Selling Land in Welwyn Hatfield

• Fields on the edges of Welwyn Garden City or Hatfield that are enclosed by the town, a main road or the railway.
• Land beside the excluded villages, such as Woolmer Green, Welwyn, Welham Green, Brookmans Park and Cuffley.
• Sites within walking distance of any of the borough's six stations.
• Former commercial, equestrian or glasshouse sites with a lawful non-farm use.
• Holdings that could help make up the homes the 2023 plan did not find.

If your land lies in the open gap between the two towns, we will tell you honestly that the bar is high. Where there is a case, we carry the cost and the work of making it.

• 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 2023 plan was adopted with a commitment built in. The plan itself says an updated or replacement plan will be submitted for examination no later than three years after adoption, to find the remaining homes, roughly 1,800 of them.

The council has run three calls for sites, in spring 2025, summer 2025 and February to March 2026, consulted on a first draft of the new plan between 12 February and 26 March 2026, and has now approved the final draft for publication. The key dates now are:

1. 23 September to 5 November 2026. The proposed submission plan, running to 2043, is open for comments on soundness and legal compliance. The council's plan page asks for responses by 6pm on 5 November, while its press release of 23 September gives the closing date as 4 November. The plan page is the more specific of the two, but anyone making representations should aim for the earlier date so that nothing turns on the difference.
2. December 2026, with examination in 2027. The press release of 23 September says the council intends to submit the plan for examination in 2027, but the council's revised Local Development Scheme, dated 16 September 2026, puts submission in December 2026. The scheme explains why: 31 December 2026 is the last date on which a plan can be submitted under the current transitional arrangements. Read together, the scheme of September 2026 has the plan going in by the end of 2026 and being examined during 2027.
3. After examination. Inspectors report, the council considers their recommendations, and the plan can be adopted. With reorganisation in Hertfordshire paused, the borough council remains the body that would adopt it.

Unlike Hertsmere, St Albans and Three Rivers, Welwyn Hatfield saw its housing figure fall under the government's December 2024 method. CPRE Hertfordshire's analysis put the new figure at 848 homes a year, below the old figure of 910 though above the 760 the adopted plan was built on. The pressure here comes from the backlog and the missing land, not from a jump in the target.

Anyone thinking about putting land forward should know how councils weigh submitted sites. Our guide to the call for sites and local plan process covers the evidence they look for.

Those missing homes are the reason a site left out of the 2023 plan can still be put forward with a real prospect of being weighed.

A recent plan does not protect a council from the Housing Delivery Test. A score of 46% brings policy S5 into play, because national policy treats a result below 75% as showing unmet need, however new the plan. The practical effect depends on where your land is.

• Inside the towns and excluded villages. Welwyn Garden City, Hatfield and villages such as Woolmer Green, Cuffley and Brookmans Park are excluded from the Green Belt. A plot within those boundaries is judged under policy S4, and the council would need to show the harm substantially outweighs the benefits to refuse it.
• Green Belt land around them. S5 does not apply here. The route is grey belt, where the shortfall supports the need test, or previously developed land, or allocation in the new plan.
• Near the six stations. Policy L3 favours new homes a short walk from a station with a good service. Welwyn North, Welwyn Garden City, Hatfield, Welham Green, Brookmans Park and Cuffley each need looking at on their own service levels.

The open land that keeps Welwyn Garden City, Hatfield and the southern villages apart does exactly the job the Green Belt purposes describe, so land within it is judged strictly. Land already enclosed by the towns, main roads or the railway is where a grey belt case is more often made, and our grey belt guide sets out the tests.

Beyond submission, the September 2026 scheme sets out the rest of the route: hearings in spring and summer 2027, the inspector's report in the autumn, and adoption in the first quarter of 2028. Under the July 2026 decision that would have left only weeks before a 1 April 2028 vesting day, with councillors for Central and Eastern Hertfordshire elected in May 2027 to sit in shadow form. The government paused that decision on 7 September 2026 for a review and the May 2027 elections are now for the existing councils, so, as things stand, a few months' delay at examination would leave the final vote with Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council.

Delivery figures will keep arriving alongside. The government releases one Housing Delivery Test result a year, each looking back over three years, and the Housing Delivery Test 2025 was released on 17 August 2026. At 46%, the borough is too far beneath 75% for one good year of completions to carry it over, so the finding of unmet need is likely to stay in the background throughout the examination.

A Supply Well Short of Five Years

The council's own land supply points the same way. Its monitoring report for 2024/25 counts 1.8 years of deliverable housing land at 1 April 2025, measured against the adopted plan's 760 homes a year:

Nearly two fifths of that requirement is backlog and buffer, carried over from years when completions ran well below target: the same report records 216 net new homes in 2024/25, against 359 the year before and 3,793 over the plan's first nine years, when 6,840 were due. Unmet need therefore rests on two measures here, not one, and both would have to recover before it fell away. Because nearly all open land in the borough is Green Belt, where policy S5 does not reach, the supply counts most as evidence for the grey belt need test. What would eventually rebuild it is the new plan's allocations, once adopted and under construction.

For a landowner, the timing points in two directions:

• Land that works under national policy today, inside the excluded villages or on grey belt, does not need to wait for 2028 and can be prepared now.
• Land that depends on a Green Belt change in the new plan is settled at the hearings, so on the council's dates its evidence should be complete by spring 2027. Transport, flood and landscape work of that kind takes months to commission and carry out, which is why we start it early and pay for it in full.