.JPG){kind=link}
On 7 September 2026, at the Manufacturing Technology Centre in Coventry, Chancellor John Healey stood in front of a room of engineers and announced that judicial review reforms originally drawn up for clean energy would be extended to all major infrastructure projects, giving Parliament the power to designate and approve the country’s most important schemes with what the Treasury described as enhanced protection from legal challenge.
The mechanism is a statutory category of Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project — projects already determined by ministers rather than councils because of their scale and national importance. What the Treasury is now proposing is a second tier above that: a designation of “critical national importance” for a smaller set of projects, which would carry stronger legal protection against judicial review. The reforms reflect lessons drawn from the Fingleton Review and, according to Construction News, would apply to nuclear, offshore wind, transport, and water schemes alike.
The “axe” in Healey’s framing is pointed specifically at judicial review. He told the audience that judicial reviews typically delay NSIPs by 18 months on average, citing the two reviews filed against Sizewell C — both of which were eventually dismissed — as the kind of pattern the new designation is designed to interrupt. New Civil Engineer noted that, under the proposed framework, Parliament would be able to designate individual projects as being of critical national importance, with the consequence that the usual avenues for legal challenge against the underlying development consent would be materially narrowed for those projects specifically.
The reform is, in substance, a workaround for what Healey described as a system “where every decision can face another challenge, consultation or review before a single brick is laid.” Construction News’s reporting made the same point in plainer terms: the existing planning and consenting regime was designed to be rigorous, and it is, but the legal-challenge layer on top of it has accumulated into a parallel system of delay whose costs fall disproportionately on the projects the government most wants built.
What is less clear is which projects will actually end up on the new designation list. A Freedom of Information request reported by New Civil Engineer showed that the government has not yet publicly identified which schemes will be designated as being of critical national importance, which means the practical scope of the reform remains undefined even as the announcement itself is being made. The Treasury announcement was also paired with a separate commitment to a new review of UK rail infrastructure costs — a distinct policy thread that, while bundled into the same Coventry speech, addresses a different problem: not the legal-challenge layer over the planning system, but the unit cost of what gets built once consent is in hand.
The legislative route matters here. Healey’s announcement is a policy commitment, not a statute. Construction News noted that the reforms will require further primary legislation and a meaningful implementation period before any project can actually be designated under the new category — a gap between announcement and effect that, given the 18-month delay the reforms are designed to prevent, is itself worth tracking. On a planning regime where every month of slippage has a measurable cost in financing and programme, the timeline between an announcement like this and an operative designation regime is exactly where the kind of delay the reforms are meant to eliminate tends to reappear.
What is genuinely new is the principle: that a small set of nationally critical projects should sit in a different legal posture from the rest of the NSIP pipeline, with the courts afforded less room to revisit the underlying merits of decisions Parliament has already taken. Whether that principle survives the legislation, which projects it ends up covering, and whether the courts treat a statutorily reinforced consent as meaningfully harder to disturb than the existing regime — these are the questions the next year will answer, and they are the questions that will determine whether “taking an axe to delays” is a description of what just happened or of what eventually does.