Call for sites: Housing land, economic land and Traveller sites

Herefordshire Council are preparing both a Brownfield and an Employment Land Availability Assessment.

The purpose of the Brownfield Land Availability Assessment is to identify and assess land that is brownfield and can support either residential or employment-based development.

The Employment Land Availability Assessment is seeking to identify land that can support specifically employment-based development, whether brownfield or greenfield.

These assessments taken together will provide important evidence of brownfield land and employment land availability in Herefordshire.

Please note, at this time, we will not be assessing any sites that are greenfield and promoted for residential development. These submissions will not be processed.

To gather the necessary information to facilitate the assessments, we undertook this call for sites exercise county-wide, for both previously assessed sites and newly available sites.

We asked landowners, agents or developers who wished to promote land for development to complete the call for sites form.

If you have submitted land in the previous 2020 and 2022 calls for sites

If you have submitted sites previously, you do not need to submit any of the same sites again, unless you wish to change the proposed use to employment from residential.

The sites received in 2020 and 2022 have been undergoing assessment but capacity issues have seen the planning team experiencing difficulties in obtaining the necessary expert input to complete these.

We apologise for this and we are working to rectify the issue as soon as possible, with a view to publishing the assessments in a single Housing and Employment Land Availability Assessment document.

Site criteria

• The site must be larger than 0.25 hectares. Sites below this size are not considered strategic and will not be assessed
• The site should be within or adjacent to an existing settlement. Sites outside of this will be considered open countryside and cannot be assessed at present
• If the site is greenfield, we will only assess those that have been proposed for employment uses. (If the site is greenfield, and you would like to promote for residential please note that this will not be processed at this time)

Location plan/map criteria

To help inform the officers working on the call for sites you must follow these criteria about location plans and maps of the site:

• Where possible two street names will need to be visible on the location plan
• If the site is in the open countryside with minimal identifying features nearby, you should provide a postcode and/or grid reference to help in correctly identifying the site
• The whole site must be identified within the location plan
• The boundary of the site must be clearly outlined, preferably in a red line
  • If you wish to show the extent of your ownership beyond the site boundaries please outline in a different colour, preferably blue
• The map itself must be clear. There is no set preference on the type of map you use as long as the criteria above inform the location plan
• The file name should be "SiteName/ReferenceNumber""Settlement"LocationPlan

Call for sites deadline

The call for sites ran for six weeks from Monday 23 October to Monday 4 December 2023.

Gypsy and Travellers' call for sites

A revised Gypsy and Travellers Accommodation Assessment (GTAA) has been prepared. This tells us that we need to identify more residential traveller pitches and travelling show people plots for development. We were keen to hear about any sites that may be suitable for consideration.

Further information

Please contact a member of the planning policy team by telephone on 01432 383637 or by email at ldf@herefordshire.gov.uk for any advice and help on this issue.

We will look carefully at all sites put forward to see if they are suitable. Not all the sites sent in will necessarily be selected.