Selling Land in Stoke-on-Trent

The city council is a unitary authority, deciding applications and writing the plan for the whole city. Its Publication Local Plan describes a polycentric city of 93 square kilometres, the Potteries, grown from six towns: Burslem, Fenton, Hanley, Longton, Stoke-upon-Trent and Tunstall. Hanley is the city centre, and the plan counts Meir among its key service areas.

• Rail and road. Trains call at Stoke-on-Trent, Longport and Longton, and the West Coast Main Line, the M6, the A500 and the A50 put the city between Manchester and Birmingham.
• Building below target. In the Housing Delivery Test 2025, published on 17 August 2026, the city delivered 1,384 homes against 2,109 required, a result of 66%. No other Staffordshire council scored lower.
• Short of land. The council's own figure is 3.73 years of deliverable housing land at 1 April 2025.
• Green Belt to the boundary. The council calls its Green Belt tight and narrow, running from the urban area up to the city limits with Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire Moorlands and Stafford.

This is a largely urban council, and the plan itself names viability and land values as a challenge. Most new homes are built on previously developed land inside the city, but the plan finds that the urban area cannot meet all of the city's needs, which is why the Green Belt edge has become the question of the new plan.

The development plan for the city is still the Newcastle-under-Lyme and Stoke-on-Trent Core Spatial Strategy, adopted jointly by the two councils in October 2009, with saved policies from the City Plan of September 1993 and a joint waste plan. The new plan will replace the strategy and the City Plan. At 16 years old, the strategy no longer sets the housing figure: a plan more than five years old has its requirement replaced by the standard method, hence the 952 a year above.

The two councils that shared it are now on different footings. Newcastle-under-Lyme adopted its own Local Plan 2020 to 2040 on 8 July 2026 and has put its next plan on hold until reorganisation is settled. Stoke-on-Trent's plan for the same period has not yet been submitted for examination, so fields either side of the city boundary face quite different policy.

Beyond its numbered sites, the plan names broad locations, which it defines as larger areas that may take longer to deliver and are later refined into specific sites. Together the broad locations allow for 7,917 homes on our count. The four biggest, with the two largest numbered housing allocations, are these:

The tables do not say which parcels lie in the Green Belt today, so the policies map has to be read alongside them. Packmoor and Chatterley Whitfield include areas with designations such as Local Wildlife Sites, which their masterplans must respect, and the former colliery at Chatterley Whitfield has its own heritage-led policy, CH3.

For neighbouring land they show where the council accepts greenfield growth, around Meir, Abbey Hulton, Norton, Goldenhill and Trentham, and whose roads and drainage nearby land would later join.

Most sites in the city fit one of these, the commonest first:

1. Inside the urban area. Policy S4 of the national framework approves homes within the built-up area unless the harm would substantially outweigh the benefits, and the draft plan's policy H2 supports windfall housing there too.
2. Previously developed land. In 2024/25, 77% of new homes were built on previously developed land. Yards, works and depots can also be put forward through the council's brownfield call for sites, which its land availability assessment of July 2026 records as carried out in December 2025, with submissions accepted on an ongoing basis after that. Our brownfield and yards page covers what we look at.
3. Edges outside the Green Belt. Policy S5 supports homes on land well related to a settlement and served by infrastructure where unmet need is evidenced, and with a delivery result below 75% it is treated as evidenced. With the Green Belt running tight to the urban area, few fields qualify, but those that do have a clear route to make their case.
4. Grey belt. Green Belt land that does not strongly serve the purposes above, with the Golden Rules on larger schemes.
5. Through the plan. The same assessment, fed by an open call for sites in October 2024, holds 456 sites, counting housing land that could take five homes or more and employment land from 0.25 hectares. On this route, land left out of the published plan now depends on the examination or on the plan's review, due within five years of adoption. Our guide to calls for sites and local plans explains the stages.

Stoke-on-Trent is not a council of large open farms. But the lowest delivery result in Staffordshire means unmet need is treated as evidenced here, the plan must still justify its Green Belt changes at examination, and brownfield schemes turn on careful viability work. Each needs evidence prepared early, and we pay for all of it.