A Land Company Has Written to Me About My Field. What Does It Mean?

Because your field appears, on paper, to be the kind of land that could take new homes. Nobody has walked it. The letter is the result of desk research, and desk research is cheap and easy to do.

Anyone can find out who owns a registered piece of land in England and Wales. HM Land Registry sells a copy of the title register, which names the owner, and the title plan, which shows the boundaries, for £7 each through its online service, and you do not have to own the land to buy them. A land company lays those plans over a map of the village, the flood maps, the Green Belt and landscape designations, and the council's policies map, and writes to the owners of the fields that pass the first sift. Typically those are fields that touch the edge of a town or village, have a boundary onto a public road, sit outside the highest flood zones, and are not covered by a designation that would stop homes.

The second reason is timing. Every council in England has to keep a local plan, the document that says how many homes the area needs and where they should go, and many councils are either preparing a new one or reviewing an old one. Each plan begins with a call for sites, where the council invites anyone to put forward land that could be developed, and the government's draft guidance to councils on the call for sites says that anyone can propose land, even if they do not own it. Companies that want to put land forward need owners who are willing, so they write before the window opens. How a council sifts the land it receives is set out in our guide to the call for sites and local plans.

The third reason is the pressure on councils to deliver. The government measures every council once a year against the homes it was supposed to deliver, in what is called the Housing Delivery Test, and the results decide how easy it is to get planning permission on land outside the plan. Where a council has fallen well behind, land on the edge of its settlements becomes more interesting to everyone, and the letters follow.

The real difference between the three is who ends up owning the land and when the price is settled. A housebuilder and a strategic land company both buy the land. A promoter usually does not: the land is sold on the open market once permission is granted. A fixed price is known on the day the agreement is signed, while a price worked out at the end depends on the market, on the planning permission actually granted and on whatever the agreement lets the other side deduct.

Our route is the one in the last row. We agree the price with you first, we pay for and run all of the planning work, and if permission is granted we complete the purchase at that price. Our guide to option agreements walks through the agreement clause by clause in plain English.

Because the national position has changed. In December 2024 the government set itself the aim of 1.5 million new homes over five years, gave councils mandatory housing targets, and set a combined figure of 370,000 homes a year across England. Delivery has not kept pace, and the Housing Delivery Test shows by how much.

The Housing Delivery Test compares the homes a council delivered over three years with the homes it needed, and gives a percentage. The 2025 measurement, published on 17 August 2026, looks back over the financial years 2022/23 to 2024/25. Under Annex D of the August 2026 National Planning Policy Framework, a result below 95% means the council should prepare an action plan, below 85% adds a 20% buffer to the land it has to show, and below 75% means an evidenced unmet need for housing is deemed to exist.

Savills' planning team, reading the 2025 results, found that the number of councils below 75% rose from 63 in 2023 to 87 in 2024 and 93 in 2025, that the share of councils passing the test fell from 65% in 2023 to just over half in 2025, and that the homes required across the three years went up by 17% while the homes delivered fell by 4%. In London the share of councils below 75% went from 37% to 65% between the 2023 and 2025 tests, and in the South East from 31% to 47%.

The framework itself changed on 17 August 2026, and the change matters for the owner of a field. The new framework asks plans to identify each settlement and its boundary. Inside the boundary, policy S4 says development should be approved unless the harm would substantially outweigh the benefits. Outside it, policy S5 lists the forms of development that can be approved, and one of them is housing that answers an evidenced unmet need, on land well related to a settlement and of a scale the roads, schools and drains can support. A result below 75% in the test means that need is treated as evidenced. A five-year supply shortfall is also evidence of unmet need, to be weighed with everything else rather than an automatic finding. Policy S5 does not apply in the Green Belt, where grey belt land has its own need test, and the Golden Rules apply to larger schemes.

Put the three together and you can see why the letters arrive. A council with an out-of-date plan, a failed delivery test and no five-year supply has land on the edge of its villages that could get permission on application, and a council with a new plan under way has a call for sites coming. Either way, companies want to talk to the owners first.

No. A reply, a phone call, a visit or a meeting commits you to nothing, and neither does receiving a price in writing. The law is on your side here. Section 2 of the Law of Property (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1989 says that a contract for the sale or other disposition of an interest in land can only be made in writing, must contain all the terms the parties have agreed in one document, and must be signed by or on behalf of each party. An option agreement is a contract of that kind, so the same rule applies to it. Until you and the company have both signed a written agreement, there is no deal.

