Only 4.1% of Folkestone & Hythe May Be Developable — Yet 2,267 Approved Homes Hadn’t Started and FHDC Is Looking for More Land

Folkestone & Hythe is looking for more land.

It may have remarkably little left.

Folkestone & Hythe District Council’s own Housing Delivery Action Plan applies a Competition and Markets Authority methodology which suggests that only around 4.1% of the entire district may be potentially developable. More than half of that limited area — around 765 hectares — is already allocated to Otterpool Park. Take that out and FHDC says “as little as 2 per cent” of the district may be both potentially available and unallocated for development. The council repeatedly warns that this is a “very crude estimate”, not a definitive map of land that can or cannot be built on, but says it illustrates the severe environmental constraints facing the district.

And right now the search for future development land is moving forward.

FHDC’s call-for-sites process has reached the assessment stage for the new Local Plan 2045. Sites already submitted do not need to be resubmitted and the council says it has progressed too far to assess fresh submissions immediately, although new ones can still be retained for later review. Those already in the system are being examined for the forthcoming Housing and Economic Land Availability Assessment — HELAA — expected to be published during September to October 2027. Alongside that, the district’s first Local Plan scoping consultation remains open until 16 October 2026.

The present consultation does not yet identify the fields, brownfield sites or settlement extensions that FHDC may eventually choose. Those come later. But the council has made clear that its new plan must decide where future housing, employment and community development should go, and national policy currently requires Folkestone & Hythe to plan for around 820 new homes every year.

So before the arguments begin over the next field at Sellindge, New Romney, Hythe, Folkestone or elsewhere, there is a more fundamental question.

Why does a district with thousands of homes already granted planning permission need more housing land?

The answer lies in the difference between a house approved on paper and one with a front door, roof and somebody living inside it.

Kent County Council’s latest complete Housing Information Audit shows that at 31 March 2025 Folkestone & Hythe had 2,704 homes with planning permission still waiting to be completed. Of those, 2,267 — 84% — had not started. Only 437 were recorded as under construction.

That same year, only 325 net additional homes were completed across the whole district. The previous year delivered 365 and 2022/23 delivered 454. Across the decade to March 2025, Folkestone & Hythe averaged 410 net completions a year.

That is the core of FHDC’s housing problem.

It isn’t simply a shortage of planning permissions.

It is a shortage of permissions becoming completed homes quickly enough.

The consequences are now feeding directly back into the planning system.

FHDC’s latest formally published assessment says it could identify only 3.1 years of housing land supply, including the then-required 20% buffer. The council itself said that failure meant the national presumption in favour of sustainable development was engaged.

Then came a further deterioration.

The Government’s latest Housing Delivery Test puts Folkestone & Hythe at just 57%, down from 68% in the preceding measurement and 83% before that. The test looks backwards at actual housing delivery; five-year supply looks forwards at whether sufficient homes can realistically be delivered. They are different tests, but both now tell the same broad story: housing is not reaching the ground at the rate required.

Under the August 2026 planning framework that matters considerably. Housing delivery below 85% brings a 20% buffer into the supply requirement, while delivery below 75% establishes an evidenced unmet housing need for the purposes of Policy S5(1)(j). That gives additional national-policy support to qualifying development outside settlements where it addresses that need, is physically well-related to an existing settlement and can be accommodated by existing or proposed infrastructure. It does not guarantee permission, but it alters the planning balance.

How did Folkestone & Hythe get here?

Go back to the council’s adopted housing strategy.

FHDC did not plan for housebuilding to continue at roughly 400 homes a year. Its Core Strategy Review deliberately stepped the requirement upwards: 622 homes annually up to 2023/24, then 885 every year from 2024/25 to 2028/29. The strategy relied upon large developments beginning to deliver at scale.

The delivery trajectory was more ambitious again.

FHDC expected 782 homes in 2022/23, 949 in 2023/24 and 932 in 2024/25. The recorded figures were 454, 365 and 325. Across those three years, approximately 2,663 homes were expected but only 1,144 arrived — around 1,519 fewer than the trajectory anticipated.

FHDC eventually acknowledged that the timetable had slipped. Its 2025 Housing Delivery Action Plan said the higher levels of development expected in the Core Strategy appeared to have moved backwards by around three years.

A significant part of that expected acceleration depended upon strategic sites.

