Selling Land in New Forest District

• Fields on the edge of Totton, Marchwood, Hythe, Holbury and Blackfield, outside the Green Belt.
• Land round Fordingbridge and the Avon Valley villages that sits clear of the river flood plain.
• Green Belt land on the edge of New Milton, Lymington, Ringwood or Hordle that is enclosed by roads, homes or other development.
• Former yards, nurseries, depots and equestrian sites with lawful buildings or hardstanding.
• Holdings of 20 acres or more, where part of the land could provide green space or nutrient mitigation.

Our page on farmland with development potential explains our approach. We pay for the surveys and reports, and you keep farming or grazing the land until completion.

• 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.

This is the first thing we check. The council's options paper puts it plainly: planning within the National Park is the responsibility of the New Forest National Park Authority, which prepares a separate local plan. The six market towns of Totton, Hythe, Lymington, New Milton, Ringwood and Fordingbridge are all in the district's plan area. Brockenhurst, by contrast, is in the Park, and the council's own description of its area refers to the main line level crossing there as lying outside its plan area.

1. Inside the Park. The Park Authority decides applications under its own plan, with the highest landscape protection, and the district's delivery result does not apply.
2. Outside the Park, but in the Green Belt. Most land round the coastal towns and in the Avon Valley is in this category. The unmet need route in national policy S5 is not available in the Green Belt, so the question becomes whether the land counts as grey belt or is previously developed.
3. Outside the Park and the Green Belt. The council's options paper places the Green Belt across the South Coastal Towns and Avon Valley area, so the Waterside sits outside it. This is where the 48% result carries the most weight, as long as the site sits well against an existing settlement and the other tests are met.
4. In Cranborne Chase. The council records 6,750 hectares of the National Landscape in its plan area, in the downlands of the north west. Great weight goes to its landscape and scenic beauty, and larger schemes face a demanding test.

Where a holding straddles one of these lines, each part is judged on its own terms, and often the useful part is the few fields closest to the town.

The South West Hampshire Green Belt adjoins the South East Dorset Green Belt to the west. In the council's words it tightly surrounds all the settlements of the South Coastal Area, so land on the edge of New Milton, Hordle, Everton, Milford on Sea and Lymington is usually Green Belt. The adopted plan's vision also commits to continued protection of the lower Avon Valley as Green Belt.

The 2020 plan already released some Green Belt land for strategic sites where it no longer strongly served Green Belt purposes. The council has now gone further in its evidence. A Part 2 Green Belt Assessment, finalised in February 2026, treats Ringwood, New Milton with Barton on Sea, and Lymington as large built-up areas, alongside the Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole conurbation. That matters because the first Green Belt purpose is about checking the sprawl of large built-up areas, and a parcel that does not strongly serve it is one step closer to being grey belt.

Grey belt is decided site by site, with the Golden Rules then applying. Our guide to how grey belt is assessed sets out the tests.

If your land near Lymington, New Milton or Ringwood is already enclosed by roads or housing, that is the grey belt question we test first, before any money is spent on a layout.

The September restart settles one question and leaves several open. These are the ones we are following.

• The Housing Delivery Test. The government issues it once a year, and the Housing Delivery Test 2025 was issued on 17 August 2026. Each result blends three years of completions, so a gap as wide as the district's takes more than one good year to close. Should it rise above 75%, the change would be felt most on the Waterside, where land outside the Green Belt leans on the unmet need route, although a supply as short as the next point describes would still count as evidence of need.
• The next supply statement. The current figure of 1.53 years runs from a base date of 1 April 2025. National policy expects a yearly refresh, so a statement from the following April is next, though we have not seen a date for it. For scale, the homes counted in the August 2025 statement would have needed to more than treble to reach five years against the standard method.
• The new programme. The council has said that details of future engagement will be published once an updated programme has been agreed. That programme, not the February options paper, will decide when land can next be put to the council.
• Reorganisation. On 7 September 2026 the government withdrew its March decisions on new councils for Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Portsmouth and Southampton, and began a wider review. The district council's statement confirms that elections in May 2027 will take place on existing boundaries. For now the district council is preparing the new plan; whether it also finishes it depends on that review.

What these dates change for an owner is readiness rather than route. The evidence behind a site here, from a nutrient budget to a Green Belt appraisal, takes months to assemble, and a site that already has it when the programme is published is better placed than one that starts then. We commission and pay for that work.