Selling Land in North Lincolnshire

• Fields on the edges of Brigg, Barton-upon-Humber, Kirton in Lindsey, Winterton and Broughton, with a road frontage or a realistic way in.
• Land around Scunthorpe and Bottesford, where the Core Strategy planned most of its growth.
• Plots on the higher ground at Epworth, Haxey and Crowle that stay clear of the low drained land around them.
• Farmyards, depots and former industrial land in or beside the towns, including brownfield sites near the steelworks.
• Inherited farmland where the family wants to know whether it is worth putting forward to the new plan.

Wherever the land sits, we look first at the flood zone, the drainage board's watercourses, access and how the field relates to the settlement it adjoins. If a site is worth taking on, we take it under an option whose price is settled before any work begins and sits above the land's worth in its present use, and we pay for every survey, submission and application, including the work on flood risk that this borough asks for. Farming or letting carries on as normal until completion, and should permission be refused for good, the land is still yours and you owe us nothing. The farmland we buy is described on its own page, which shows the larger holdings we take on, and families dealing with an estate can read our guide to probate and selling land.

• 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 submitted a new North Lincolnshire Local Plan, covering 2020 to 2038, for examination on 11 November 2022. It never reached adoption. Its statement of withdrawal records that the cabinet resolved to withdraw it at a meeting held on 30 September 2024, using the power in section 22 of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, and the council's local plan news page records the formal withdrawal from examination on 15 November 2024.

The 2025 Local Development Scheme gives the reason in plain terms: the examination "concluded with a recommendation from the Inspectors" that the council withdraw the plan, in light of a letter from the Minister of State. Local reporting puts the withdrawal down to the changes in national policy of 2024, which raised the housing figures councils plan for.

A Fresh Start, Then a Second Change of Course

The council published a new scheme in March 2025, launched a call for sites in May 2025 and updated its timetable in November 2025. The cabinet report of July 2026 records the work done by then: a call for sites, the "assessment of over 700 sites", "settlement boundary reviews" and a range of technical studies. It explains why the council changed course: "The Government has made clear that North Lincolnshire Council should move into the new plan-making framework at the earliest opportunity and this is not a local decision to delay the Local Plan". At its meeting on 13 July 2026 the cabinet approved the move into the new plan-making system.

The report adds two points that matter to anyone with land here. The evidence already gathered carries across, so the council "will be able to utilise the substantial evidence base already prepared", and the new plan "would carry increased material weight for decision making purposes at Gateway two and beyond". Hits Radio reported that the cabinet also agreed to write to the Secretary of State with its concerns about the higher housing target.

Land that appeared in the 2022 plan carries no status from it now, so an owner whose field was put forward then and who is now thinking of selling should treat the new plan as a fresh hearing, with the council's assessment of those 700 sites as its starting evidence. The settlement boundary reviews deserve as much attention, because where the new line falls around a village decides whether a field beside it is judged as land inside the settlement or outside it.

Flood risk is the constraint that reaches furthest here. The Strategic Flood Risk Assessment of June 2022, prepared for North Lincolnshire and North East Lincolnshire together, describes a borough in which water levels are managed "by using a heavily engineered and complex network of pumps and drains". About half of its study area lies within an internal drainage district, where a drainage board looks after the watercourses and pumps.

The Isle of Axholme

The Isle of Axholme rises to about 35 metres above sea level, and the assessment names Belton, Epworth, Haxey and Upperthorpe as the places it supports, with part of Crowle on "a noticeable high point". Around them lies flat, artificially drained land between the Trent, the Torne and the Idle, its water levels held by pumps. The assessment puts the Trent's tidal defences generally at a 1 in 200 year standard or better. For a field on the Isle, the key line is the edge of the higher ground around each village, because a site that keeps its homes and its access on that ground has a very different case from one on the low drained land below.

The Humber Bank and the Ancholme

The assessment names the Humber estuary itself as a main source of flooding. It notes that the defences between Barton-upon-Humber and New Holland are mostly earth embankments, and that in the flood compartments behind them, around Barton and Goxhill, the defences were "substantially overtopped in many locations" in the tidal surge of December 2013. The same surge brought "major over topping" of the flood banks along the Trent and the Ancholme. The River Ancholme is embanked and drains through a gated outfall at South Ferriby, so land beside it can sit lower than the water it carries.

• Flood Zone 3b, the functional floodplain, is land where water has to flow or be stored in a flood, and the assessment takes land that floods with a 1 in 20 annual chance or more as the starting point for mapping it.
• Flood Zone 3a is land with a 1 in 100 or greater annual chance of river flooding, or a 1 in 200 or greater chance of flooding from the sea, where homes must pass the sequential test and the exception test.
• Climate change matters too: the assessment's own working assumption is that land now in Flood Zone 2 will become Flood Zone 3 over time.

Those tests weigh on the largest allocation too. The Lincolnshire Lakes, the subject of a 2016 Area Action Plan for new village communities and business parks on the land between the western edge of Scunthorpe and the River Trent, had seen no development by March 2024, according to the monitoring report, with the council still working with developers and funders on its exception test strategy and phasing. How a site gets through the sequential test, and what the council asks to see, is set out in our flood risk guide for landowners. For most owners on the Isle or the Humber bank, the flood map answers the first question before anything else is worth paying for, which is why it is the first thing we check, at our cost.

The council's plan timetable, first published on 28 July 2026, sets out a single new Local Plan looking ahead to 2045 under the new system. A scoping consultation ran from 4 August to 1 September 2026. The dates after that are the council's and may move:

An Old Plan, a Thin Margin and an Unsettled Reorganisation

Until a new plan is adopted, the Core Strategy of 2011 stays in force, and a plan of that age has its housing figure replaced by the standard method whenever supply is tested. The statement in force has a base date of 1 April 2024 and a margin of 45 homes, so the council's next statement, counted from a later base date, is the figure to watch. We do not predict what it will show.

The delivery test runs alongside it once a year, and the Housing Delivery Test 2025, published on 17 August 2026, put North Lincolnshire at 137%, clear of every threshold that carries a consequence. Below 95% a council must prepare an action plan, below 85% a 20% buffer is added to its supply, and below 75% policy S5 treats unmet need as evidenced.

Reorganisation is also unsettled. The government's July 2026 decision for Greater Lincolnshire would have created two new unitary councils for the rest of the county while leaving North Lincolnshire as it is. On 29 October 2026 the government withdrew that decision for Lincolnshire, North Lincolnshire and North East Lincolnshire, so that all the proposals submitted in November 2025 can be considered again. West Lindsey District Council reported that reorganisation has not been cancelled, that every area under review has been promised an outcome by early 2027, and that any new councils are expected to take over on 1 April 2029, two months before the date the timetable gives for considering adoption of the new plan. Until a decision is made, North Lincolnshire Council remains the planning authority for the whole borough and the body preparing that plan.

Ahead of the 2027 Consultation on the Plan's Content

• Land inside a town or village can be looked at now, under policy S4 and the old plan, while a field on the edge needs evidence of unmet need under policy S5 or a place in the new plan.
• Larger fields that need an allocation are best prepared before the consultation on content and evidence, which the council's timetable puts from 28 June to 9 August 2027, when the council sets out what the plan will cover.
• Land on the Isle of Axholme or the Humber bank needs its flood position settled first, and that work takes time whichever route it follows.

Our guide to the call for sites and local plans explains how land is carried through a timetable like this one.