Selling Land in Tonbridge and Malling

• Land outside the Green Belt on the edges of Kings Hill, the Medway Gap and Snodland.
• Green Belt land that could qualify as grey belt, especially where it is enclosed by roads, railways or existing homes.
• Former yards, nurseries, depots and restored quarry land, including in the Green Belt.
• Fields and plots a short walk from a station on any of the four lines through the borough.
• Larger holdings on the edges of the main settlements that could contribute to growth in the new plan.

If your land is in the Kent Downs or in open Green Belt between villages, the case is harder, and we will tell you so honestly. Our how it works page explains what happens after 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 council's Green Belt note is precise about the pattern. The boundary is drawn tightly around the whole of Tonbridge, and along at least one edge of three of the four other urban areas: the Medway Gap, Kings Hill and Snodland. The smaller rural service centres are heavily constrained by it as well. The strategy paper adds that the larger settlements are inset, meaning drawn out of the Green Belt, while many hamlets and some small villages are washed over by it. The parts of the borough beyond the outer Green Belt boundary include extensive areas of the Kent Downs.

In practice, a field just beyond the edge of Tonbridge is almost certainly Green Belt, while a field on a different side of Kings Hill, the Medway Gap or Snodland may not be. Two sites a few miles apart can therefore face entirely different tests, and the 63% result means very different things on either side of the line.

Knowing exactly which side of the line a field falls on, and how the council's latest Green Belt study rates it, is the first thing we check. Our grey belt guide explains how Green Belt land is assessed.

The council's hesitation over the plan came from a specific local issue. In March 2026 KentOnline reported South East Water telling the council it could not accommodate growth beyond what its 2024 water resources plan assumed, a forecast of about 6,318 extra homes to 2042, roughly a third of the draft plan's total. Planning Geek reports that the company expects to publish updated demand assumptions in spring 2027, with proposed infrastructure to follow in spring 2028, well after the plan's submission deadline.

The council has responded through its planning decisions as well as its plan. Its planning pages now say that adequate water supply is a material planning consideration in deciding applications, and that applicants must show compliance with policy SQ5 by addressing whether there is adequate water infrastructure, or whether it can be provided, to meet the needs of the development. This applies to new applications and to those with a resolution to approve where water capacity has not yet been addressed.

For a landowner this is technical evidence rather than a bar: the water strategy for a scheme becomes part of the application from day one. We prepare that evidence and pay for it.

Two clocks were set to run in the borough in 2027, the plan examination and local government reorganisation, though the second has now been stopped for a review.

A Delivery Result and a Supply Count Both Well Short

Each Housing Delivery Test counts three years of completions together and is republished annually, so a result well under the 75% line, like the borough's 63%, is rarely closed by one better year. We would not put a figure on the next edition. The bigger shift will come from the plan: once it is adopted, its allocations and Green Belt releases become the main way most land here gains permission.

The supply count points the same way. The council's most recent housing land supply briefing note, published in January 2025, finds 2.89 years of deliverable land at 31 October 2024. It was the council's first count against the government's revised standard method of December 2024, 1,096 homes a year, which with a 20% buffer for past under delivery asks for 6,576 homes over five years. The council counts 3,804. Its earlier count at the same date, against the older method's 820 homes a year, found 3.97 years, so the fall owes more to the higher target than to fewer sites. The council's Local Plan questions page still points to the January 2025 note as its latest position.

Beyond the Green Belt, the shortfall adds a second, separate strand of evidence of need under policy S5. Within it, the shortfall counts towards the need test that grey belt housing has to pass. Once the new plan is adopted its allocations count towards supply, so the shortfall does most work before then.

Water Evidence Mid-Examination, and the Second Clock Stopped

If the plan is submitted by the end of 2026, as the direction requires, the examination would run through 2027, when South East Water's updated demand assumptions are also due, so new water evidence may well arrive mid-examination. For owners of allocated land, that makes an early, well evidenced water strategy the most useful thing to have ready.

The government's statement of 16 July 2026 set May 2027 elections to four new Kent unitary councils, with a handover in April 2028. On 7 September 2026 that decision was paused for a review, and the May 2027 elections will now fill seats on the existing councils instead. The examination should therefore run with Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council as the planning authority, and if a west Kent council is created later, it would inherit the adopted plan along with those of Sevenoaks, Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells.

• Allocated land: the hearings in 2027 are where its place in the plan is confirmed or lost.
• Land outside the Green Belt near Kings Hill, Snodland or the Medway Gap: an application under S5 need not wait for either clock.
• Green Belt land the plan does not release: unless it qualifies as grey belt, the examination decides its prospects.