The New National SuDS Strategy Templates: What They Are and How to Use Them

In August 2026 the Environment Agency published two national SuDS strategy templates: one for major development and one for non-major development. Each is a free Word form that an applicant fills in and submits with a planning application, so that a council can check, question by question, whether a drainage scheme has been designed to the 2025 national standards. Alongside the forms, the Environment Agency, CIRIA and the Association of SuDS Authorities are encouraging every Lead Local Flood Authority (LLFA) and Local Planning Authority (LPA) in England to adopt them in place of their own local versions.

The forms do not introduce a new requirement. Sustainable drainage was already expected on development that could affect drainage, designed to the national standards, and the National Planning Policy Framework already named the document you have to submit to prove it. What was missing was a common format for that document, and that is what these templates supply. If you are preparing a scheme now, the useful question is how to fold the template into a surface water drainage strategy that will pass validation, because the form summarises that strategy rather than replacing it.

The template does not change what the national standards require. It standardises how you show, and how a council checks, that you have met them.

What is the SuDS strategy template?

A SuDS strategy template is a standard Environment Agency form that sets out, in one place, how a development's drainage meets each of the seven national standards for sustainable drainage. The applicant completes it and submits it with the planning application, next to the underlying drainage strategy or SuDS statement and, where one is needed, a site-specific flood risk assessment. Its spine is an audit: sections two to nine are titled "Compliance with Standard 1", "Compliance with Standard 2", and so on, so every answer is tied to a specific requirement.

The forms use a colour-coded box system. Blue boxes instruct you or ask for information; green boxes tell you when supporting evidence is needed and point to the relevant guidance, such as the CIRIA SuDS Manual (C753), each with a "Ref." field so you can cite the exact document and page; white boxes are the ones you fill in. The white-box word counts are deliberately tight, because the template is a summary and signposting instrument, not the place to reproduce the calculations.

• Two versions. A major-development template (around 43 tables) and a lighter non-major template (around 29 tables), so the depth of questioning matches the scale of the scheme.
• Completed by the applicant. You submit the form with the drainage strategy, the calculations and any flood risk assessment; the form points the assessor to that evidence through its "Ref." fields.
• Version-controlled. The Environment Agency asks users to download the latest version from the Planning Portal for each job rather than reusing an old saved copy, and invites feedback so the forms can be improved.

Why has the Environment Agency published them?

The short answer is fragmentation. Until now, every authority invented its own SuDS submission form or checklist, so the same deliverable arrived in dozens of different shapes. Unda's own review of roughly 145 councils found at least 35 distinct document titles for what is essentially one thing, with the most common exact title appearing on only around 12% of validation lists. A national form is the response to that patchwork: get the key information in front of the assessor in a consistent order, and you reduce validation delays and raise the quality of first-time submissions.

Unda's review of about 145 councils found at least 35 different document titles for the same SuDS deliverable, the most common appearing on barely one validation list in eight.

The bodies behind the templates are explicit about the goal. They want the forms adopted widely enough to retire the bespoke local versions and, with them, the inconsistency developers and consultants have lived with for years.

Where the SuDS strategy template sits in the planning rules

The template has no independent legal force. It inherits its pull from the policy above it. Since the August 2026 NPPF rewrite, Policy F8 expects sustainable drainage on development of all sizes that could affect drainage, designed in accordance with the 2025 national standards. The NPPF also names the document that evidences this: a statement outlining how the national SuDS standards have been achieved. The Environment Agency template is simply the national form for that statement.

Read this way, the template is the bottom of a stack that runs from a dormant statute at the top down to the form on the assessor's desk. An authority that adopts it is not creating a new requirement. It is standardising how applicants evidence a requirement, Policy F8 plus the national standards, that already binds them. The statutory alternative, Schedule 3 of the Flood and Water Management Act 2010, remains uncommenced in England, which is why this planning-led route matters.

Major or non-major: which SuDS template do you use?

