Every mechanism this publication has taken apart works in the same direction. A formula in Whitehall sets a number. A test enforces it. A presumption punishes the council that falls behind. A viability assessment reduces what the community was promised. The parish council sits at the bottom of all of it, and the honest conclusion of our explainer on neighbourhood planning was that if you want to prevent what gets built, the system has already decided that question.
Something has changed, and it went almost unreported.
What section 113 actually does.
The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 received Royal Assent on 18 December 2025. Section 113 sits in Part 5, which deals with compulsory purchase, and it does two things.
First, it amends the Acquisition of Land Act 1981 by removing subsection (2A), a restriction that stopped an acquiring authority confirming its own compulsory purchase order where compensation was to be assessed under section 14A of the Land Compensation Act 1961.
Second, and this is the part that matters here, it inserts a new paragraph A1 into Schedule 2A, adding:
"Section 125 of the Local Government Act 1972 (compulsory acquisition of land on behalf of parish or community councils)."
Section 14A of the Land Compensation Act 1961 is headed, in the legislation's own words, the case "where prospect of planning permission to be ignored". In plain terms, it is the provision that lets compensation be assessed without hope value.
So the effect of section 113 is that compulsory purchase made on behalf of a parish, town or community council is now among the powers for which a direction removing hope value can be sought.
Why hope value is the whole argument.
Anyone who has read our piece on land value knows the number.
Agricultural land is worth roughly £8,500 an acre. The same land with residential planning permission is worth around £790,000. Nothing has been built. A decision was made, and value was created.
Hope value is the price of the expectation of that decision. A landowner selling a field near a settlement edge does not sell it at agricultural value, because both parties know what it might one day become. The buyer pays for the prospect. That expectation is why a parish council wanting to buy a field for six affordable homes has historically found it priced as though it were forty market ones.
Remove hope value from the compensation and the arithmetic inverts. The land is valued for what it is, the uplift stays inside the scheme, and the uplift is what pays for the housing to be affordable. It is the same mechanism that made the post-war new towns possible, and it is the mechanism this publication described as having been tried three times in England and abolished within a decade each time.
Every mechanism this publication has explained runs one way, from Whitehall down to the parish. This one runs the other way, and it is the only one that does.— The Editor · Ground Level, August 2026
What this is not.
Four limits, and they matter more than the headline.
It is not a new power to buy land. Section 125 of the Local Government Act 1972 has existed for over fifty years. A parish council cannot make a compulsory purchase order itself. It asks the district or unitary council to make one on its behalf, and that council decides whether to. Section 113 changes what the compensation looks like if that happens. It does not change who decides.
It is not automatic. Removing hope value requires a direction, and a direction has to be justified in the public interest. The framework for that came in through the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023, which allowed acquiring authorities to include such directions where the public interest supported it, in cases such as public sector led affordable housing, health and education. Section 113 adds parish CPOs to the list of powers eligible for that treatment. It does not guarantee the direction is given.
Commencement is staggered. Some provisions of the Act took effect on Royal Assent, more came into force on 18 February 2026, and others await commencement regulations. Before relying on this, check whether the relevant provision is in force on the day you need it.
Nobody has done it yet. There is no reported case of a parish council in England acquiring land under section 125 with a hope value direction. This is a power on paper. The first council to use it will be doing something new, with the costs and the risks that implies.
What it would take in practice.
A parish that wanted to use this would need four things, and the second is the hard one.
A site, and a reason it cannot be delivered any other way. Compulsory purchase is a last resort in law, and an authority will be asked why negotiation failed.
The district or unitary council willing to make the order. This is the real gate. The council carries the legal risk, the cost of the inquiry if the order is opposed, and the compensation liability. A district facing abolition under local government reorganisation may reasonably be unwilling to start something it will not finish.
A scheme the housing can actually be delivered through, which in practice means a housing association or a community land trust as the eventual owner, because a parish council is not a registered provider.
Money, both for the acquisition and for the process. This is where the CIL neighbourhood portion becomes relevant. A parish with a made neighbourhood plan receives 25% of Community Infrastructure Levy receipts from development in its area, uncapped, against 15% capped without one. That share can be spent on affordable housing and on the plan itself. In a district with an active development pipeline, that is the only meaningful sum most parishes control.
Which produces an unexpected argument for making a neighbourhood plan. Our explainer concluded that a plan gives you real power over design and money but no power to prevent. That conclusion still holds. What has changed is that the money now has something more useful to buy.
Why this was worth writing about.
It would be easy to overstate this. One clause, in a long Act, adding one power to a schedule, and nobody has used it.
It is worth writing about because of what it is an exception to. Every other thing on this site describes a mechanism that transfers decisions upward and value outward: a formula set nationally, a test applied by an inspector, an uplift captured by whoever held the option agreement. The parish is the object of all of it.
Section 113 is small and it runs the other way. It will not change a housing target, it will not restore a council's power to refuse, and on current evidence it will be used a handful of times before anyone notices. But a parish that has spent three years and £40,000 producing a neighbourhood plan, watching a strategic allocation land on it regardless, now has one instrument it did not have in 2024.
Section 113 of the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 is published in full on legislation.gov.uk and runs to under a page.