The Government has published its new National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) for England, which finally appears to have laid the foundations for planning authorities to give “substantial weight” to the benefits of “maintaining or improving network coverage, capacity, reliability and resilience” of modern gigabit broadband and 5G mobile networks.
The NPPF is designed to set out a foundation for how the government’s policies for plan-making and for making decisions on development proposals in England are expected to be applied. Mobile operators in particular have long called for an updated policy that clearly prioritises telecommunications infrastructure, ideally by helping to reduce the number of applications requiring full planning or prior approval to ease pressure on local authorities and their own plans (here and here).
However, despite their lobbying, the government’s Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 largely seemed to ignore mobile networks, preferring instead to focus on other sectors, such as energy, housing and transport. But the recent 10-Year UK Infrastructure Strategy (10YIS) did signal a change by pledging to “remove barriers to digital infrastructure deployment“.
This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.
You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page.