'local authority' to the 2010 rules, tying those terms back to section 102 of the Planning Act 2008. That may sound technical, yet definitions are what stop a regulation becoming vague or open to dispute later. The other operative change is in Schedule 2 to the 2010 Regulations. In the list of prescribed public authorities, the instrument inserts 'a local authority in whose area the land is situated' straight after Natural Resources Wales. That is the line doing the real work.

The geographical reach is worth noticing as well. The regulations apply across England and Wales and, in a more limited way, to Scotland. The Scottish extension only covers a specific cross-border case: the construction, other than by a gas transporter, of an oil or gas cross-country pipeline with one end in England or Wales and the other in Scotland. **A quick explainer:** this is why legal texts often look more complicated than the policy change itself. The law has to spell out exactly where a rule applies, and where it does not, so that developers, councils and decision-makers are working from the same map.

The explanatory note on legislation.gov.uk says no full impact assessment was produced because no, or no significant, effect on the private, voluntary or public sector is expected. That tells you the Government sees this as a technical amendment rather than a major shift in planning policy. Even so, technical amendments can still matter. If councils are expected to put staff time into nationally significant infrastructure cases, questions about who can charge for that work are not minor details. They affect whether local knowledge is properly built into big planning decisions, and whether councils are expected to carry those costs themselves.

There is also a longer legal story behind this short text. The power used for these 2026 regulations comes from section 54A of the Planning Act 2008, a provision added by the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023. The explanatory material also notes that Schedule 2 itself was only inserted into the fee regulations in 2024, which shows you how planning law often changes through a chain of amendments rather than one dramatic rewrite. If you are learning how infrastructure consent works, this is a useful example to keep. A short statutory instrument can look dry, but it can quietly change who is recognised in the system and who can charge for the work they do. Here, the main lesson is simple: when a major project affects land in a council area, that host local authority now has a clearer, named role in the fee rules.