In this guest post, David Eddy, a campaigner with Drawing a Line in the Chalk in North Yorkshire, reviews the change in direction in national planning policy on onshore oil and gas and asks whether it will make any practical difference to the communities living with the risks?

In October 2025, I wrote for Drill Or Drop about the challenges faced by local communities confronting technically complex oil and gas planning applications.

Writing as the then chair of Foxholes and Butterwick Parish Council, I described a system in which well-resourced developers could call on specialist consultants and technical advisers, while parish councils and residents struggled to obtain information, scrutinise environmental assessments and secure independent expertise.

I argued that fragmented regulation, inadequate transparency and an over reliance on mitigation left communities at a structural disadvantage.

A year on, the national planning landscape has changed. The revised National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), published in August 2026, and its updated mineral policies, published in September, introduce a more restrictive approach to onshore oil and gas extraction.

But the question remains: Has the planning system changed in ways that will actually help communities protect their environment?

A change in policy direction, but not a ban

In chapter 11, the revised NPPF contains a specific policy on development involving peat, coal and onshore oil and gas.

Policy M5 states that development involving onshore oil and gas extraction should be refused unless it falls within specified exceptions. These include development necessary to facilitate exploration, appraisal or production where the North Sea Transition Authority (NTSA) has granted petroleum rights.

This is a significant change in the way national policy expresses its approach to fossil-fuel development. But it does not amount to a blanket prohibition on projects within pre-existing licensed areas.

For communities challenging exploration proposals, the implications need careful examination. The existence of petroleum rights does not, by itself, demonstrate that a particular development is environmentally acceptable or that it satisfies every other relevant planning policy.

The question is whether decisionmakers will properly scrutinise the evidence, apply the relevant environmental protections and explain why the benefits of a proposal do, or do not, outweigh its impacts.

The evidence must be good enough to support the decision

Our experience at Foxholes illustrates the challenge.

A technically complex application can contain hundreds of pages of assessments without necessarily answering every question that matters to the community.

A hydrogeological assessment, for example, needs to be examined not simply for its conclusions but for the evidence supporting them:

• What site-specific investigations have been undertaken?
• Which assumptions have been made?
• How are uncertainties addressed?
• What happens if containment systems fail, extreme weather occurs or impacts persist after operations have ceased?

These are not arguments claiming that every development will cause harm. They are questions that must be answered sufficiently well before a planning authority can make a properly-informed decision.

The revised NPPF’s Policy M4 requires mineral development to avoid unacceptable adverse impacts on the natural and historic environment and human health, taking account of other national decision making policies and cumulative effects. It also addresses restoration and aftercare.

That framework makes the quality of the evidence particularly important. A conclusion that impacts are acceptable should be supported by evidence, not simply by a statement of intent or an expectation that proposed mitigation will work.

Mitigation is a lessening of risk. Mitigation is not the same as eliminating risk.

Communities are frequently reassured that risks will be controlled through engineering measures, planning conditions and environmental permits. Those measures can have a role to play and may be important. But their existence does not automatically resolve every concern.

There is a difference between demonstrating that a risk can be managed in principle and showing that the proposed arrangements are appropriate for a particular site, geology, groundwater system and operating plan.

There is also a difference between the controls imposed at the planning stage and those subsequently dealt with through environmental permitting or other regulatory regimes.

Communities need to understand which authority is responsible for each issue, what evidence it has considered, how compliance will be monitored and what happens if something goes wrong?

Long-term well integrity, restoration and the financial responsibility for dealing with future problems deserve particular attention. A planning decision should not rely on an assumption that a risk will somehow be resolved by another regulator at a later stage.

The cumulative evidence problem

One of the most important lessons from our experience in Foxholes is that environmental risks cannot always be assessed adequately in isolation.

In its consolidated response to Egdon Resources’ application, Foxholes and Butterwick Parish Council have challenged the way the proposed development’s impacts were assessed separately. Traffic, air quality, noise, light, landscape, groundwater and public amenity are not independent issues experienced by different communities. They interact in the same place, at the same time, and affect the same residents and environment.

The revised NPPF now provides a particularly relevant framework for examining this problem. Policy M4 requires mineral development proposals to avoid unacceptable adverse impacts on the natural and historic environment and human health, taking account of the other national decision-making policies. Crucially, it explicitly includes the cumulative effects of multiple impacts from individual sites and/or from a number of sites in a locality.

At Foxholes, that means looking beyond individual assurances that particular impacts can be mitigated.

The proposed wellsite involves drilling through the Principal Chalk Aquifer, within a complex groundwater environment connected to local surface water systems. The assessment must also consider the potential implications of well integrity, subsurface geological pathways, methane or saline migration, operational chemicals and hydrocarbons, and the consequences if containment fails.

