The planning system in England is changing significantly. For developers and their consultants, one question is becoming increasingly central to site strategy: does your site sit within walking distance of a genuinely well-connected train station? Under the draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) published in December 2025, that question now has a specific, testable policy answer, and the stakes are high.
Key Highlights
- The draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) introduces a clear policy definition of what counts as a “well connected” railway station and why it matters for development strategy.
- Sites within walking distance of qualifying stations may support higher density residential development of 50 dwellings per hectare, including in certain Green Belt locations outside settlements.
- A station is considered “well connected” if it sits within a top-60 Travel to Work Area by GVA and has at least four trains per hour overall or two per hour in one direction during the weekday daytime timetable.
- The draft policy forms part of wider reforms introducing National Decision- Making Policies (NDMPs), which will limit local authorities’ ability to diverge from national policy.
- Using spatial analysis, LandTech has developed a methodology to identify land parcels genuinely accessible to qualifying stations and filter out key environmental and planning constraints.
The Draft NPPF; Where Has It Come From and Where Is It Going?
The NPPF is the government’s principal document setting out national planning policy for England. It guides both how local authorities prepare their local plans and how planning applications are decided. It is, in practice, the backbone of the English planning system.
The current version was updated in December 2024, representing a significant pro-growth shift under the Labour government. The government followed this with a further draft revision published in December 2025, introducing proposed changes to housing delivery, Green Belt policy, affordable housing, and the plan-making system.
The public consultation on the draft ran to 10th March 2026. The government has indicated it anticipates completing its analysis of responses and publishing an update in Summer 2026. While timeframes for the publication of the final version are not set, there is an expectation that the government will push for publication as soon as possible.
This means that, whilst the final wording is not yet confirmed, developers and their advisers cannot afford to wait. The policy direction is clear, the consultation is closed, and the final version is a matter of months away. Sites and strategies need to be assessed now.
One of the most substantive structural changes in the draft is the introduction of National Decision-Making Policies (NDMPs). Local plans that conflict with NDMPs will carry very limited weight once the revised NPPF takes effect, encouraging greater consistency and limiting local variation. In practical terms, this reduces the
ability of individual local authorities to dilute or reinterpret national policy in their own plans, which raises the stakes around getting the national policy right, and understanding it precisely.
The Station Connectivity Policy: What It Actually Says
One of the most significant policy changes in the draft is the permanent presumption in favour of suitably located development, with the government making development of suitable land in urban areas acceptable by default. Within that broader framework, the station connectivity provisions are particularly significant
for site identification and promotion.
The draft NPPF promotes higher-density residential development at 50 dwellings per hectare near “well-connected” railway stations located outside settlements, including land within the Green Belt, subject to minimum service levels.
The policy definition of “well-connected” is specific. According to footnote 26 of the draft NPPF, a well-connected station is one within a top-60 Travel to Work Area by Gross Value Added (GVA) that is served, during the normal weekday timetable, by four trains or trams per hour overall, or two per hour in any one direction throughout the daytime.
For developers, this is a significant opportunity. Land near qualifying stations that would previously have faced a difficult policy context, particularly on the urban fringe or within the Green Belt, now has a clearer route to support in principle. The policy logic is to align land use with transport investment and reduce car dependency. The practical implication is that station proximity, properly assessed against the policy thresholds, becomes a material factor in site strategy.
Translating Policy Into Spatial Intelligence: The LandTech Approach
The challenge for developers and their advisers is that the policy text, whilst precise, is not easy to apply at scale. Which stations actually qualify? Which land parcels fall within genuine walking distance of those stations, rather than just within a radius on a map? And which of those parcels are free from the constraints that would prevent development regardless of transport connectivity?
LandTech has built a methodology to answer those questions systematically, drawing on a combination of official datasets and spatial analysis. The approach works in four stages:
Stage 1 - Which Stations Qualify?
The first is establishing which stations qualify under the policy. This requires processing official rail timetable data, cross-referenced against station location data and filtered against ONS Travel to Work Area GVA rankings. The result is a classified set of stations that either meet the “well-connected” threshold of four or more services per hour, or fall into the qualifying but directionally contingent category of two to four services per hour.
Stage 2 - Which Stations Are Accessible?
The second stage is determining what is genuinely accessible on foot from each qualifying station. Rather than applying a simple radius, which overstates accessibility and does not reflect how people actually walk, the analysis models the real path network around each station, taking into account actual footpaths and roads and a realistic walking distance. This produces a far more accurate picture of which land parcels are physically connected to each station.
Stage 3 - Which Adjacent Land Parcels Can Accommodate Development?
The third stage is identifying the land parcels that adjoin this accessible network and are of a type that could accommodate development, filtering out residential and commercial land in favour of undeveloped natural land parcels
Stage 4 - Constraint Filtering
The fourth stage is constraint filtering. Parcels that fall within environmental or policy constraints, including flood zones, SSSIs, and Special Areas of Conservation among others, are removed from the output, leaving a clean dataset of land that is both accessible and, on the available evidence, free from the principal barriers to
development.
The current set of ‘footnote 7’ constraints (with the exception of Green Belt) has been used as a basis for this constraint analysis. Some constraints have led to sites being removed completely (Flood Zones, for example). Sites affected by other constraints have been flagged as ‘constrained’, but retained in the analysis because
the constraint should be able to be overcome through the planning process.
The output is a national spatial dataset of land parcels that are accessible from well-connected train stations and unconstrained by the designations most likely to impede development promotion.
Results
The resulting output has given us a set of sites that meet the possible criteria for housing delivery under the policies within the Draft NPPF. We can assume that, due to other infrastructure and green space requirements on these sites, that around 60% of each site would be able to accommodate housing delivery.
By applying the proposed 50 dwellings per hectare (dph) density target to the sites that we have identified through this process, we’ve been able to calculate the approximate number of new homes that this policy may facilitate.
In total, our findings indicate that nearly 190,000 homes could be facilitated, all within 800m of well-connected train stations (being stations with more than 4 services an hour). When you also include train stations with between 2 and 4 services an hour, which will be classified as ‘well connected’ if both the trains are
heading the same direction, that number jumps to nearly 465,000 homes.
The analysis highlighted that the biggest opportunity area is Stratford-on-Avon, with capacity for over 31 thousand new homes spread across 8 qualifying stations. At the station level, the highest potential lies on land surrounding Knebworth Rail Station, which has capacity for 11,624 new homes.
Exploring the Opportunity: The LandTech Interactive Map
The numbers above tell part of the story. But planning opportunity is inherently spatial - and the picture looks very different depending on where you're focused.
The map below plots every local planning authority (LPA) in our analysis. Each circle represents an LPA with qualifying stations nearby, sized by the number of potential homes that could be unlocked under the draft policy. Click any circle to see the headline figures for that area, including the number of qualifying stations and how it ranks nationally.
You can filter by region or set a minimum dwelling threshold to focus on the areas most relevant to your pipeline.
Top 10 LPAs
Top 10 Stations
Want to see the full picture?
This analysis is just a snapshot of what's possible with the right spatial intelligence. LandTech's platform helps developers and their advisers identify, assess, and act on opportunities like these - faster and at scale.
If the draft NPPF's station connectivity policy is relevant to your pipeline, we'd love to show you how LandTech can help you get ahead of it.
Book a demo today and see the data behind the opportunity.
