What does the pledge mean? 

The National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) is a document which sets out the government’s planning policies for England, and outlines how these are “expected to be applied”. 

Since it was first published in 2012, it’s been updated and revised regularly by previous governments to reflect their planning policies. It was last updated by a Conservative government in December 2023, when, among other changes, housing targets were made advisory, rather than mandatory. (Then-housing secretary Michael Gove had announced his intention to make this change in December 2022.) 

In its manifesto, Labour pledged to “immediately update the National Policy Planning Framework to undo damaging Conservative changes, including restoring mandatory housing targets”. (This appears to be a typo, and refers to the National Planning Policy Framework instead.)The wording of Labour’s pledge did not make clear exactly which specific “Conservative changes” it planned to “undo”, or exactly what was meant by “immediately” in this context, given changes to policy don’t often happen overnight. 

What progress has been made?

We’ve updated our rating on this pledge to “achieved”, because on 12 December 2024 the government published an updated version of the NPPF, which included mandatory housing targets. 

Paragraph 61 of the Labour government’s NPPF states the aim of local plans is to “meet an area’s identified housing need”, rather than “to meet as much of an area’s identified housing need as possible”, as was written in the 2023 version of the document. 

This had been a controversial change introduced in the previous version, that gave councils more leeway in hitting local targets—some, including the cross-party Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee, warned it could make it more difficult for the then-government to meet its national target of building 300,000 homes a year by the mid-2020s. 

Under the new NPPF, each area has its own target, but England’s combined annual target is 370,000 homes a year.

We also believe the timing specified in the pledge can be said to have been met, despite the fact that Labour’s manifesto didn’t define what it meant by “immediately”. In a speech on 8 July 2024, three days after forming a government, the chancellor Rachel Reeves said work was “underway” on planning reform, and that the government would reform the NPPF and consult on it “before the end of the month”. 

On 30 July 2024, the government presented a new draft of the NPPF. A consultation on this draft ran until 24 September 2024, before its response and a new version of the NPPF was published on 12 December.