Otterpool Park was supposed to begin contributing hundreds of homes as the plan moved into its higher-delivery phase. When developments of that scale arrive later than forecast, the problem is not confined to one site. Every missing home affects the district-wide delivery total and, ultimately, the amount of future supply FHDC has to demonstrate.

But blaming everything on Otterpool would miss the wider pattern.

FHDC’s Housing Delivery Action Plan shows thousands of housing commitments sitting in the system year after year: 3,239 in 2019/20, 3,048 in 2020/21, 3,277 in 2021/22, 3,522 in 2022/23 and 3,220 in 2023/24. The council’s own conclusion was that rising permissions had not translated directly into higher completion rates.

Nor does the evidence support the simplistic claim that developers merely collect permissions and deliberately let them expire.

FHDC calculated that lapsed dwellings represented an average of only 1.15% of outstanding permitted homes between 2019/20 and 2023/24. The council considered that infrastructure and funding problems may be less significant in preventing developments from starting than in affecting the rate at which they subsequently build out.

That rate is influenced by economics as well as planning.

FHDC asked developers and planning professionals what was slowing delivery. Its survey was small — only nine responses from 42 questionnaires — so the council rightly warns against treating it as representative of the whole market. But respondents raised viability, the combined costs of CIL and Section 106 requirements, nutrient-neutrality costs, difficulties securing affordable-housing partners and shortages of skilled labour. FHDC also recognises wider economic and market conditions among the factors affecting delivery.

There is another revealing finding in the council’s evidence. Most respondents who answered the housing-market question thought Folkestone & Hythe could absorb between 600 and 850 homes a year in the right conditions. But FHDC immediately noted two problems: sufficient suitable sites would have to be found in a highly constrained district, and existing permissions had not been built out.

That brings us back to the fields.

In September 2025 FHDC’s Planning Committee resolved to grant Quinn Estates outline permission for up to 105 homes at Elmtree Farm, Sellindge, together with affordable and self/custom-build homes, commercial and community uses, school-expansion land and other infrastructure. FHDC subsequently stated explicitly that “the site was not allocated for development within the adopted development plan.”

Elmtree Farm therefore demonstrates why the housing-supply figures matter outside the council chamber.

The site did not suddenly become allocated land because FHDC’s housing delivery deteriorated. Settlement policies did not vanish. But the decision was made at a time when FHDC could demonstrate only 3.1 years’ supply and the council itself accepted that the national presumption in favour of sustainable development applied. Housing need therefore carried greater weight within the planning balance.

Now move south to New Romney.

Catesby’s application 26/1476/FH seeks outline permission for up to 110 homes north of Cockreed Lane, together with open space, landscaping and associated works. It was received on 8 September 2026, validated on 14 September and remains under consideration.

Cockreed Lane has to stand or fall on its own evidence.

Flood risk, drainage, water, roads, agricultural land, landscape and infrastructure remain material planning matters. The new national rules do not automatically turn unallocated land into housing land simply because FHDC is short of deliverable homes.

But the context in which Catesby’s application will be determined is markedly different from a district comfortably meeting its housing requirements.

FHDC now has a weak published five-year supply position, sharply deteriorating delivery figures and a Local Plan process actively examining where future development can go. At the same time, its own evidence says the pool of potentially available unallocated land may be extremely constrained.

That is the paradox.

The council needs more homes. It has granted thousands of permissions. Many have taken years to progress or have yet to start. The resulting delivery shortfall weakens FHDC’s position when fresh applications arrive, while the new Local Plan simultaneously has to find enough land to plan for around 820 homes every year.

And the search for that land has already begun.

FHDC says the call-for-sites submissions are now being assessed for the HELAA. Its Housing Delivery Action Plan says updating that assessment is one of the council’s priority measures and records an intention for further calls for sites to be made annually, or more frequently if required. The sites ultimately chosen will then feed into the difficult argument about where the district’s next generation of housing should actually go.

That leaves Folkestone & Hythe with a problem that cannot be solved simply by approving another application.

More land may be needed.

More permissions may be needed.

But neither guarantees more homes.

Until the gap between permission and completion closes, every delayed strategic site and every permitted development that builds out more slowly than anticipated feeds back into the same system — weaker housing delivery, greater pressure to identify supply and another search for somewhere to put the homes that the last housing trajectory said should already have been built.

And in a district where FHDC’s own crude assessment suggests as little as 2% of the land may be both potentially available and unallocated, that next search is unlikely to be painless.

The Shepway Vox Team

The Velvet Voices Of Voxatiousness