Selling Land in Runnymede

The council's Urban Area Capacity Study of May 2026 took 77 sites inside the built-up areas forward for assessment, 17 of them in the Addlestone, Chertsey and Egham town centres and 7 in local centres, and gives a capacity of up to 1,608 more homes. Set against the 6,400 or more homes the new plan is scoping, the urban capacity it quantifies falls well short, which is why the Green Belt review matters so much here. The 2025 land availability assessment, published the same month, considered 189 sites but leaves the question of which are grey belt to later site selection. That test is still open for every field, and we look for:

• Car parks, garage blocks, offices and employment land in or near the Addlestone, Chertsey and Egham centres, the kinds of urban site the study assessed.
• Enclosed land on the edges of Addlestone, Chertsey, Egham, Ottershaw, Englefield Green or Virginia Water, bounded by homes and roads, that the joint Green Belt review could class as grey belt.
• Previously developed land anywhere in the borough, in or out of the Green Belt.
• Land within an easy walk of Egham, Virginia Water, Chertsey or Addlestone station.
• Part or all of an allocated site that has not yet started.
• Sites of 0.25 hectares or five homes upwards, the size the council's assessment records, and smaller paddocks and small sites too.

Land lying wholly in the Thames floodplain in the east of the borough, and open fields well away from any town or village, are harder cases. We still review them, and we will tell you plainly if the evidence points against a scheme.

• 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.

Runnymede's delivery result has moved about from one edition to the next. The council's October 2024 action plan answered a result of 87% in the 2022 measurement; its September 2025 land supply statement quotes 114% for the 2023 measurement; and the Housing Delivery Test 2025 gives 94%. At that level the council must again explain how it will improve delivery, but national policy does not treat it as having unmet need on the score alone, and no 20% buffer applies.

The Number That Carries More Weight

The five-year supply is a different story. The September 2025 statement, based at 1 April 2025, measured supply against the standard method figure of 640 homes a year, because the plan is more than five years old, and added a 5% buffer. It found 1,943 deliverable homes, equal to 2.89 years. The scoping document explains the jump behind it: the figure the council plans for has risen from 500 to 640 homes a year.

Under the August 2026 National Planning Policy Framework a shortfall in the five-year supply is evidence of unmet housing need, to be weighed with everything else rather than an automatic finding. In Runnymede that evidence matters twice over. It supports the unmet need route in policy S5 on land outside the Green Belt, and it helps meet the need test that grey belt land has to pass before homes can be approved.

Two local constraints add cost rather than ruling land out, and both are allowed for from the start.

These costs come out of the value of a scheme, not out of your pocket, and our guide to section 106 and CIL explains how they are worked out.

The Floodplain

The scoping document notes the higher flood risk in the east of the borough from the Thames and its tributaries, and refers to the River Thames Scheme as a nationally significant infrastructure project. Land partly in Flood Zones 2 or 3 is not automatically ruled out, since homes can often be kept to the drier part, but it needs flood evidence early.

For the owner of a paddock near Egham or Chertsey with a dry corner, that early flood evidence is often what turns a doubtful field into one worth taking forward.

The council gave notice in June 2026 that it would prepare a new local plan under the reformed system, and its scoping consultation ran from 7 September 2026 to 11.59pm on Monday 12 October 2026. Landowners were invited to put sites forward as part of it. The council's timetable, approved by its planning committee on 25 February 2026 and updated on 24 September 2026, then shows the Gateway 1 self-assessment running from 1 to 30 October 2026, consultation on the vision and strategy in June and July 2027, consultation on the proposed plan in April and May 2028, submission in September 2028, examination from October 2028 to March 2029 and adoption in April 2029. The scoping document proposes a plan period of ten years from adoption, which at 640 homes a year means about 6,400 homes, rising to 9,600 over fifteen.

On 1 April 2027 a West Surrey unitary council replaces Runnymede and the other five borough and district councils in the west of the county. The council expects the new plan still to cover Runnymede's own area, and says the other five councils are taking a similar approach and starting plans of their own. The plan will therefore be finished by the new council, not the one that started it.

A Result That Has Swung, and a Supply Short of Five Years

The delivery test is published each year, and the Housing Delivery Test 2025 was issued on 17 August 2026. A rise to 95% would end the duty to prepare an action plan. A fall below 85% would add a 20% buffer to a supply already short of five years, and a fall below 75% would mean unmet need was treated as existing without further evidence. Given how far the result has moved between editions, we would not read much into any single year, and we have not seen completion figures for 2025/26.

On supply, the September 2025 statement is the latest we have found, and no 2026 statement had been published when we checked. A new statement could move the figure either way.

An Application While Supply Is Short, the Plan at the Same Time

The new plan will not be adopted until 2029 at the earliest, and its sites will be chosen from land put forward from the scoping stage that closed in October 2026 onwards, ahead of the proposed plan the timetable places in April and May 2028. A strong site can go forward by application while the supply is short and be put forward for the plan at the same time. We cover the cost of both, and how it works explains the steps.