LAWBITES
Spot the difference What a waste of notepaper. The single-person office of Information Commissioner morphs into the corporate-based Information Commission on 30 September 2026 (see SI 2026/1015). Functions, staff, coffee cups, complaints and jokes all transfer over. Blame ss 118–119, Data (Use and Access) Act 2025.
Naming and Shaming HMRC has a heart. Official. The lost revenue threshold for its publication of details of ‘deliberate tax defaulters’ is doubled on 2 October 2026 to £50,000 (see SI 2026/1000). The latest list is online. I tired after the first 100 entries.
PLANNING AHEAD
Sections 51–52 of the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 will allow local planning authorities to set their own planning fees to reflect their particular costs of processing applications. Subject to any local extractions we may see in due course, new national default fee hikes are to apply to virtually everything that looks and smells like a planning application as from 8 December 2026. That’s unless something
