Selling Land in Central Bedfordshire

• Fields adjoining towns and larger villages outside the Green Belt, such as Biggleswade, Sandy, Potton, Stotfold, Arlesey and Cranfield.
• Green Belt parcels around Dunstable and the Luton fringe that may be grey belt.
• Plots and backland inside settlements, judged under policy S4, which favours approval unless harm substantially outweighs benefit.
• Yards, depots and other previously developed land.
• Larger holdings for the 2050 plan, especially near Ridgmont, Lidlington, Flitwick or Sandy stations.

Downland in the Chilterns National Landscape and fields that plainly keep two towns apart are harder, and we will say so. Size is no bar either way: the call for sites set aside land too small for ten homes, but a smaller plot inside a village can still go forward as an application on its own merits. For the rest, we fix the price with you on day one, set higher than the land's present value, then fund and manage every stage of the planning ourselves, at our own risk. If permission is granted, we complete and you receive the agreed price; if not, you keep your land and owe nothing, and you keep using it throughout. See how it works.

• An outright sale. You sell the land as it stands today, privately or at auction. The price is what a buyer will pay for it without planning permission, and the buyer takes on everything that follows.
• A conditional contract. You agree a sale now, but it only completes if planning permission is granted. Until then you keep the land, and the agreement sets out who applies for permission and who pays.
• An option agreement, the route we use. We agree your price at the start, in writing, set above what your land is worth today. We then pay for and run all of the planning work, at our own cost and risk. If permission is granted, we complete the purchase and you receive the agreed price on completion. If it is not, you keep your land and owe nothing.

For land that needs planning permission before it is worth more, an option means you know your price before any work starts and never spend a penny on planning. The ways to sell land for development, compared sets out each route in full.

The figure of 3.93 years comes from the council's five-year housing land supply statement for the five years from 1 April 2026, now in a second version with an addendum. It works the sums twice: against the adopted plan, and against the standard method, which the addendum says must be used from 22 July 2026, when the plan's strategic policies turned five. The 9,124 deliverable homes are the same in both; only the yardstick moves.

The council is not behind on building: it is 1,513 homes ahead of its plan, and the buffer is 5% because there has been no significant under delivery. The gap comes from the yardstick, which asks for about 410 more homes a year than the plan had left to build. And a third of the supply is windfall, land the plan never allocated: 2,532 homes on such sites with permission and 539 more allowed for sites yet to come.

Already in the Committee Reports

Up to 150 homes behind Crawley Road, Cranfield, went back to committee on 23 September 2026, after members had resolved to refuse them on 1 July. The officer report records the fall from 4.83 years to 3.93 years, accepts that the site lies outside Cranfield's settlement envelope, quotes the national policy on evidenced unmet need and again recommends approval, subject to a section 106 agreement.

Two Appeals, Two Outcomes

At Holly Farm on Flitton Hill, an appeal for nine self-build homes was dismissed in April 2025 although the inspector put the supply at 4.93 years, against the council's 5.05. Residents would have relied on cars, with a bus every two hours and a mostly unlit lane to walk, and the homes would have spread behind and well beyond the existing houses. At land north of Sandy Road, Potton, the council conceded a shortfall, putting its own figure at 4.85 years, and chose not to defend its reasons for refusal, and in September 2025 the inspector allowed up to 125 homes outside the settlement envelope. Both were decided under the framework then in force, but the lesson holds: location and access decide the case.

S5 does not reach into the Green Belt. There, land that contributes little to Green Belt purposes can count as grey belt, and national policy allows homes on it where the need is shown. The usual evidence is a delivery test result under 75% or less than five years of supply. At 3.93 years, the second is plain. Larger schemes on Green Belt land carry the Golden Rules as well, covering affordable homes, infrastructure and public green space, as our grey belt guide explains.

Grey belt is judged parcel by parcel. The council's report on the National Trust's Chiltern Gateway Centre at Whipsnade records land "washed over by the South Bedfordshire Green Belt", inside the Chilterns National Landscape and within 200 metres of the Dunstable and Whipsnade Downs Site of Special Scientific Interest. Land with those protections is a hard case under any housing figures. Yards, depots and parcels hemmed in by roads or housing are far better prospects.

The largest allocation, the Marston Vale new villages, provides for up to four villages, up to 5,000 homes and at least 40 hectares of employment land north of Lidlington, with an interchange planned at Ridgmont station. Large sites move slowly: after an appeal at Langford Road, Biggleswade, the council accepted that the 220 Marston Vale homes it had counted within five years were not deliverable, and took them out, as the Holly Farm decision records. Delays like that leave need to be met on smaller sites.

• Tempsford. The government's New Towns Draft Programme of 23 March 2026 proposes over 40,000 homes and a station where East West Rail meets the East Coast Main Line, but no homes "until wider flood mitigations are in place". The government intends to adopt the programme later in 2026, once its environmental assessments are complete.
• East West Rail. Its 2026 consultation, which ran from 14 April to 9 June, proposed new Marston Vale line stations at Woburn Sands, Ridgmont, Lidlington and Stewartby.
• Neither grants permission. Both will shape where the 2050 plan looks, so land near a future station deserves an early look.