You choose the template by the scale of your scheme. The non-major form covers development below the major threshold but excludes minor and householder work, so it targets the middle band, for example schemes of roughly one to nine dwellings. The major form follows the same eight-part spine but asks for more of the working to be shown. Crucially, the technical thresholds are identical across both forms, because they come from the national standards, not the form, so the major version asks for more detail without moving the goalposts.

The split is the delivery mechanism for the proportionate approach that runs through Policy F8 and the local-validation rules: the smaller the scheme, the lighter the form, without ever loosening the underlying design standard.

Will LPAs and LLFAs adopt the templates, and when?

Adoption is likely to be gradual and uneven, spread over years rather than months. The templates are encouraged, not mandated, and the standards they carry are non-statutory. A national form only becomes a validation requirement in a given authority when that authority folds it into its adopted local validation list, and a local list can be reviewed only through a regulated process that runs on an up-to-two-year cycle. Across more than 150 LPAs, that produces a staggered roll-out, and adoption tied to a Local Plan update runs slower still.

Capacity is the other brake. The bodies expected to adopt and then operate the forms are stretched thin, which slows both the paperwork of adoption and the quality of assessment once a form is in use.

Around 60% of local authorities told the Public Accounts Committee they lacked the staff capability to carry out their flood role effectively, and more than half said they lacked the funding.

1. Late 2026 into 2027. Early voluntary adoption by authorities with no form of their own, or those retiring an outdated checklist. Developers and consultants begin using the templates proactively because they read as best practice.
2. One to three years. Staggered incorporation into local validation lists as authorities reach their review points. Regions with mature forms, such as the London proforma and the North West pro-forma, are more likely to align their existing forms towards the national structure than to abandon them.
3. Three to five years and beyond. The template plausibly becomes the default for the SuDS statement across much of England, especially for non-major schemes where no incumbent form existed — but with persistent local variation in the numbers.

One nuance limits how far any national form can standardise. The national standards let a more stringent local approach take precedence where an authority can evidence it, so even under a single template the figures you must hit can still vary from one authority to the next. The form standardises the questions and the format; it cannot, by itself, standardise every local standard.

What the templates mean for your planning application

For applicants, the templates raise the floor on the information you must show, and they expose a thin strategy, because every claim on the form carries a visible evidence reference. That changes how a good submission is assembled more than it changes the engineering. The most reliable way to use the form is as a checklist of exactly what an assessor will verify, run before you submit rather than after an objection lands.

• A ready-made QA gate. Running a design through the relevant template catches the omissions that draw objections: infiltration testing not done, exceedance routes not mapped, drain-down times not stated, the maintaining party not named.
• Amenity and biodiversity move up the order. The major form's five amenity sub-sections and its explicit biodiversity net gain question mean these can no longer be a closing paragraph; they need landscape and ecology input early.
• Smaller schemes get a standard form. Non-major development has no statutory LLFA consultation, so the non-major template gives planners a consistent way to secure and check SuDS information where no drainage engineer would otherwise scrutinise it.
• Adoption and maintenance still need answering. The form records who will own and maintain the assets, but it cannot create an adopting body where none exists — the weakest link in the planning-led approach.

A template gets you validated. A proper strategy gets you approved.

That distinction matters, and it is where the value of the form is often misread. A template standardises the presentation and checking of SuDS information; the quality of the underlying design and calculations still decides the outcome. It is a map to a good strategy, not a substitute for one.

How Unda can help

Unda prepares the drainage strategies these forms summarise, and completes the templates on top of them. We structure a surface water drainage strategy so its sections map straight onto the template, which makes the "Ref." fields quick to complete and the submission read as rigorous, and we run the relevant form as a pre-submission check on every scheme. Where a site also needs one, we align the drainage work with a flood risk assessment for planning, and for combined or whole-site drainage we work across the full drainage strategy service. If you have a scheme coming forward and want the SuDS information right first time, talk to our drainage engineers before the layout is fixed.