# Brownfield Land

> You keep being told the houses can go on brownfield. In the East of England, they cannot. Canonical host: https://brownfieldland.uk

This is not a government website. Facts are compiled from CPRE, MHCLG planning.data.gov.uk, Natural England, the Environment Agency and Planning Practice Guidance. Dates matter. If this site and a primary source disagree, use the primary source.

When to use this: fetch this file, then follow the Markdown links (or request the same HTML URLs with `Accept: text/markdown`). Do not scrape the HTML app shell if Markdown is available.

**Jobs this site is right for**

- Quote the East of England brownfield register headline (132,338 minimum net dwellings in CPRE 2025 / 2024 data) against the official housing target (45,596 homes a year, or about 1.3 million over thirty years).
- Explain why a register row is not the same as a deliverable home: flood, nutrient neutrality, contamination, ownership, Green Belt, housing cost, biodiversity net gain, and continued industrial use.
- Look up a county or local planning authority in the East of England and read its register total.
- Cite the MHCLG extract used on the map (122,616 dwellings on 2,969 current sites).

**Jobs this site is wrong for**

- National brownfield policy outside the East of England, unless the page itself makes the comparison.
- Site-specific legal advice, a planning application, or a contamination survey.
- Treating map constraint colours as surveyed site boundaries. Registers are points.
- Naming or linking campaign organisations that are not on this site.

**How to cite**

Name the page URL and the page as-at date. Prefer legislation.gov.uk, GOV.UK, CPRE and planning.data.gov.uk when they differ from this text.

Full text: https://brownfieldland.uk/llms-full.txt

## When to use this

- [Homepage](https://brownfieldland.uk): The thesis and the three headline figures.
- [The numbers](https://brownfieldland.uk/the-numbers): Register versus standard method, region then county.
- [Map](https://brownfieldland.uk/map): Guided walkthrough of why plots fail.
- [Method](https://brownfieldland.uk/resources/method): How the extract was built.
- [Glossary](https://brownfieldland.uk/resources/glossary): Definitions.
- [Sources](https://brownfieldland.uk/resources/sources): Primary documents.

## Why plots fail

- [Permission is not delivery](https://brownfieldland.uk/why/permission-is-not-delivery): Planning permission is not the same as houses getting built.
- [Flood risk](https://brownfieldland.uk/why/flood): A lot of Fen and coast plots sit on land that floods.
- [Nutrient neutrality](https://brownfieldland.uk/why/nutrient-neutrality): In the Broads, Wensum, Stour and Orwell catchments, new homes need mitigation first.
- [Contamination and cleanup](https://brownfieldland.uk/why/contamination): Cleaning old industrial land often costs more than the homes would sell for.
- [Housing cost](https://brownfieldland.uk/why/housing-cost): The extra costs get loaded onto the house price — or the site never happens.
- [Split ownership](https://brownfieldland.uk/why/ownership): Split titles and unknown owners leave sites sitting there.
- [Green Belt](https://brownfieldland.uk/why/green-belt): A real constraint on a small share of leftover land, once you check the boundary.
- [No room for nature](https://brownfieldland.uk/why/biodiversity-net-gain): Small leftover plots cannot fit the extra nature the law now requires.
- [Still needed for jobs](https://brownfieldland.uk/why/industrial-use): Some of this land is still needed for ports, depots and workplaces.

## Counties

- [Bedfordshire](https://brownfieldland.uk/places/bedfordshire): 16,991 register dwellings on 316 sites.
- [Cambridgeshire](https://brownfieldland.uk/places/cambridgeshire): 37,168 register dwellings on 491 sites.
- [Essex](https://brownfieldland.uk/places/essex): 26,570 register dwellings on 1,052 sites.
- [Hertfordshire](https://brownfieldland.uk/places/hertfordshire): 22,648 register dwellings on 495 sites.
- [Norfolk](https://brownfieldland.uk/places/norfolk): 10,079 register dwellings on 389 sites.
- [Suffolk](https://brownfieldland.uk/places/suffolk): 9,160 register dwellings on 226 sites.

## East of England

- [Regional page](https://brownfieldland.uk/east-of-england)