In order to meet the needs of our residents and businesses up to 2040, the Local Plan 2040 may need to identify additional land for development.
We want to look at a number of options and, in consultation with local communities, chose the most suitable sites for where new development goes.
We want to hear from you if you have any suggestions for sites that should be considered when we are developing the Local Plan. This is known as the 'Call for sites'.
The call for sites will not determine how much new development we need, or whether a site should be allocated for development. It is simply an opportunity for local residents, community groups, business operators, landowners and developers to suggest sites that they would like to be considered as part of the preparation of Leeds Local Plan 2040.
Anyone can suggest a site to us. When you submit a site you will be asked what your connection to the site is, for example, if you are the landowner, a developer, a business operator, a local resident, a community group or have a another type of connection.
You do not have to own the site to suggest it. If you are not the landowner but you know who it is, it is helpful if you can tell us this, but if you don't know, it doesn't matter as we can look into this.
Types of sites or developments you can suggest
You can suggest any site that you would like to be considered when we look at how we can meet the needs for new development in Leeds between now and 2040.
Sites can be suggested for a wide range of uses. This includes:
- housing (which could include market-led housing, 100% affordable housing, older-persons housing, student housing, self-build housing or other types of specialist housing)
- Gypsy and Traveller sites
- Travelling Showpersons sites
- industry (including distribution and logistics uses)
- commercial uses (including offices, retail, leisure, hotel and mixed commercial uses)
- community uses
- minerals (extraction, processing etc.)
- waste (recycling, processing etc.)
- tourism
- new public greenspace
- renewable energy
- energy storage
If you think that there could potentially be more than one suitable use for a site, you can indicate this when you submit.
Sites can be suggested for more than one use either in combination (for example, housing and commercial uses together) or separately (for example, all housing or all commercial development).
View Call for Sites suggestions
As part of the consultation on the
Leeds Local Plan 2040 which started in February 2023, we asked for your site suggestions for the uses listed above.
This stage of the Call for Sites closed on 30 June 2023.
The link below provides a map which shows the boundaries and suggested uses for the sites that were submitted to us by 30 June 2023.
Call for Sites submissions map
External link
This map allows you to click on a site to get further information about the submitter and suggested uses and to filter to show sites suggested for a specific use, such as housing. The data can also be downloaded using the tool provided. Help on how to use the map is available by clicking on the guidance page within the map.
What happens to the sites suggested
These sites are not endorsed by the City Council and are part of the Local Plan 2040 early process of evidence gathering.
The call for sites will help identify a potential 'pool' of sites for further consideration.
Just because a site has been submitted to us does not mean that it is suitable for development or that we think it will be needed. Where a site been not been suggested by the landowner we will also need to contact the landowner to check whether the site is available for development.
We are doing detailed work to look at how much and what sorts of developments are needed in Leeds between now and 2040, and whether additional land needs to be allocated for development to meet these needs.
Further information about what we are proposing to look at as part of the Leeds Local Plan 2040 is available here.
The pool of sites in the call for sites joins two other key sources of land for development:
- existing sites with planning permission, allocation or known to the Council through land assessments
- urban capacity study – a piece of work underway to look at what parcels of brownfield land may be available for development
If this work identifies that additional land needs to be allocated for one or more of the uses identified, we will undertake a detailed assessment of all of the suggestions that have been made to determine their potential suitability for future development.
This will consider a wide range of factors, including environmental considerations, transport, the roles of places, infrastructure and flooding (often referred to as sustainability considerations), as well as what benefits new development may bring and any issues that might affect the deliverability of the site such as contamination.
Further information about the Site Assessment Methodology is outlined in section 6.1 of the
Sustainability Appraisal Scoping Report (PDF, 9.5MB).
Once we know what sites there are that could potentially be suitable for development we will need to make decisions, working with communities, about which of the potential options would be the best to develop in order to meet the identified needs. We will undertake further consultation to help inform these decisions.
What land might be developed
At this early stage in the process, we don't know what land might be developed. Much will depend on what the District's overall identified needs are and what the overall spatial strategy for distributing development looks like.
Further opportunities to submit Call for Sites
We intend to reopen the Call for Sites at the next stage of consultation on the Leeds Local Plan 2040 providing a further opportunity to submit new or update existing site suggestions.
