What Changes for Planning and Development if Reform Makes Major Gains in May’s Local Elections?
Planning is intrinsically political and politics, by its very nature, brings change. With Reform UK rising in the polls, the prospect of significant change is potentially closer and more immediate.
At the 2025 local elections Reform won 677 seats – 41% of those contested – and took control of 10 councils. At the time of writing, the party now has more than 900 councillors, eight MPs, two mayors and over 270,000 members. This inexorable rise, if continued into May’s local elections or the next general election, is enough to alter the climate in which planning decisions are made.
Furthermore, the next test is larger than last year’s. On 7 May, voters will choose 4,851 councillors across 134 English councils. Polls put Reform ahead, though the outcome is far from predictable. In March, YouGov put Reform at 23% of the vote, while Ipsos put it at 28%. A PollCheck Council Projector estimates that Reform would gain the most seats, enabling it to take Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Sunderland and Barnsley councils. The projected win of 816 would make it the second largest political party in local government, after Labour.
But while Reform could become considerably more influential after May, the new councillors’ aspirations for change may occur in a patchier and more volatile way than they might hope.
The extent of local power
From a planning point of view, any substantial political shift will be tempered by the fact that councils do not rewrite national planning law, or even guidance. They do, however, change the tone, pace and risk profile of local decision-making. Where Reform leads a unitary, district or borough council, it can directly shape housing strategy, local plan progress and the member-officer climate around development management. Where it controls a county council, decisions on minerals and waste, highways, flooding and consultation on nationally significant infrastructure projects will feel some impact.
Reform’s priorities for planning and development
Almost a year on from Reform’s significant gains in the 2025 local elections and taking into account the party’s 2024 general election manifesto, observations indicate that Reform is not anti-development per se. It is selective about the type of development it supports and sceptical about the broader policy context in which that development is enabled: its manifesto backed fast-tracking planning and tax incentives for brownfield sites, a review of the planning system and a ‘loose-fit planning’ approach for large residential developments. The policies page on the Reform website adds a promise to scrap Net Zero as a policy driver, simplify planning and cut regulation. In essence, schemes that can be justified as practical, brownfield and economically useful are supported; less so renewable energy schemes and changes to greenfield land. The broader policy context is Reform’s immigration policy: its 2024 manifesto argues that ‘strict limits on immigration are the only way to relieve the pressure on our housing.’
Reform does not lack sector expertise. Richard Tice brings a long property background and Robert Jenrick is a former housing secretary. Simon Dudley, the former chair of Homes England and the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation, has recently been appointed housing and infrastructure spokesperson. He has committed to leading a review of planning, housing delivery and national infrastructure. Reform can no longer be dismissed as a party with no one in the room who understands land, delivery or regeneration.
The local record to date
Examples of Reform councillors in action are less about wholesale refusal of development than a strong anti-sustainability stance. Lincolnshire County Council has moved away from Net Zero targets in its environmental policy, West Northamptonshire has removed its local Net Zero targets and, in County Durham, the planning committee refused the Harehill Farm solar farm and battery storage scheme, against officer recommendation.
The restraining impact of the law
New administrations do not start with a blank sheet of paper: they inherit statutory duties, officer structures, committee procedures and, of course, the National Planning Policy Framework – at a time when national policy has gained greater weight in the interpretation of local plans. Local Government Lawyer has already argued that some of Reform’s early local government promises, such as removing diversity roles for ideological reasons, are likely to collide with employment law. It states separately that Kent’s early DOGE-style initiative gave a flavour of the same problem, with warnings that officers obstructing an internal review could be treated as committing gross misconduct. Councillors are quickly learning that when campaign language meets governance, governance usually triumphs.
Planning works in much the same way. A Reform-led authority may become more combative, more resistant to renewables, or more receptive to arguments that affordable housing and sustainability initiatives have become unrealistic. But refusals need defensible planning grounds, weak decisions still go to appeal and, especially following recent changes by Matthew Pennycook, national policy will trump anti-development decision-making. On this basis, I suspect the likeliest short-term shift is not liberalisation nor wholesale anti-development but politicisation – more theatre, more abrupt policy signalling and more attempts to diverge from the interpretation of national rules.
There is also the people risk. Fast-growing parties, not least populist parties, often attract a mixture of defectors, local campaigners and single-issue candidates. While that can broaden their reach, it can also make discipline harder. Recent turbulence in Staffordshire, which is onto its fourth leader in under a year and has been beset with racism scandals, protests, resignations and bullying accusations, is a reminder that winning seats and governing institutions are different disciplines. For developers and landowners, the problem is not just the ideology but the inconsistency.
Beyond May
Following May’s local elections, commonly branded as the government’s ‘mid-terms’, thoughts will move on to the next general election.
To understand what impact a populist party might have in power, it is useful to consider international comparisons. Looking at Donald Trump’s America or Giorgia Meloni’s Italy, such parties often combine a critique of bureaucracy with a selective willingness to back projects they regard as economically useful or politically resonant. Trump’s recent initiative has been to remove regulatory barriers to affordable home construction, while Meloni has backed the so-called ‘Save Milan’ bill to unfreeze more than 100 stalled building sites in Italy’s main property market, intervening to bring legal clarity where planning disputes had paralysed development.
Translating this into a UK planning context suggests that a Reform government would probably mean a stronger brownfield-first doctrine, a much harder attack on Net Zero as a planning rationale, more impatience with consultation and environmental processes where those are seen as causes of delay, and perhaps a greater willingness to accept lower affordable housing asks where viability is weak. But it would also mean greater policy volatility.
So, if Reform does well in May, I would not expect planning legislation to change rapidly. I would expect the politics around planning to become pricklier and policies, specifically those concerning brownfield development and sustainability, to be refocused.
Some councils will become more combative on solar, grey belt and officer advice. Others will discover, quite quickly, that administration is a discipline of law, budgets and compromise rather than slogan. For those of us advising landowners, developers, and investors, the response is neither alarm nor complacency but to read local politics even more carefully, test assumptions earlier and recognise that the next phase of planning risk may be shaped less by what the statute says than by how political administrations choose to use the scope for manoeuvre available to them.
