Selling Land in Fareham

• Land on the edges of Fareham, Portchester, Stubbington, Titchfield and the Western Wards that lies outside the strategic gaps.
• Fields inside a gap that are already enclosed by roads, housing or other development, so the gap's openness is limited.
• Former commercial yards, depots and buildings with a lawful non-farming use.
• Land within walking distance of Fareham, Portchester or Swanwick station.
• Larger holdings where part of the land could provide nitrogen mitigation or open space for homes on the rest.
• Sites with a road frontage or a clear route to one.

If your land sits at the narrowest point of a gap, we will tell you so. Our letters are about specific sites we have already looked at, and our reviews start from the planning position of your own field.

• 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.

With no Green Belt in the borough, a field outside the urban edge of Stubbington, Portchester or the Western Wards can rely on the 60% result through the shortfall route that policy S5 of the national framework, as revised in August 2026, provides. The site has to sit naturally against one of those settlements, with roads, drainage and schools able to take the extra homes. Across much of the Home Counties, where the Green Belt covers most open land, that route barely exists.

It does not make the strategic gaps disappear. They are local plan designations rather than national ones, so any harm to one goes into the balance against the homes Fareham lacks, rather than acting as a bar. Where a site sits within a gap, and how much of the gap would remain open, usually decides the outcome. Our guide to the 2026 planning framework sets out the national tests in full.

The Order in Which We Look at an Edge-of-Town Field

1. Gap or no gap. Land outside both strategic gaps starts from a stronger position. Land inside one needs a layout that keeps the gap readable on the ground, often by holding homes to the side nearest existing development and leaving the rest open.
2. Relationship to the town. We look at how the field sits against the existing edge: roads, boundaries, levels and whether new homes would read as part of the place.
3. Nitrogen and birds. Every net new home needs mitigation for both, and the scheme has to show how it will be secured before permission is granted.
4. Soil and landscape. The adopted countryside policy considers the loss of the best agricultural land, and the plan identifies Areas of Special Landscape Quality, so both are checked early rather than discovered late.

An owner selling land on the edge of Stubbington, Portchester or the Western Wards therefore gets an answer on the gap from us first, because it is the question an officer or inspector will ask first.

Fareham's coast is part of the Solent's network of protected sites. The adopted plan deals with them through policy NE3 on recreational disturbance, policy NE4 on water quality and policy NE5 on the Solent wader and Brent goose sites, and together they add work and cost to every housing scheme.

• Water quality. Permission depends on showing that nutrients from the extra waste water will not harm the protected sites. In practice that means a nitrogen budget for the scheme and mitigation to balance it, often bought as credits.
• Recreational disturbance. Bird Aware Solent notes that most visits to the Solent's protected areas are made by people living within 5.6 kilometres of them, and new homes in that zone pay towards its strategy. From 1 April 2026 the charge runs from £501 for a one-bedroom home to £1,299 for a home with five or more bedrooms, updated each year in line with the Retail Price Index.
• Biodiversity net gain. Schemes also need to show a 10% gain in habitat value, which can take land out of a layout or require habitat off site. Our biodiversity net gain guide explains how it is measured.

These costs are paid out of the value of a scheme, and they are one reason a field can support fewer homes, or less value per acre, than its size suggests. They are also well understood locally. The nitrogen budget, ecology surveys and mitigation strategy are reports we commission and pay for as part of the planning work.

The Housing Delivery Test comes out once a year, and the Housing Delivery Test 2025 was published on 17 August 2026. The next edition adds 2025/26 to its three-year window, the year the first Welborne residents moved in. Whether that year was strong enough to move the borough's result far is something only the release will show, and we do not guess it. What each outcome would mean is clearer:

• Still under 75%. The shortfall route for well-related land outside the strategic gaps, set out earlier on this page, stays open.
• Over 75%. That automatic route would close, yet a weak land supply would still count as evidence of need. The council's own calculation of July 2026 puts the supply at 2.99 years at 1 April 2026, measured against the plan's 653 homes a year plus 1,018 homes of past under-delivery and a 20% buffer, so it is well short of five.
• The plan's fifth birthday in April 2028. The council's supply page says its calculations rest on the housing requirement in the Fareham Local Plan 2037, and lists a 2026 report as its current position. From that birthday the national formula for local housing need takes over as the test, so the yardstick itself changes, whatever the figure is at that point.
• Welborne's pace. It drives both measures, and the occupation limit tied to junction 10 falls away once the improved junction is open to traffic.

Reorganisation is the larger unknown. In March 2026 the government decided that Fareham would join Gosport, Havant and Portsmouth in a new South East Hampshire council from 1 April 2028. On 7 September 2026 it withdrew that decision following legal advice, and Fareham Borough Council says it now awaits urgent clarification of what the review means for Hampshire. Until then the borough remains the planning authority, the Fareham Local Plan 2037 stays in force and applications are decided as they are today. The open question is the replacement plan: whether it continues as a Fareham document or gives way to planning for a wider area depends on a decision that has not yet been made.

For a landowner the distinction is practical. The application route does not hang on any of this, while the plan route does. Land that works under today's policies can be assessed now, rather than held back for a timetable that may be redrawn.