Brentwood planning: call for sites closes 31 August

You have until 31 August 2026 to put land forward for Brentwood's new Local Plan. Where the plan stands, the housing numbers, and what Dunton Hills means.

There is a deadline running in Brentwood right now that most residents will not have heard about. The council’s second Call for Sites closes on 31 August 2026. It is the stage where landowners, developers, community groups and ordinary residents can put forward land they think should be considered in the new Local Plan, and it is the last easy way in before the council starts choosing between sites.

This page sets out what the Call for Sites is and is not, where the Local Plan Review has got to, the housing numbers behind it, and the two schemes that dominate the borough’s planning picture.

The Call for Sites, and what it actually is

Brentwood Borough Council is inviting submissions of potentially developable land as part of the Local Plan Review. That covers land for housing, employment, retail, sport and leisure, community infrastructure and green uses, including sites for the council’s Green Infrastructure Network and off-site Biodiversity Net Gain (Brentwood Borough Council, Call for Sites 2025/26).

The council is unusually blunt about the limits of the exercise. In its own words, the Call for Sites:

is not a planning application
does not mean a submitted site will be developed
does not imply any endorsement or support from the council
is not a decision-making stage: no sites have been selected or approved

What it does do is build the evidence base. Submissions feed into the Strategic Land Availability Assessment, which judges whether each site is suitable, available and achievable, and that assessment then informs which sites the plan proposes to allocate (Brentwood Borough Council, Call for Sites).

What it means for you: if there is a field, car park or brownfield plot near you that you think should or should not be in the frame, this is the cheap moment to say so. Submissions go in through the council’s consultation portal, one form per site, using the web map to draw the land. You need an account. The deadline is 31 August 2026.

The first Call for Sites, which ran from 18 December 2023 to 4 March 2024, produced 133 site submissions. Those are already published, with location, site area and proposed use, on the council’s interactive map and in its Call for Sites Report, broken down by ward from Blackmore and Doddinghurst through to Shenfield.

Where the Local Plan Review stands

Brentwood’s current development plan is the Brentwood Local Plan 2016-2033, adopted on 23 March 2022 (Brentwood Borough Council). It is not old, but it is already being rewritten, and the reason is written into the plan itself.

When the Planning Inspectorate examined the plan, the inspectors would only find it sound if the council added Policy MG06: Local Plan Review and Update. That policy commits the council to bringing forward a partial update with the objective of meeting the borough’s full objectively assessed housing need, with the review to start immediately and be submitted for examination within 28 months (Brentwood Borough Council, Local Plan Review update, September 2023).

In other words, the 2022 plan was adopted on the understanding that it did not meet the borough’s full housing need and that a follow-up would.

The council’s published timetable, the Local Development Scheme covering 2025 to 2029, sets out the stages:

Chart by Brentwood Online

The Regulation 18 preferred options consultation was scheduled for the second quarter of 2026, a six-week window. As of 9 August 2026 the council’s consultation portal shows no Regulation 18 document open, and the Call for Sites is the live consultation instead, so that stage has not yet started. We will update this page when it does (Brentwood Local Development Scheme 2025-2029).

The housing numbers

The adopted plan provides for 7,752 new homes (net) across the borough between 2016 and 2033. The delivery rate is deliberately back-loaded: 300 dwellings a year to 2023/24, then 400 a year to 2029/30, then 984 a year to 2032/33. Alongside that it allocates about 46.64 hectares of employment land, 13 permanent Gypsy and Traveller pitches, and retail floorspace (Brentwood Local Plan 2016-2033, Policy MG01).

That last figure is the one to watch. Brentwood’s housing target more than doubles at the end of this decade, and almost all of the increase depends on one site.

The constraint behind all of it is straightforward. The council told the Government in March 2026 that the borough is approximately 89% Green Belt, and that this, along with infrastructure capacity, is why it argues the national standard method for calculating housing need is insufficiently responsive to local circumstances (Brentwood Borough Council response to proposed NPPF reforms, Assets, Projects and Strategy Committee, 11 March 2026).

Dunton Hills Garden Village

The single biggest thing in Brentwood planning is a new village in the south of the borough. Dunton Hills Garden Village is a strategic allocation under Policy R01(i) of the adopted plan: 259.2 hectares east of the A128, south of the A127 and north of the c2c railway line, for residential-led mixed-use development.

The plan allocates it for around 1,650 homes within the plan period, as part of an indicative overall capacity of around 4,000 homes, the rest coming after 2033. Alongside the housing it requires around 5.5 hectares of employment land, three care homes of about 80 beds each, a minimum of five serviced Gypsy and Traveller pitches, and the community, retail and infrastructure needed for a self-sustaining village (Brentwood Local Plan 2016-2033, Policy R01(i)).

The application that followed was larger. Brentwood councillors approved an outline scheme in November 2023 for up to 3,700 homes, of which 555 would be for social or affordable rent and a further 555 for shared ownership, along with three 80-bedroom care homes, five Gypsy and Traveller pitches, a secondary or all-through school with a sports hub and up to three primary schools. The application had been submitted in August 2021 by Commercial Estates Group (Housing Today).

Dunton Hills was designated one of 14 government garden villages in January 2017, and the council adopted a Dunton Hills Garden Village Supplementary Planning Document in 2023 to guide how it is built.

What it means for you: Dunton Hills is where most of Brentwood’s housing target is meant to land, which is the argument for it. It is also the reason the A127 improvements at the Dunton junction matter locally, because the road network at that end of the borough has to carry the new village.

Fitzwalters Farm solar farm

The most significant recent decision is a large solar scheme in the Green Belt. On 27 July 2026 the council’s Planning Committee approved a 49.9MW solar farm with battery energy storage at Fitzwalters Farm, Roman Road, Shenfield, expected to generate around 63,208MWh a year, which the council says is enough for about 23,410 homes.

Permission is temporary, for up to 40 years, after which the equipment is removed and the land restored, and it carries conditions covering Green Belt impact, landscape effects and biodiversity. The committee chair said that “the majority of the committee recognised that, while there were impacts associated with the proposal, the planning benefits outweighed those impacts” (Brentwood Borough Council).

Neighbourhood plans

Three parts of the borough have designated neighbourhood planning areas: Doddinghurst, Ingatestone and Fryerning, and West Horndon. The Ingatestone and Fryerning Neighbourhood Plan was adopted in August 2022 and forms part of the statutory development plan for that area, so applications there are judged against it as well as the borough plan. The council expects it to be reviewed alongside the Local Plan Review (Brentwood Local Development Scheme 2025-2029).

Following individual applications

The Local Plan sets the rules; individual applications are decided week by week regardless of what stage the plan is at. Brentwood runs an Idox Public Access register where you can search applications, read the documents and comment within the consultation period, at publicaccess.brentwood.gov.uk. Most applications are decided by officers under delegated powers; the larger or more contentious ones go to the Planning Committee.

One thing worth understanding about timing. If a site near you is allocated in the new Local Plan, that does not approve a development. It means the principle of building there has been accepted in policy, which makes a later detailed application considerably harder to refuse. The plan stage is where the argument is really had, not the application stage.

Sources

Checked 9 August 2026. This page will be updated when the Regulation 18 consultation opens.