At the same time, the development would bring additional heavy traffic onto rural roads, alongside existing traffic, noise and road safety concerns. Construction, round the clock drilling, vehicle movements and potential flaring could combine to affect residential amenity and the character of the surrounding countryside.

Each of these issues deserves proper assessment in its own right. But that is not enough. The local planning authority also needs to understand how the impacts interact: do the assessments use an adequate baseline and would the combined effects be acceptable at this particular location?

There is a further question about the boundaries of the assessment. The applicant acknowledges that a successful exploration programme could lead to subsequent applications for appraisal and production. Those later stages would require their own planning decisions, but their foreseeable implications should not be confused with wholly unrelated future development. The authority needs to be clear about what the current application includes, what it excludes, and whether any relevant cumulative effects have been left unexamined.

The same applies to the history of the site. The nearby Fordon-1 proposal was withdrawn in 2013 following objections from Yorkshire Water and the Environment Agency concerning groundwater vulnerability and containment. That history does not prove that the present proposal is unacceptable, but it is relevant evidence that should be considered when assessing whether the current application has adequately addressed the risks associated with the local hydrogeological system.

There is also a significant development in the evidence base.

In December 2025, the British Geological Survey (BGS) completed new geological mapping of the Yorkshire Wolds, improving understanding of the Chalk Aquifer’s complex geological structure and fault network. This work post-dates Egdon’s Hydrogeological and Flood Risk Assessment, submitted in November 2025. North Yorkshire Council must therefore establish whether this new evidence has been taken into account and whether Egdon’s assessment adequately reflects the latest understanding of geological structures and potential groundwater pathways. Where a development involves drilling through a Principal Aquifer supplying drinking water to over 900,000 people in East Yorkshire, the adequacy and currency of the evidence are fundamental to determining whether the risks have been properly assessed.

The central question is, therefore, not whether every individual risk can be described as unlikely, or whether a mitigation measure exists for each one. It is whether the evidence demonstrates that the combined impacts and uncertainties have been properly understood and that the development would be acceptable in this particular setting.

Policy M4 gives decision-makers a clear reason to ask that question. The challenge now is to ensure that cumulative impacts are genuinely assessed, rather than acknowledged in policy but overlooked in practice.

The imbalance in resources remains

Even where national policy provides a clear basis for challenging a proposal, communities must still assemble the evidence and make their case.

Developers can employ specialist planners, lawyers, geologists and hydrogeologists. Parish Councils and volunteer campaign groups, such as Drawing a Line in the Chalk, often have to scrutinise the same technical material with limited funds, often no experience or expertise in this field, and considerable demands on their time.

That inequality matters. An objection supported by specialist evidence may expose a weakness that would otherwise go unexamined. But obtaining that evidence can be beyond the means of the people most directly affected.

If the planning system expects communities to engage meaningfully with complex applications, it should consider how they can access independent professional advice.

Modest funding for technical scrutiny, early access to application documents, clear non-technical summaries and sufficient time to review substantial new evidence would make a practical difference.

Independent review need not mean that every applicant-funded report is unreliable. It means ensuring that important conclusions can be challenged and tested where the consequences of getting them wrong could be serious.

What should change now?

The revised NPPF is an opportunity to improve both the substance and the practice of planning decisions. Local planning authorities (North Yorkshire Council in our case) should ensure that decisions are based on sufficiently robust evidence, with risks, uncertainties and cumulative impacts addressed explicitly.

Regulators should make relevant information available in a way that enables the LPA and the public to understand the issues within their respective remits.

Applicants should provide accessible explanations of their proposals and make the supporting evidence available early enough for meaningful scrutiny.

Government should consider practical support for communities facing complex applications, including support from the LPA and access to independent technical advice.

Finally, decision makers should distinguish between the existence of a mitigation proposal and evidence that it is adequate, enforceable and appropriate for the site concerned.

A fairer system is still needed

The new national planning policy establishes a more restrictive approach to onshore oil and gas. That is a welcome development in the policy debate, but the practical test will be how the NPPF is applied to proposals.

For communities such as ours, the issue is not opposition to development for its own sake. It is whether decisions are made on the basis of sound evidence, with environmental risks properly understood and local people given a meaningful opportunity to participate.

A year ago, I described the experience as playing a board game in which another rule was announced after we had rolled the dice. The rules have now changed. But will communities finally have a fair chance to play by them?

So the central question now is not simply whether the new NPPF is better, but whether a more restrictive national policy on fossil fuels will be matched by a planning process in which communities can properly scrutinise the evidence and decisionmakers fully utilise the evidence to inform decision making and ensure they are accountable for the conclusions they reach?

David Eddy, Drawing a Line in the Chalk