Selling Land in Cambridge

The joint plan's development strategy meets need first inside the Cambridge urban area and only then on the edge of the city, and it expects about 6,660 homes across Greater Cambridge to come from windfall sites that no plan names. That is where most of our work in the city sits:

• Garage courts and lock-up blocks, like those the draft plan allocates at St Matthews Street and Norfolk Street and at Davy Road.
• Yards, workshops and older commercial buildings in Chesterton, Romsey and Cherry Hinton.
• Long rear gardens and corner plots in Queen Edith's and Trumpington, which the draft plan tests under a policy of its own for garden land.
• Two or three neighbouring gardens put together, which often gives a better layout and an easier access.
• Institutional and school sites, such as North Cambridge Academy on Arbury Road, where the draft plan allocates 150 homes.
• Land next to Cambridge East, Eddington or Darwin Green that could help those sites with access, drainage or open space.

The hardest land is open Green Belt that frames views of the historic city. With the plan looking to urban and allocated land first, it rarely has a near route, and we say so after the first look.

• 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.

Until autumn 2026 the councils published one housing land supply figure for Greater Cambridge as a whole. Their September 2026 addendum now counts each council separately. It explains that the government declined to calculate the delivery test jointly, and national guidance offers no way to pair separate results with a joint supply figure. For the city it sets out this calculation:

The standard method figure is used because the 2018 plan is more than five years old. The same addendum states that Policy 3 of the Cambridge Local Plan 2018 is materially inconsistent with the new national framework and should now be given very limited weight.

The delivery score alone sits above the 75% level at which national policy treats unmet need as proven. A supply shortfall is separate evidence of unmet need, though, and policy S5 of the August 2026 framework accepts it for sites beyond a settlement edge that are well related to it. S5 itself does not reach Green Belt land, but grey belt housing has to show evidenced unmet need too, and in Cambridge the council's own figure now supplies it. South Cambridgeshire, which scored 148%, shows 7.83 years with a 5% buffer, so the argument stops at the city boundary.

On the edge of Cambridge, then, the boundary is the first thing to check before selling: a contained field just inside the city has the shortfall behind it, and a similar one just across the line in South Cambridgeshire does not.

Two documents date the Green Belt differently, and both are right. The councils' Green Belt Assessment of 2021 records that its inner boundary around the city was first defined in a town map approved by the Minister in 1965, and that the Cambridge Green Belt Local Plan of 1992, prepared by the county council with the district councils, set new boundaries. Cambridge Past, Present and Future, the civic society that campaigned for it from the inter-war years, gives 1992 as the date it was established, most likely counting from that formal plan. What matters for a landowner is what followed: the boundary has since moved only through local plans.

The society describes the Green Belt as a ring of land surrounding the city, meant to prevent sprawl and encourage the reuse of brownfield sites. It records that land has already come out for Eddington and West Cambridge, for Trumpington and the Biomedical Campus, and that the new plan proposes a further release.

Add up the addendum's figures and a pattern appears. The five 2018 allocations in the first three rows account for 2,361 of the 3,545 homes the councils expect in the city from 2026 to 2031, about two thirds of the supply. Any slippage on a handful of large sites widens a shortfall that already supports well placed land.

Grey Belt Near a Historic City

Grey belt is Green Belt land that is previously developed, or that does not strongly serve three of the Green Belt purposes: checking sprawl, stopping towns merging, and preserving the setting of historic towns. Cambridge is exactly the kind of historic city that third purpose protects, so an open field that frames views of the city will rarely qualify. A paddock boxed in by a road, a school and houses, or an old nursery with lawful buildings on it, is a different question, and with the city short of housing land the need test is on its side. The remaining tests and the Golden Rules are explained in our grey belt guide.

Cambridge North opened in May 2017, and Cambridge South opened in June 2026 to serve the Biomedical Campus. The government's announcement of the airport purchase adds that Cambridge East is expected to benefit from a proposed Cambridge East station, which it says could improve links to central Cambridge and London and extend onwards to Bedford and Oxford.

National policy now favours new homes within reasonable walking distance of well connected stations, with minimum densities attached. In a city this compact, that makes the walking routes to Cambridge North and Cambridge South worth checking on any site in Chesterton, King's Hedges, Cherry Hinton or Trumpington.

A yard or garage court within that walking distance may be able to carry more homes than its size suggests, which is worth knowing before you decide whether to sell.