Selling Land in West Lindsey

• Plots and small fields within the built form of Welton, Nettleham, Saxilby, Scotter, Keelby, Cherry Willingham or Dunholme, now that scheme size is no longer capped.
• Land in and around Gainsborough that lies clear of the Trent flood plain.
• Fields by Caistor and Market Rasen, where the plan directs proportionate growth, with the Wolds setting checked first.
• Farmland that could be put forward for the new Central Lincolnshire plan, especially in the Lincoln Strategy Area villages.
• Former farmyards and redundant buildings in the smaller villages, and inherited land where a family wants the planning position settled.

Our free review starts with the settlement tier, the flood zone, the Wolds boundary, access and the title. Where land is worth taking forward, we fund the surveys, the design and the application ourselves, under an option at a price agreed before any of that work starts, and you farm or use the land as now until completion. If permission is refused the land stays yours and nothing is owed. Larger holdings are covered on our farmland page, and each stage of the process is set out on how it works.

• 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.

Policy S2 sends around 12% of Central Lincolnshire's new homes to Gainsborough, through a mix of urban regeneration and two large urban extensions. Over the plan's first seven years the town delivered less than that share. The joint Local Plan Monitoring Report 2024 to 2025 counts 842 homes built in Gainsborough since 2018, 8.71% of the plan area's total, although 156 completions in 2024/25 took its share for that year to 12.9%.

The southern site has averaged 65 completions a year over the last four years, up from 60 a year over the three years to 2023/24. Further phases of both extensions hinge on applications that were still undecided when the monitoring report was prepared, so the pace of the town's growth turns on those decisions.

Flood Risk on Gainsborough's Sites

When the councils screened Gainsborough's sites for the plan, the Level 1 Strategic Flood Risk Assessment of March 2022 recorded how much of each lay in Flood Zone 3, the highest band of flood risk, and whether that risk came from a main river, where the Environment Agency has powers to maintain and improve the channel, or from an ordinary watercourse:

Four of the five smaller sites sit wholly or almost wholly in the highest band and the fifth about a third in it, all from a main river, while the 140 hectare Southern Neighbourhood is almost entirely clear of it. Land on the town's southern side can therefore start from a very different position to a yard on ground like those smaller sites, which must pass the sequential test our flood risk guide explains.

For an owner near Gainsborough, the flood map and the progress of the two neighbourhoods are the two facts that shape a sale: land away from the river avoids the first, and a site small enough to be built quickly does not wait on the second.

North of Lincoln, two places carry their own policies in the plan, and neither works like an ordinary village site.

1. RAF Scampton. The inspectors recorded that the plan responds to the impending closure and sale of the base with a policy, S75, to manage its reuse, and modified it so that redevelopment must come forward through a separate development plan document.
2. The council's bid. On 2 March 2026 the full council agreed unanimously to progress plans to buy the 800 acre site from the Home Office, with Scampton Holdings Limited as its development partner, for a scheme of more than £300 million based on aviation, heritage, tourism and education, with the airfield kept in use.
3. Where the sale stood. In a statement of 30 September 2026 the council said the Home Office had demonstrated that the commercial process was still live, and that its own aims for the site were unchanged.
4. Hemswell Cliff. The inspectors noted that Hemswell Cliff is also identified as an Enterprise Zone. The joint monitoring report shows its business park at 26 hectares, with 25.83 hectares still undeveloped at 31 March 2025.

The council's published proposals for Scampton do not mention new housing, and the monitoring report counts Hemswell Cliff's business park as employment land. For owners around Scampton and Hemswell Cliff, that means the two sites are best treated as uncertain neighbours rather than a reason for growth, and land there is judged under the village rules above until the Scampton document exists.

On 12 October 2026 the Central Lincolnshire Joint Strategic Planning Committee published a notice of intention to start a new plan, prepared under the new system with three gateway checks. Its Local Plan Review Timetable of November 2026 sets out these milestones:

• Scoping consultation opened on 22 October 2026, and the timetable sets 17 December 2026 as the closing date for representations.
• Proposed content and evidence out for consultation from 30 September 2027 to 11 November 2027, then the proposed plan in June to August 2028 and submission in December 2028.
• Adoption in September 2029, after an examination expected from January to July 2029; the timetable uses the first of the month where the exact day is not yet known.

The consultations page says the online call for sites tool, used for a call between December 2025 and February 2026, has been reopened during the scoping consultation. How the councils then assess each entry is covered in our call for sites guide.

The Plan's Fifth Year and the Joint Figures

The adopted plan reaches five years in April 2028, before its replacement is due. From then the government's standard method would generally take the place of the plan's own requirement when supply is tested, for all three councils together. The Housing Delivery Test is published once a year, and a new joint supply report would replace 7.1 years for the whole plan area at once. We would not predict either.

Council Structures Still Undecided

In a letter of 29 October 2026 the minister for local government withdrew the decisions announced in July 2026 for Lincolnshire, North Lincolnshire and North East Lincolnshire, one of nine areas treated that way. The letter keeps all the options and proposals for the area under review, promises an outcome for every area by early 2027, and confirms that the elections due in May 2027 go ahead to the existing councils. Until a new structure is decided and in place, West Lindsey District Council decides applications here.

In practice, a plot within a West Lindsey village can be assessed straight away under national policy S4, whereas a field outside the built form needs its evidence ready before the councils consult on the content of the new plan, from 30 September 2027.