Permitting Reform Compared: The US Rewrites NEPA, Britain Passes Its Planning Act and the EU Proposes Deadlines With Tacit Approval

The environmental impact statement for an 88-mile railway in Utah ran to 3,600 pages. When the case reached the US Supreme Court in May 2025, the justices used it to change how the country’s main environmental review law works. In Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, the Court told judges to give agencies substantial deference on how they carry out reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act, and said agencies don’t have to study separate projects upstream or downstream of the one in front of them.

That ruling was one of several moves in 2025 and 2026 that rewrote how rich democracies decide whether to let things be built. The US, Britain and the EU are all trying to make permits faster. They’re doing it in quite different ways.

The United States: rules out, deadlines in

The White House Council on Environmental Quality wrote binding NEPA regulations for decades. In November 2024 a federal appeals court found it had no authority to do so. In January 2025 an executive order told it to rescind them. It did, on an interim basis in February 2025 and finally in January 2026. Each agency now writes its own NEPA procedures. Several did so in mid-2025, some as non-binding guidance.

Congress is working on the statute itself. The House passed the SPEED Act in December 2025 by 221 votes to 196. Clean energy groups dropped their support after a provision on permit certainty was limited to actions from the current administration onward. On 30 September 2026 a bipartisan group of senators, Shelley Moore Capito, Sheldon Whitehouse, Mike Lee and Martin Heinrich, unveiled their own bill. It would set deadlines of one year for an environmental assessment and two years for a full environmental impact statement, cut the time to challenge a permit in court to 150 days, let federal regulators approve interstate power lines if states haven’t acted within a year, and require data centres and other large computing loads to pay their own grid costs. A Senate vote is planned for November.

Britain: courts and nature

Britain’s Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 received Royal Assent on 18 December 2025. Its two biggest changes are about delay in court and delay over nature. It cuts a stage from judicial reviews of major infrastructure projects and blocks appeals in cases judged totally without merit. And it creates a Nature Restoration Fund: developers can pay a levy into it, backed by environmental delivery plans, instead of arranging site-by-site mitigation for each project. The government’s targets are 1.5 million homes and 150 major infrastructure decisions this Parliament.

The EU: clocks and silence

The EU has already capped permits for clean-tech factories under its Net-Zero Industry Act of 2024, at 12 to 18 months. In December 2025 the Commission proposed going further for energy. A permitting directive in its grids package would set the first binding EU-wide time limits for permits for grids, renewables, storage and electric-vehicle charging. If an authority misses the deadline, the permit is treated as granted, a rule known as positive silence. Such projects would also be presumed to be in the overriding public interest. An environmental omnibus proposed the same day aims to cut administrative burdens by a quarter by 2029. All of it is still being negotiated.

Three philosophies

The US is narrowing review: less to study, more deference to agencies, shorter windows to sue. Britain is changing the trade-offs, letting developers pay into a central nature fund instead of fighting over each site. The EU is setting clocks and letting silence count as consent.

Each targets a different bottleneck, and none touches the one the transit cost research found most important: whether governments keep the in-house expertise to design and manage projects well. Faster permits help. They don’t make a station box shorter or a contract better written. Countries that build fast tend to have both quick decisions and capable public engineers. Permitting reform delivers only the first.