Selling Land in East Staffordshire

The Local Plan calls Burton upon Trent "firmly identified as a brewing town", home to Molson Coors and Marston's. Uttoxeter is a smaller market town on the A50 serving a rural population that extends into Stafford, Staffordshire Moorlands and Derbyshire Dales, and JCB has its world headquarters seven miles north at Rocester. The plan places every settlement in a hierarchy that decides where homes may go:

• Main towns. Burton upon Trent and Uttoxeter, where most growth is directed.
• Strategic villages. Tutbury, Barton under Needwood, Rolleston on Dove and Rocester.
• Local service villages. Abbots Bromley, Yoxall, Marchington, Mayfield, Denstone and Draycott in the Clay.
• Everywhere else. Places such as Bramshall, Hanbury, Newborough and Tatenhill have no settlement boundary and count as open countryside.

The Housing Delivery Test 2025 counted 2,334 homes built against 1,289 required, a result of 181%.

The council's notes show the margin narrowing:

Most of the fall came with the December 2024 framework: its standard method lifted local housing need from 419 a year to 607, and the 5% buffer, not applied in September 2024, came back on top, taking the figure measured against to 637. Building has slowed as well: completions peaked at 935 in 2022/23, then fell to 781 and to 576 in 2024/25, below 607 a year. The delivery test still finds 181% because it measures April 2022 to March 2025 against a lower requirement of 1,289 homes.

Most of the borough has no Green Belt. The plan records "a small portion of the Burton upon Trent/Swadlincote Green Belt", there to stop the two towns merging, and notes that the same land lies in the coal consultation area, "considered to be a constraint on development". It adds local Strategic Green Gaps where building is allowed only if it keeps the landscape open.

Flood risk follows the Trent and Dove valleys. The plan admits that much of Burton's built-up area is at risk, which "severely curtails the options" for growth there and at Uttoxeter. The Environment Agency says the whole investment in Burton's defences, over £30 million, reduces the risk of flooding to over 4,600 homes and 1,000 businesses, but the plan still asks for a flood risk assessment in Flood Zones 2 and 3, and homes there face the sequential test, as our flood risk guide explains.

The National Forest covers Burton and the rural south east, and Strategic Policy 26 asks schemes to add to it. Housing sites over half a hectare give 20% of the development area to woodland, and sites over 10 hectares 30%, with a payment for planting elsewhere only in exceptional circumstances. The National Forest Company adds that this comes "in addition to the statutory requirement to demonstrate Biodiversity Net Gain".

In June 2026 a cabinet paper proposed a new plan to 2043, warning, as Place Midlands reported, that keeping five years of land "will be increasingly difficult as the plan ages further". The council's engagement strategy put a scoping consultation, asking what the plan should contain, in July to August 2026, and sets the later stages, with adoption "all within 34 months":

The February 2026 needs assessment puts need at 616 homes a year, 11,088 over 2025 to 2043, with 153 a year affordable, and suggests 30% affordable housing on sites is plausible, subject to viability.

The council's most recent land availability assessment, its 2021 update, looked at 104 sites of about a third of a hectare or more, 712.64 hectares with room for 21,381 homes at its standard 30 homes a hectare. Seventeen, with 1,037 homes, were judged suitable and so developable; three of those were also available and achievable, with 413 homes in its first five years. The other 87 were judged not developable and put at 15 years or more, the timescale it gives land outside settlement boundaries, as they "would be subject to a Local Plan and/or Neighbourhood plan review". Being listed "should not be taken to imply" that applications will be viewed favourably. The same density gives the two Molson Coors yards and the main Derby Road site 491 homes, where the September 2025 note counts 760. The likely reason is that the plan's allocations expect more homes on these town sites; for an owner, neither figure fixes what a site takes, its design and permission do.

Comments outside the three consultation windows "will not be accepted", the strategy says, yet it wants to hear from anyone with "land which you would like to build on" "at any stage in the preparation of the plan, but the earlier the better". Fifteen sites were put forward between the 2017 and 2021 reviews, and sites whose owners had not replied were dropped. The council's call for sites form takes sites "at any time", asks especially for brownfield land, and warns that information sent after 31 March, when its monitoring year ends, "may not be included until the following year". Each step is walked through in our guide to calls for sites and local plans.