Land promoters: a CPRE briefing

This short briefing sheds some light onto how self-styled ‘land promoters’ make lucrative profits by exploiting the planning system and working against local wishes.

Land promoters persuade landowners to allow them to pursue planning permission on their land for a share in the profits once it is sold on for development.

Communities welcome good development that follows local and neighbourhood plans, but land promoters actively work against local wishes for the sake of their own profit. National planning policy allows and even encourages land promoters to do this through loopholes in the NPPF.

CPRE undertook analysis of appeal decisions concerning four land promoters, between 1 April 2012 and 31 August 2017. It shows that even in cases where local authorities had an up to date 5 year housing land supply, one in three cases are approved.

In the majority of these cases, land promoters sought to undermine authorities further by openly challenging authorities’ housing land supply. This, and other forms of speculative development, have lost communities’ faith in the planning system.