What it is
Planning Distilled is independent research on how planning decisions in England are being made under the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) that took effect on 17 August 2026. It reads what Planning Inspectors, the Secretary of State and councils actually decided, and sets out the findings with quotations and a page for every decision cited.
It is not connected with the Planning Inspectorate, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government or any council. Nothing on the site is legal advice.
What is here
- NPPF 2026 Navigator: an interactive decision route through the Framework, also published as one page of text.
- Decisions under the August 2026 NPPF: a note on every decision in the database, with the finding on each Framework policy the decision turned on.
- Service Village Does Not Mean Sustainable: how inspectors and councils have used settlement-tier labels, with a register of the decisions.
- Local planning authorities and settlements: reviews of one council's decisions and of single sites.
How it is checked
The pages quote published planning decisions. Page and paragraph references are to the officer report or the decision letter. The service-village register and the review of Stratford-on-Avon District Council's decisions each say how their quotations were checked against those sources. How the decisions database was collected, how the Navigator's Framework quotations are verified against the published text, and what the notes have been cross-checked against are set out in Method & cross-references.
Reusing the research
Text, data and images on this site are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, quote, republish, translate and adapt them, for any purpose, with credit to Planning Distilled. That includes indexing by search engines, use by AI assistants to answer questions, and use as training data for AI models. Crawlers are welcome: see robots.txt and llms.txt.
Quotations from decision letters, officer reports, development plans and the Framework remain the copyright of their publishers.
To credit a page, name Planning Distilled and link to the page used:
Planning Distilled, “Service Village Does Not Mean Sustainable”, https://planningdistilled.org/research/england/service-village/
Data downloads
- Every decision note as JSON and the decision index as CSV.
- The decision route as Markdown; each decision note is also available as Markdown from its page.
- The route and every decision note as one text file.
- The site's files are in a public repository: github.com/planningdistilled/main-site.