Good design, clearer decisions: what the draft NPPF means in practice

Chapter 14, “Achieving well-designed places”, redrafts the current design chapter and is intended to work alongside a new consolidated Design and Placemaking Planning Practice Guidance, published for consultation in January 2026.

For all many years that planning policy has addressed design, the system has often lacked a clear and consistent way to judge it. Applicants have therefore been left trying to satisfy broad design ambitions without always knowing how those ambitions will be assessed in practice. The proposed changes are an attempt to make that process more structured, more transparent and, in theory, easier to defend at application and appeal stage.

At the heart of the draft framework is policy DP3, which rewrites the design tests around a set of principles for well-designed places. These begin with context and then run through liveability, climate, nature, movement, built form, public space and identity, with the accompanying guidance describing seven features of a well-designed place, all informed by context. The draft NPPF also gives these principles real weight in decision-making. It says proposals that are not well designed should be refused, that substantial weight should be given to compliance with local design policies, guides, codes and masterplans, and that the national design guidance should help inform decisions where local material is absent. In other words, this is not simply a restatement of familiar aspirations. It is an effort to turn design quality into a more usable assessment framework.

For this reason, the next iteration of the NPPF (expected in the summer) will be significant for design professionals. Much of what it covers will sound familiar to architects, technologists and planners. The difference is that these matters are now being drawn together into a single planning approach that is meant to shape how schemes are explained, tested and decided. If adopted in anything like its current form, the effect may be less about imposing wholly new obligations and more about changing the standard of evidence, analysis and visual justification expected from the outset.

My thinking is that this will not necessarily introduce new policy requirements, but it will change how applications are assessed and justified.

For a long time national policy has talked about good design but has not really explained how officers or inspectors should judge it. That has created a situation where schemes that technically comply with policy still get delayed, negotiated repeatedly or refused because “quality” is difficult to defend either way. The guidance is clearly trying to fix that by giving decision makers a structured way to assess proposals.

The seven features are therefore important, but not because they are new ideas. Most of them already exist in different forms across policy, Building Regulations and local guidance. The change is that they are now being tied together into a single assessment approach.

Liveability in particular moves beyond minimum standards. It is less about floor areas and more about whether a home actually works for modern living. Issues like daylight, dual aspect, working from home and overheating are likely to be looked at more closely at planning stage rather than later technical stages.

Climate is also a noticeable shift. Passive design, orientation and shading have traditionally been engineering or Building Regulations matters, but the guidance brings them into planning. Layout will start to matter as much as specification.

Nature goes further than Biodiversity Net Gain and expects landscape structure to be considered from the start of a scheme rather than added as mitigation. Movement will also have practical implications, as connected streets and walkability will be assessed alongside highway requirements, not after them.

From a technologist’s point of view, the biggest change is how we present information. I do not think this will be solved by longer reports. The document is clearly visual in intent. Clear diagrams explaining context, movement, solar orientation, street enclosure and public space will probably carry more weight than additional written justification.

In terms of the wider direction, it does feel like a move away from the previous focus on “beauty” and towards functionality. Rather than asking whether a place looks traditional, the guidance asks whether it works as a neighbourhood. That is a more realistic and measurable test.

There may be some short term adjustment while both applicants and authorities get used to it, but in the longer term it should reduce redesign and negotiation. If a scheme demonstrates how it meets the seven features from the outset, officers have a more defensible reason to approve it. For applicants that could mean fewer iterations and a clearer route through planning.