Updated 20 September 2026
Still needed as industry
Lichfields' national register analysis found that much recorded capacity is best suited to continued industrial use. Ports, depots, utilities, rail sidings and mid-tech yards are scarce in the East of England. Relabelling them as housing land on a CSV does not create a second plot.
Suitable on paper, useful in use
The 2017 regulations ask whether a site could support housing. They do not ask whether the region can afford to lose the current use. A working depot in Thetford or a port plot in Harwich can meet the size test and still be the wrong place to put dwellings.
Lichfields said a slice of national register capacity is best kept in industrial use. That is sharper in the East, where industrial land next to the Cambridge labour market is under housing pressure, and industrial land on the coast is one of the few remaining local job bases.
Double counting
A strategy that meets housing need from the brownfield register and also keeps a functioning employment land supply is using the same hectares twice. The honest move is to take working employment sites out of the housing total before quoting the register as a five-year supply.
How to read the map
The industrial step is the last screen on the walk. It takes out sites whose name or notes point to land still doing an employment job: depots, docks and dockyards, ports, wharves, rail sidings and railway land, freight and haulage, warehousing, abattoirs, working yards, and named industrial, business and trading estates.
Former uses that mainly leave dirty ground — gasworks, tips, tanneries, filling stations — are counted earlier, at contamination and cleanup, so no site is counted out twice.
It runs last for a reason: it is the roughest screen here. A keyword cannot tell a thriving business park from an empty shed with the same name, and by this point in the walk most sites have already gone for a harder reason. A full employment-land review is the proper local test.
Questions people ask
- If a site is on the housing register, has the council already decided it should be homes?
- Part 1 is an assessment that the site is suitable, available and achievable for housing. It is not an allocation, and it does not retire the employment use. Many rows remain in active industrial use.
- Why not convert empty industrial land anyway?
- Empty is not the same as surplus. Coastal and Fenland economies still need yards, and the Cambridge area still needs space that housing values will otherwise eat.
Where the numbers come from
- Banking on Brownfield — Lichfields, for the Land Promoters and Developers Federation, 1 June 2022. National register capacity equated to 31% of 15-year housing need, with less brownfield where demand is highest.
- Brownfield land dataset — Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, 20 September 2026. National aggregation of Part 1 registers. Points, not polygons. Coverage may be incomplete. Open Government Licence v3.0.
- Town and Country Planning (Brownfield Land Register) Regulations 2017 — legislation.gov.uk, 16 April 2017