So a conversation, a visit or a price on paper leaves you exactly where you were. The Act does set out a few exceptions, such as a contract made at a public auction and certain short leases, and none of them arises from answering a letter about your field. Nothing said in a conversation binds you, and you can put the letter back in a drawer for a year afterwards if that suits you.

What a reply does give you is a clearer picture of your own field. The first thing our review settles is whether the land sits inside a settlement or outside it, because the framework treats the two very differently, and that decides which route to planning the field would take. That in turn tells you whether the letter is about something that could happen in two or three years or something more likely to take five to eight.

A desktop review is a planning assessment of your land done from records and maps, without anyone visiting. With us it takes a few days and it costs you nothing. It is the step between the letter, which is based on a quick first sift, and a conversation about terms, which needs a proper opinion.

We look at the title and the boundaries, the distance from the field to the shops, school, bus stop and station, the road frontage and the visibility a car would have pulling out, the flood maps for river and surface water, the landscape, heritage and wildlife designations around the site, the trees and hedgerows a scheme would need to keep, and the council's position: its adopted plan and the policies that apply to the land, where its new plan has got to, its five-year supply statement, and its result in the Housing Delivery Test. From that we form a view on how many homes the field could take, which route to planning fits it, and what would need solving along the way.

A desktop review is honest about what it cannot see. It cannot tell us whether a ditch floods every February, whether a neighbour has a right of way across the gateway, or whether the far corner is an old tip. That is why the next step is a conversation with you, because you know the field in a way no map can, and then a visit, arranged for a time that suits you and never without your say-so.

At the end of the review you get a plain answer. Either we think the land has a case and we would like to put a price in writing, or we tell you why it does not, which is just as useful, because it tells you where the field stands before you spend any more time on it. If your land is in one of the areas we cover, you can ask for a free desktop review at any time.

1. A first conversation, then the desktop review: a few days. You tell us how the land is used, who owns it and what you would like to happen. We finish our review and, if it helps, visit at a time that suits you.
2. A price in writing, then heads of terms: six weeks to three months, including the option agreement. Where the review supports it, we put the price and the main terms in a short written offer that the whole family can read in one sitting. Your own solicitor then works with ours on the option agreement, and the time this takes depends mostly on the solicitors and on any title issues. We pay towards your solicitor's and land agent's bills.
3. Surveys and design: three to twelve months. Ecology, highways, drainage, trees and heritage. Bats, newts and nesting birds each have a survey season, so the calendar, not the paperwork, usually sets the pace here. We pay for all of it. You carry on farming, grazing or using the land as before.
4. Pre-application advice and community consultation: two to six months, often alongside the surveys. We talk to the council's officers and the highway authority before anything is submitted, and we tell you before anything about your land becomes public.
5. Planning application to decision: several months for a straightforward outline application, often a year or more for a large or contentious scheme. Or, where the land needs to be allocated in the local plan first, often several years, depending on where the council is in its plan. We submit the land, make representations at every stage and appear at the examination if needed.
6. Appeal, if refused and there is a realistic case: commonly six months to a year. Paid for by us. While an application or an appeal is still being decided, the agreement stays alive, so a long planning effort is never cut off a week before the answer.
7. Completion and payment: set out in your agreement. Once planning permission has been secured we complete the purchase and you receive the agreed price. If permission is refused for good, the agreement falls away, the land stays yours and there is nothing to repay.

Taken together, a site that can go straight to an application is often two to three years from first call to planning permission, and a site that needs the local plan first is commonly five to eight. Our guide to how long planning takes sets out each stage with the statutory periods, and our how it works page shows the same journey from your side.

If the letter on your table is from a land promoter, it helps to understand how that model pays out, because it is the model most landowners find hardest to picture. The promoter does not normally buy your land. It spends its own money getting planning permission, then the land is sold on the open market, and the promoter is paid out of the sale.

Fraser Dawbarns, a firm of solicitors, sets out the order of payment plainly in its guide for landowners: if permission is obtained and the land sold, the promoter is reimbursed its agreed costs and then receives a fee or percentage of the sale proceeds, and the agreement should set out what costs can be recovered and whether there is a cap. In practice the sale price comes in, the promoter's agreed costs for surveys, consultants, applications and any appeal are repaid, the promoter takes its fee or percentage, and the balance is yours. The same firm notes that the promoter usually funds the work with its own money and carries much of the risk at the start, and that these agreements can run for several years. The figure you receive is therefore the last number to be known, not the first, and it moves with the market on the day of sale and with how much the planning work ended up costing.

