Two government inspectors signed the plan off on 21 August and councillors vote on adopting it on 9 September, replacing the 1994 plan. Three sites were added, sixteen deleted.

The Local Plan that has governed building in St Albans district since 1994 is a week and a half from being replaced. Two planning inspectors delivered their report to the council on Friday 21 August 2026, closing an examination that had run for 21 months. They conclude that with their recommended changes, the new plan is “sound, legally compliant and capable of adoption”.

An extraordinary meeting of the full council has been called for 7pm on Wednesday 9 September in the Council Chamber at the District Council Offices on St Peter’s Street, with one item on it: whether to adopt the Local Plan. The agenda is published the week before the meeting.

If councillors adopt it, the District Local Plan Review adopted on 30 November 1994, which the council itself calls one of the oldest in the country, stops being the plan that decides applications here after almost 32 years.

What the plan commits the district to

The headline number has moved. Inspectors Matthew Birkinshaw and Thomas Bristow found that the plan period runs from April 2024, not October 2024 as Policy SP3 had it, and the correction lifts the minimum housing requirement to 15,045 homes by 2041.

They also rewrote the phasing. The submitted plan asked for 485 homes a year in the first five years after adoption; the inspectors raised that to 615 a year, then 1,210 a year in years six to ten. Their reason was that delaying delivery is not acceptable simply because the big sites are slow.

For scale, the district has never come close to either figure. The inspectors note that since 2021 a maximum of 401 homes a year has been built here, against a local housing need of 885. The plan’s own figure for 2024/25 and 2025/26 is an average of 360 a year.

How the St Albans Local Plan reached adoption A timeline of the St Albans Local Plan examination. The current plan was adopted on 30 November 1994. The new plan was submitted for examination on 29 November 2024. Hearings ran from 29 April to 11 December 2025. Consultation on Main Modifications ran from 13 April to 26 May 2026. The inspectors delivered their report on 21 August 2026. The council votes on adoption on 9 September 2026. From 1994 to a vote on 9 September Source: St Albans City and District Council Local Plan examination page and the Inspectors' Report, 21 August 2026. 30 Nov 1994 Current plan adopted 29 Nov 2024 New plan submitted Apr to Dec 2025 Hearings, two stages 13 Apr 2026 Modifications consultation 21 Aug 2026 Inspectors' report 9 Sep 2026 Adoption vote Thirty-one years and nine months separate the plan in force from the one councillors will vote on. Graphic by St Albans Daily
Graphic by St Albans Daily. Source: the council's Local Plan examination page and the Inspectors' Report of 21 August 2026.

Three sites were put back in, because the Chilterns extension was dropped

The most concrete local change in the report is the addition of three housing sites that the council had taken out of its own plan.

All three had been proposed at the earlier Regulation 18 stage and then dropped, for one reason: they fell inside land earmarked for a possible extension of the Chilterns National Landscape. Natural England has since confirmed that the project to review and extend the National Landscape is no longer going ahead.

The inspectors found that the three sites had been “discounted solely” on that basis and “passed all other site selection criteria”, so excluding them left the plan neither justified nor positively prepared. They are now allocated:

  • Beesonend Lane, Harpenden (M14), around 43 homes on a single dwelling in a landscaped plot, with access to come from the residential streets to the north and east rather than Beesonend Lane itself
  • South of Codicote Road, Wheathampstead (M24), about 1 hectare for an indicative 46 homes, on a site that already has a resolution to grant permission for retirement living
  • Lower Luton Road, Wheathampstead (M26), roughly 0.34 hectares for 7 homes, on former storage land off Kingfisher Close

That is 96 homes, and in each case the inspectors found that exceptional circumstances exist to take the land out of the Green Belt.

Sixteen allocations were deleted

Going the other way, the report deletes sixteen sites. Five went because they are no longer available or cannot deliver the minimum five homes required to be allocated: the former Bricket Wood United Reformed Church, Greenwood United Reformed Church, Southdown Road in Harpenden, the Waitrose site in Harpenden, and Abbotts Avenue West and Abbey Line in St Albans.

Ten more went on flood risk grounds, after further work on surface water and groundwater flooding found they could not deliver five or more homes safely, or could not provide safe access and escape routes. They are mostly garage sites:

  • Garages off Cotlandswick and Cotlandswick Garages B, London Colney
  • Garages rear of Hill End Lane, St Albans
  • Land rear of Snatchup, Redbourn
  • Garages off Park Street Lane, Park Street
  • Garages west of 32 to 46 Riverside Road, St Albans
  • Garages adjacent to Oakley Road, Harpenden
  • Garages south of Abbots Park, St Albans
  • The motor repair garage at Paynes Yard, Park Street
  • Lattimore Road, St Albans

The Smallford Works site (P1) is also deleted, because the land is no longer available.

The village infilling policy is gone

Policy LG8, which was meant to identify “Green Belt Settlements” where limited infilling would be allowed, has been deleted outright. The inspectors found neither the list of villages nor the boundaries justified.

Their examples are specific. Napsbury Park is a previously developed former hospital site, not a village. Radlett Road is a cluster of houses and commercial property next to Park Street and Frogmore with nothing to distinguish it. Annables is “a small cluster of 32 houses, not a village”. At Sleapshyde the drawn boundary left out the village pub. Properties were left off the Gustard Wood map without a reason given.

The tiers themselves stay in the settlement hierarchy, but without settlement boundaries the policy that would have permitted infilling in those places has gone. The council will have to update the policies map on adoption.

The early review the inspectors took out

One recommended change did not survive. The version consulted on in April included a commitment for the council to start an early review of the plan within a year of adopting it, to test how it was performing against the latest housing need figures.

The inspectors removed it. Their reasoning is that the council has already begun work on a new Local Plan under the government’s new plan-making system, which requires it to publish a Gateway 1 self-assessment by 31 October 2026 and to complete the new plan in no more than 30 months. Annual monitoring, they say, will give the council enough data. So the safety net of a formal early review is not in the plan going to the vote.

What it means for you

If you object to building near you, the argument changes on 9 September. Once the plan is adopted, the twelve strategic allocations and the sites listed above stop being proposals and become the development plan. Applications on them are judged against how they are built, not whether they should be.

If you are in Wheathampstead or on the Harpenden side of Beesonend Lane, three sites are new. They were not in the plan the council consulted on last year, and they are in it now because a national landscape designation was abandoned, not because anything about the land changed.

If you were relying on Policy LG8, it no longer exists. Owners in the villages that policy would have covered, from Napsbury Park to Gustard Wood, go back to standard national Green Belt policy.

The five-year housing land supply is close. With the inspectors’ revised figures, the council needs 3,690 homes in the five years from 2026 with the 20 per cent buffer applied, and its evidence shows a supply of 3,777. That margin is 87 homes, about 2 per cent. A plan can lose its five-year supply quickly on numbers that tight, and losing it is what opens the door to speculative applications.

The vote is public. The extraordinary council meeting is at 7pm on Wednesday 9 September at the District Council Offices, St Peter’s Street, AL1 3JE.

Sources

More on what is being built and where: St Albans planning news. What the market is doing: St Albans house prices.