.jpg)
Securing planning permission for new homes on your site can dramatically increase its value - but not every site is considered suitable.
One of the questions we get asked most often is how landowners can tell if their site is likely to be suitable for new homes - here the things you need to consider when making that decision:
New housing sites must have good access to services and facilities like schools, shops and public transport –the wider the range of services, the better. That means they’re generally within, or immediately on the edge of, existing settlements with safe walking routes to those services and facilities.
They must have good access to the existing road network too. Usually that means they immediately adjoin an existing road with no intervening landownerships. Sometimes, however, other land might need to be bought to allow that access to be delivered.
Not every site on the edge of a town or village will be suitable for development, though. Sites are normally proportionate to the size of the settlement. For example, a 10-acre development site which could accommodate around 100 homes might make sense on the edge of a town, but perhaps not as an expansion of a small village.
Sites must also relate well to the settlement and look like a logical extension. A long “finger” of development stretching into the countryside is less likely to be considered suitable than a more compact site that is more of a “rounding off.”
Some of these are fairly obvious – steeply sloping sites can be difficult and expensive to build on, for example, while woodland couldn’t be cleared to build new homes.
Others are slightly less obvious. The Environment Agency produces the Flood Map for Planning showing the risk of flooding of every part of the country. To be suitable for new homes, potential development sites should ideally fall within Flood Zone 1, the area with the lowest flood risk.
There also needs to be somewhere for surface water – the rainfall that lands on the site – to drain. That usually means an existing drainage ditch or watercourse, ideally within the boundary of the site, however new drains can be installed across other land with the agreement of the owner.
When deciding where development should be located, planners also consider the impact of development on the wider landscape. As a result, sites which are well contained and aren’t very obvious in long-range views tend to be considered more suitable.
The existing ecological value of the site also needs to be considered. Arable fields tend to provide fewer habitats for wildlife than wildflower meadows, for example.
Other physical characteristics to think about are agricultural land quality, the past uses of the site, and the ground conditions.
Most local plans draw a line – known as a settlement boundary - around every city, town and village. New housing development inside that boundary tends to be supported in principle, while outside the boundary it is more likely to be opposed.
The fields beyond the settlement boundary are usually designated as either open countryside or green belt. This is an important distinction in planning policy – not all greenfields are green belt – so it needs to be checked carefully.
Green belt is amongst the most restrictive of the UK’s planning policies. It can only be developed for new homes in certain circumstances - if it is removed from the green belt by a new local plan, or determined to be “grey belt”, if the council is failing to deliver enough new homes, and provided a series of extra policy requirements (including extra affordable housing) are satisfied. You can read more about grey belt policy here.
Other fields tend to be classed as open countryside and, although planning policy is still restrictive, it is less so than for the green belt. They can also be designated for housing development in new local plans, but planning applications can also be approved if the council is falling behind in housing delivery – without all the extra tests and policies associated with the green belt.
There are a whole host of other planning designations too. Conservation Areas can have an impact even if your land is outside it’s boundary, while the locations of other heritage assets like Listed Buildings, Scheduled Ancient Monuments and Registered Battlefields need to be considered.
Nature protections are provided by a further suite of designations – including Sites of Special Scientific Interest, Local Nature Reserves and Special Areas of Conservation. Again, these designations needn’t cover your site for them to influence its suitability for development.
National Parks, National Landscapes (formally called Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty) and local landscape designations can be important too, while councils often have a whole range of designations that are unique to them – Safeguarded Land, Green Gaps, Areas of Separation, Areas of Search and an almost endless list of others.
While some of these designations can be changed in a new Local Plan, many others - typically those relating to heritage and wildlife - usually aren’t and are likely to be permanent.
To help landowners decide whether their site has development potential, The Strategic Land Group offers a free, no obligation site assessment service. Simply send us a plan of your site, and we’ll let you know whether we think it is suitable for new homes and how we would go about unlocking that potential for you - all at our cost and risk.
Find out more about how we do that here.
