Selling Land in Gosport

• Yards, depots, garages and workshops inside the urban area, especially where the business is moving or closing.
• Redundant commercial or community buildings with land around them.
• Large gardens or backland with a realistic, independent access.
• Sites next to or close to the regeneration areas, where new access or services are planned.
• Land mostly outside the highest tidal flood risk, or with enough dry ground for the homes.
• Groups of adjoining plots where neighbours are willing to put land forward together.

Former marine and defence land in Gosport often needs a contamination survey and a tidal flood assessment before a layout can even be drawn. We pay for and run all of that work, along with the drainage and design reports, and if permission is not granted you keep your property and owe us nothing. Sites like these are what our brownfield and yards page is about.

• 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.

Inside a settlement, policy S4 of the August 2026 National Planning Policy Framework says development should be approved unless its harm substantially outweighs its benefits. That applies whatever the council's housing figures are, and in Gosport it covers almost the whole borough. Combined with a delivery result of 25%, it means the council has every reason to welcome well-designed homes on land that is already built on or enclosed by the town.

The land that tends to come forward in Gosport is small and scattered rather than large and open:

• Commercial yards and workshops, including builders' yards, garages and depots that have outgrown their location.
• Redundant buildings such as older offices, halls, clubs and single-storey shops with space behind or above.
• Large gardens and backland plots with a workable access, in the older parts of the town where plots are generous.
• Waterfront and boatyard land, where marine uses have wound down and the council's policies on employment and the waterfront have to be addressed.
• Land held with a former defence or institutional use, where the buildings have closed and the site sits within the urban area.

When the 2015 plan was adopted, it recorded that the peninsula was reached by just three road routes, the A32, Newgate Lane and Stubbington Lane, and that parts of the A32, Rowner Road and Newgate Lane had reached capacity. With limited roads and no railway, parking and traffic weigh more heavily in Gosport than in most towns, so a backland scheme is often judged on how cars reach it as much as on the homes themselves. Rights over a shared drive, a strip of land in someone else's name at the entrance, or a neighbour's window facing the plot can each decide the outcome. The access and ransom strips guide covers the first two, and we check all of them in the desktop review before anyone visits.

The council has long focused change on a small number of large sites, most of them former naval or defence land. They matter to other landowners because they bring new roads, services and investment, and because they show where the council wants activity to be.

If your land is next to one of these areas, its prospects can change as they are built. A site that is awkward today can be better connected once a new road or access opens next door.

The Housing Delivery Test is published once a year, and the result shown here comes from the Housing Delivery Test 2025, issued on 17 August 2026. A borough at 25% is a long way beneath 75%, and one year of building would have to be exceptional to close that gap, so what the council does about it matters more than the next score. It has published three delivery action plans since 2020, the latest agreed on 12 March 2025, with actions that include seeking funding to take the risk out of brownfield sites, working with the Defence Infrastructure Organisation on Ministry of Defence land and securing nutrient mitigation through the Partnership for South Hampshire.

The action plan put the land supply at 2.12 years from 1 April 2024. The council's Housing Supply Background Paper, published with the draft plan in March 2026, brings that forward to 1 April 2025, and the position has weakened:

The same paper shows why adoption matters so much here. Measured against the new plan's own requirement of about 150 homes a year, with a 5% buffer, the same 973 homes would give the council 6 years of supply. While the plan is being examined, the shortfall sits alongside the delivery result as evidence of unmet need, which is most useful for the few sites outside the urban area boundary. Once the plan is adopted, the yardstick changes and that support largely falls away, so the months before adoption are when such a site has most in its favour. Land inside the town relies on policy S4 either way.

The council votes on the plan are covered above. Once it is submitted, an inspector examines it in public, and no hearing dates have been published yet. National policy gives an emerging plan more weight the further it advances, so its urban area boundary and its employment and waterfront policies will count for more at each stage, well before adoption.

Reorganisation adds another layer. The government's March 2026 decision would have placed Gosport in a South East Hampshire council with Fareham, Havant and Portsmouth from 1 April 2028. It withdrew that decision on 7 September 2026 pending a review, so for now the borough council remains the planning authority taking this plan forward.

For owners of yards and plots inside the town, none of these dates is a reason to hold back. The case for homes rests on national policy today, and the new plan points the same way.