Selling Land in East Hampshire

• Fields of 2 acres or more on the edges of Alton, Four Marks, Whitehill and Bordon, Liphook or Grayshott, outside the Park.
• Land around Horndean, Clanfield and Rowlands Castle, where the council's supply statement already counts 300 homes at Horndean alone.
• Land close to Whitehill and Bordon, where the council records 959 homes with outline permission still to be built.
• Sites with a road frontage and a junction that can take more traffic, as the combined effect of schemes on local roads is a recurring concern.
• Former yards, nurseries and farm buildings, inside or outside the Park.
• Larger holdings that could also provide open space or habitat alongside homes.

Arable and grazing land outside the Park is often the strongest candidate, and our farmland page explains how we approach it. Land deep inside the Park is harder, and we will say so plainly in our review.

• 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 South Downs National Park Authority's own plan review, published for comment in 2026 and running to 2043, proposes 98 homes a year in the East Hampshire part of the Park. The district council objected, pointing out that this is 9% of the district's total need on 57% of its land, and that the rest falls on the area it controls.

The Park plan does still allocate land. The council's response notes eight proposed sites in Petersfield, which it describes as the second largest town in the Park, totalling 224 homes, and a strategic site at Liphook for 380 homes and a 65 bed care home.

We check which side of that line a field sits on before anything else, because the answer shapes everything that follows.

The council consulted on a draft plan for 2021 to 2040 between 22 January and 8 March 2024, and in all ran four early rounds of consultation that drew close to 9,000 comments. The plan was later reset to run from 2025 to 2043, and in March 2026 the council still expected to publish its final draft in late summer.

On 28 May 2026 the cabinet changed course. It agreed to stop preparing a district plan under the current system, which would have had to be submitted by 31 December 2026, and to adapt the existing work for plans prepared by the new councils. The report gives the reasons as unresolved evidence on transport modelling and water supply, too little time to rework the plan after the revised national framework, and the likelihood that it would not be adopted before the district is abolished.

What That Means for Land That Was Put Forward

In May the council said its evidence and engagement would be kept to inform the strategic plans of its successors, and its response to the Park plan shows that the emerging strategy already identified Liphook as a second tier settlement. Because the land availability assessment is part of that evidence, sites already submitted to it are not lost. Our guide to calls for sites and local plans in practice explains how submissions are carried from one plan to the next.