Selling Land in Slough

• Yards, garages, workshops and commercial units in residential areas.
• Backland and large garden plots with a realistic access, especially where houses could be built.
• Older offices and industrial buildings outside the main employment areas.
• Land close to the Elizabeth line stations.
• Green Belt land around Wexham and Upton, where the council has tested sites before, that may be grey belt.
• Land at Colnbrook and Poyle, looked at case by case given Heathrow.

Every review starts with your site rather than the borough as a whole. How our agreements work, including the planning costs we carry, is on our how it works page.

• 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.

For many years the council's strategy has been to put most new homes in and around the town centre. The Core Strategy set a minimum of 3,000 there, and the 2020 spatial strategy consultation raised the estimate to around 9,000. The largest sites it counted were:

• The former Horlicks factory, for about 1,300 homes.
• The Queensmere and Observatory shopping centres, for at least 1,000 homes through redevelopment.
• The North West Quadrant, for about 1,300 homes.

The council now says the 2020 strategy requires review and updating, so these are best read as the scale it had in mind for the centre rather than a current count.

The Homes Slough Is Short Of

Of the 827 homes finished in the year to April 2024, only 64 were affordable and 91% were flats or maisonettes, according to the same council report. It also found that people in Slough have 27.2 square metres of living space each, against 36.5 in other towns and cities, and that what families need most are houses with gardens. Land that can take a small group of houses, rather than another block of flats, fills a gap the council itself has identified.

Why the Shortfall Figures Differ

Anyone reading the council's documents side by side will meet several figures for the gap. The 2020 spatial strategy worked from a need of 17,860 homes for 2016 to 2036 under the government method of the time, and expected to fall about 5,000 short. The 2021 Green Belt consultation repeated that figure. The 2024 report looked further ahead, to 2041, and put the gap at 5,981. Different periods and methods explain most of the variation. What has held steady across all three is a shortfall in the thousands, and a council that has twice looked beyond its built-up area, to Green Belt land and to southern Buckinghamshire, to close it.

When you sell land in Slough, the useful point is that the shortfall has appeared in every count, so a site that can take family houses answers a gap the council has set out in its own reports.

The Core Strategy treats the countryside around Colnbrook and Poyle as part of a strategic gap between Slough and Greater London, which includes the Colne Valley Park. It is the largest open area left in the borough.

Why the Council Started Its Plan Again

The 2020 spatial strategy assumed that there would not be any expansion of Heathrow Airport in the short to medium term. That assumption no longer holds. The council now says that Heathrow Airport Limited's expansion proposals include development affecting parts of Slough's Green Belt, and that this was part of the reason it moved to the new plan making system in December 2025. Its July 2026 scoping consultation put the question plainly: "The Government may direct us to develop some of the Colne Valley Regional Park to build the third runway for Heathrow, and other parts to provide family homes."

In June 2026 the government published a draft Heathrow Expansion National Policy Statement for consultation, closing on 1 September 2026. It supports a new north west runway of up to 3,500 metres, and a decision on a development consent order could follow in the first half of 2029. Until the scheme takes its final shape, land around Colnbrook and Poyle carries real uncertainty, and we treat each enquiry there on its own facts.

Green Belt the Council Has Looked at Before

In 2021 the council consulted on releasing Green Belt land for family housing, citing a lack of brownfield sites suitable for family homes. Of ten sites tested, it judged five suitable, including land east of Wexham Park Hospital, the hospital's School of Nursing site, land behind Opal Court on Wexham Street and Upton Court Farm, with room for roughly 600 to 900 homes in all. That consultation never became an adopted plan, but it shows where the council has already accepted that the Green Belt may be weaker. Policy S5's unmet need route stops at the Green Belt boundary, so the real question for this land is whether it counts as grey belt, which our grey belt guide explains.

Owners of Green Belt land around Wexham or Upton who are weighing a sale can treat those 2021 findings as a record the council has already written down, though its new plan will test each site afresh.

The consultation dates for the new plan are covered above. The timetable the council published on 30 June 2026 also sets formal checkpoints between them, and whether these are met is the earliest sign of whether the programme is holding:

• 31 October 2026. Gateway 1, a readiness assessment ahead of the consultation on the plan's proposed content.
• 24 May 2027. Gateway 2, after that first round of consultation.
• 2 June 2028. Gateway 3, followed by submission to the Secretary of State on 21 June 2028.

The council says it will keep the timetable under review.

The Delivery Test and a Supply of 2.51 Years

The Housing Delivery Test is published once a year; the latest, the Housing Delivery Test 2025, appeared on 17 August 2026. Each result averages three years of completions, so a single strong year lifts it only part of the way, and any result under 75% leaves policy S5 counting Slough's housing need as unmet. In a borough this built up, though, the bigger change is the plan itself. A new plan has to identify five years of deliverable sites for the period straight after adoption, and the council has already said its supply falls thousands of homes short.

The council's monitoring report for 2024/25, published in August 2025, finds 2.51 years of deliverable housing land from 1 April 2025. It measures against local housing need of 810 homes a year by the standard method and adds a 20% buffer because of the delivery result, so it needs 4,860 homes over five years and can identify 2,442. The same report records 204 net completions in 2024/25, after 827 the year before, and that low year stays within the three the next delivery test will measure. Beyond the Green Belt edge, S5 lets a supply gap count, with other evidence, towards unmet need where a site sits well against a settlement and can be serviced. In the Green Belt, where S5 does not reach, a grey belt case for homes has its own need test, and a supply this far below five years, like a delivery result under 75%, is the usual way of meeting it.

Heathrow, and What It Means for Timing

With consultation on the draft Heathrow policy statement now closed, the next step lies with the government, which must weigh the responses before any final statement is designated. For land elsewhere, the practical point is simpler: a site inside the town can go forward on an application at any time, while Green Belt land around Wexham and Upton is best assessed before January 2027, when the council shows what it proposes to include.