The NPPF August 2026 edition: what changed and why paragraph numbers no longer work
The National Planning Policy Framework was replaced on 17 August 2026. It is now organised into coded policies rather than running paragraphs, which breaks every objection template that cites a paragraph number.
A new edition, not a revision
On 17 August 2026 the government published a new National Planning Policy Framework for England, replacing the December 2024 edition. Previous editions were a single run of numbered paragraphs, and a generation of objection letters, consultants' reports and templates cite them: "paragraph 116" for highway safety, "paragraph 135" for design. The 2026 edition abolishes that structure.
How the new framework is organised
It is divided into chapters, each with plan-making policies and decision-making policies, and every policy has a code and a title. Highway safety, for example, is now policy TR6, and the refusal test is at TR6(4): proposals should be refused if they would have an unacceptable impact on highway safety or a severe residual cumulative impact on the network. Design is DP1 to DP4, living conditions and pollution are P3, historic environment is HE1 to HE10, flood risk F1 to F9, Green Belt GB1 to GB8. Paragraph numbers restart inside every policy, so a citation must always carry the policy code.
Why this matters for objections
A letter that cites "NPPF paragraph 116" now cites nothing. Officers know the new framework and will read an old citation as a sign the letter was copied from a template or generated without checking. Councils were already reporting, before the change, that a large share of AI-written objections cited policies from the wrong authority or case law that does not exist; the renumbering makes stale citations easier still to spot.
Local plans are unaffected, for now
Your council's adopted local plan keeps its own policy codes and continues to apply. Over time, councils will update plans to reflect the new framework, but a plan adopted under an older NPPF remains the development plan until it is replaced.
How Curtilage handles it
Curtilage holds the August 2026 framework as 131 coded policies, extracted from the published document and checked against its contents page, and cites them by code and sub-paragraph. It also holds Planning Policy Wales, Scotland's NPF4 and Northern Ireland's SPPS, and it never cites one nation's framework for a council in another. Every citation is verified against the database before the letter is shown.
Ready to write it? Curtilage pulls the application, shows the closing date and drafts a letter in your words that cites only policies that exist. £19 per letter.
Start a letterUpdated 2026-09-14. Curtilage is not legal advice.