DevAssist: Meet SHELAA: The Hidden Risk Lurking Next Door

Have you ever heard of the term “SHELAA” (nicknamed Shelagh)? I’m not expecting you to, but you really should have.

A SHELAA stands for a Strategic Housing and Economic Land Availability Assessment, and I want to explain what they are and why they’re so important for property buyers to understand.

All local authorities in England and Wales have housing targets based on intelligence (usually a Housing Needs Survey) that predicts how much new housing stock needs to be created over 5, 10, and 15-year periods. A local authority rarely has enough land in its already-permitted pile or allocated sites, so they consult with as many landowners as possible to see what land could be made available – for housing, employment, or gypsy and traveller sites.

Needless to say, hundreds of landowners throw their hats into the ring. And why wouldn’t they? With agricultural land selling at around £15k per acre and development land going for over a million, it’s an easy decision. If you were a landowner, wouldn’t you?

Once that’s done, the local authority kicks off the SHELAA process. All the submitted sites are assessed on their merits, specifically, whether they’re suitable for one of the uses mentioned earlier. What comes out the other end is essentially two piles: one made up of sites considered suitable and deliverable, and the other… not so much.

The suitable sites then go on to form part of the council’s future land supply – essentially the pool they rely on to meet their housing and development targets.

This is the amazing bit: there’s no public consultation on these sites.

You could literally be living right next door to a piece of land the council has marked as suitable and available for development, and have absolutely no idea. It’s public information, yes – but only if you know where to look.

These sites don’t (yet) have any planning history, so they’re not picked up by the planning data scrapes that so many solicitors rely on. And that’s incredibly dangerous. But I’ll come back to that another time.

Now add in the fact that councils receive a New Homes Bonus for approving new housing, which gives them a financial incentive to say “yes” more often than “no” – and you start to see the real risk. If that hasn’t landed, please go back to the top and read it again.

I’m proud to say we’re the only company that spotted this. And among many other brilliant things we do, we uncover these hidden risks, for the benefit of your clients and the protection of your firm.

Be honest: would you rather your client bought a house and then found out there’s a development site next door, or found out before, when they still had options?

All our reports come with clear, evidence-backed findings. We identify high-risk issues in 44% of our reports – that’s nearly one in two buyers getting the chance to renegotiate, pull out, or proceed with full awareness.

And here’s the best part for solicitors: once you’ve instructed us, the liability sits with DevAssist, not you. You get to sleep at night, knowing our PI has your back.

We’re all in the business of reducing risk, so get in touch and find out just how affordable it is to protect both your clients and your reputation.

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