Wolverhampton Local Plan

We are preparing a new Local Plan for Wolverhampton. This Plan is designed to support the growth and regeneration of the City and to protect and enhance the characteristics that make Wolverhampton a special place to live, work and visit.

To do this, the Plan will make some key decisions about the future development of Wolverhampton up to 2042, including:

• where larger housing and employment developments will be located
• where infrastructure investment will take place
• areas of the City where development will be restricted, and areas of environmental and historic importance which will be priorities for conservation and enhancement
• a set of ‘policies’ – the rules which are used to determine planning applications to address big issues, such as climate change, environment, design, centres, transport and waste

Wolverhampton has high housing and employment growth needs but is a very constrained and densely developed urban area with valuable pockets of green belt.  The Wolverhampton Local Plan proposes to deliver a balanced amount of sustainable development, including allocating 43 hectares of employment (industrial) land and sites for 9,330 new homes by 2042. These will all be in the urban area - making best use of brownfield sites, vacant properties and poor quality industrial land - and built at high densities, whilst protecting local character and providing a mix of house types to meet local needs. Most of these sites have already been granted planning permission or are allocated in other Plans. 

This means we are not proposing to develop any Green Belt sites and some other greenfield sites which were previously considered.

More information is provided on this webpage about the stages of the Wolverhampton Local Plan’s preparation.
 

What is a Local Plan?

All councils are required to prepare a Local Plan that decides where new development will be located, how development will be designed and managed and which areas will be protected from development.

The Plan must take into account how much land is needed to support future jobs and provide new housing and the extra infrastructure necessary to support development, such as schools, green space, health services, public transport, cycle routes and highway improvements.

The Plan must go through two stages of consultation. The Plan is then submitted to the Government and an independent Planning Inspector is appointed to carry out a public examination of the Plan. If the Inspector concludes that the Plan has been correctly prepared, then it can be adopted by the council.

Do we have a Local Plan in place now?

Yes, Wolverhampton has a Local Plan which is made up of a number of documents:

• The Black Country Core Strategy (2011)
• Area Action Plans (2014-16) for the main regeneration areas in the City
• Parts of the Wolverhampton Unitary Development Plan (2006)

These Plans allocated development to meet Wolverhampton’s needs up to 2026.

Ten years ago, two Neighbourhood Plans were prepared by local community groups covering Tettenhall and Heathfield Park. These Neighbourhood Plans can only be updated by the local community and are not part of the Wolverhampton Local Plan.

When did we start preparing the Wolverhampton Local Plan?

The Local Plan for Wolverhampton is now over five years old and is out-of-date. We need to prepare a new Plan to ensure that we can plan for new homes and jobs in the right places. Between 2017 and 2022 City of Wolverhampton Council worked with Dudley, Sandwell and Walsall councils to prepare a Black Country Plan to replace the Black Country Core Strategy. When work ended on the Black Country Plan in October 2022, City of Wolverhampton Council decided to prepare a Wolverhampton Local Plan which built on the significant work and consultation already undertaken on the Black Country Plan.

What progress has been made?

Consultation took place in February – April 2024 on an “Issues and Preferred Options” (Regulation 18) document, which set out proposed policies and development sites to be included in the Plan. There were 119 responses to the consultation. Relevant documents related to the Issues and Preferred Options consultation, February 2024 can be found in the “Wolverhampton Local Plan Preparation and Consultation Documents” section of the “WLP Publication (Regulation 19) Consultation Sustainability Appraisal, Evidence & Plan Preparation Documents” page.

We considered the issues raised in the Issues and Preferred Options, February 2024 consultation and updated our evidence,  consulting on the Wolverhampton Local Plan (WLP) Publication (Regulation 19) Stage from Monday 25 November, 2024 to Thursday 9 January, 2025.

Following the Government publishing the updated National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) on 12 December, 2024 the Council are proposing to take the WLP forward under the updated NPPF transitional arrangements.

The Council submitted the Wolverhampton Local Plan to the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government on 7 March 2025 for independent examination.