That is not a criticism of promoters. Many do excellent work, and a promoter with the right site can do well for its landowner. It is simply a different shape of deal. Under our option, the price is the first number to be known: it is written into the agreement before any work starts, it is not reduced if the planning costs rise, and the market and the planning costs are our concern, not yours. For a family that wants one clear figure to agree on, that is the simple route. Our guide to promotion agreement fees and deductions works through the arithmetic with example figures.

Not from us, and not at this stage. A desktop review uses public records that anyone can buy, and a conversation with you is private. We do not contact the council, the parish or your neighbours about your land until there is a signed agreement and a plan you have seen, and we agree the timing with you before anything is submitted.

The point at which land becomes visible is when it is put forward to the council. Even then, the government's draft guidance on the call for sites says a council does not have to publish a list of the sites it receives, and asks councils to consider keeping personal data, such as the contact details of whoever proposed a site, out of anything they do publish. The same guidance lists what a council should collect as standard when land is put forward:

• who is putting the land forward, and how to contact them;
• where the site is;
• information about the site itself;
• what it is proposed to be used for;
• any constraints already known about;
• anything else the council should take into account.

Your title register is already public, and has been all along. Anyone can buy a copy from HM Land Registry, and it usually shows who owns the land, the price paid at the last sale, whether there is a mortgage, and any restrictive covenants and rights such as rights of way. A letter, a reply or a desktop review adds nothing to it.

A letter about your land is easy to read as more than it is. It is worth being clear about the limits.

• It does not mean your land has any planning status. Nobody has applied for permission, the council has not allocated the field, and no planning officer has looked at it. A company's opinion that the land has potential is just that, an opinion, formed from maps.
• It does not mean the land is on a list. There is no national register of land that developers want. The list that matters is the council's own land availability assessment, which fills from the call for sites, and a letter does not put your field on it.
• It does not mean you have to do anything. You do not have to reply, and you do not have to reply by any date. A date in a letter is the sender's own timetable, and it creates no obligation for you.
• It does not mean the land is worth a particular figure. A letter is written before anyone has looked at the field closely enough to put a figure on it, and the honest answer at that stage is that the field might, after a lot of work, be worth considerably more than it is as farmland. Knight Frank's index put bare agricultural land across England and Wales at £8,497 an acre in the second quarter of 2026, down a little over 4% in a year. That is the starting point. Everything above it depends on planning.
• It does not mean the whole holding is in play. Often it is one field, or part of one, that touches the village, and everything else you own stays as it is.
• It does not mean your council is short of homes. Letters reach owners in councils that pass the Housing Delivery Test as well as those that fail it. Where a council is meeting its numbers, land usually comes forward through the local plan, by being put forward in a call for sites and then allocated, which takes longer but is often the surer route.

Then nothing happens, and that is a perfectly reasonable choice. Land does not go off. The Housing Delivery Test is published every year, local plans come round every few years, and a field on the edge of a village that is interesting now will usually still be interesting later. The only thing that changes with time is which route to planning is open, because a council's supply position and the stage of its plan move.

If you would rather keep the letter than act on it, a few minutes now will make it useful later.

• Keep the letter with your deeds or your Land Registry title documents, so that whoever deals with the land after you, an executor, a child or a buyer, knows that someone saw potential in it and when.
• Note the date and the name of the sender on the envelope, and any reference number, so that a later conversation can start from the same notes.
• Write down which field or part of the holding the letter describes. If it quotes a title number, that is HM Land Registry's reference for the parcel, and the same number appears on your own title register.
• Make a note of your council's next call for sites. The council's planning policy pages announce it, and so do we for the councils we cover. A field that misses one plan may wait several years for the next.
• Keep hedges, trees and rough corners as they are. Under the biodiversity net gain rules in Schedule 7A to the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, where habitat has been damaged since 30 January 2020 without planning permission, a future scheme is measured against what was there before, so clearing it helps nothing and can make the gain harder to meet.
• Tell anyone who shares the ownership, including executors and trustees, that the letter exists, so a later decision does not come as a surprise to them.

One change worth watching is the age of your council's plan. Under Annex D of the framework, once the housing requirement in a council's plan is more than five years old, its five-year supply is measured against the government's standard method figure instead, so a council's position can change in a year when nothing on the ground has moved.

If the letter on your table is from us, our letter page explains why we wrote about your land and what happens if you get in touch. If it is from anyone else and you would like a plain answer about your own field, our review is free and it commits you to nothing.