Building on tennis courts

One Answer

1. Martin Gaine says:

   29th January 2025 at 9:22 am

   Hi Mark,

   Thank you for your question.

   The planning system is against new buildings in the green belt, which it wants to keep permanently open. There are some exceptions, however, and a new one was introduced by the government in December 2024.This reform created the concept of ‘grey belt’, which are areas of green belt that do not serve the purposes for which green belts were first created (mostly stopping towns from growing out and merging into each other). In a nutshell, if you are in a built up part of the green belt (where you aren’t infilling land between settlements) and the area is not meeting its housing targets, you have a chance of getting permission.

   However, because it is new, we planners don’t yet know how it will be applied or how easy it will be to take advantage of. Councils are, not surprisingly, reluctant to grant this exemption so we are waiting for appeal decisions to come through to see how we can expect this ‘grey belt’ designation to work.

   If you would like to build on your tennis courts, you should consider getting specialist advice from a planning consultant and possibly making an application for ‘Permission in Principle’, which is a type of application for new housing which allows you to check whether a proposal is acceptable in principle (in this case, whether it would meet green belt requirements).

   If successful, you could then be able to press on with a further application including the full design of the house, and dealing with all other planning matters (like parking, trees, flooding, biodiversity etc).

   Hopefully this helps.

   Martin Gaine (planning expert)

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