HELAA Site Assessment Records and Call for Sites Evidence
Case reference EIR2026/01063
Received 30 April 2026
Published 18 May 2026
Request
I have been reviewing Herefordshire Council's latest published Brownfield Land Register, particularly the sites listed as "not permissioned".
A number of these entries refer to sites having been submitted through a Call for Sites process and assessed through a HELAA in 2020, 2023, 2024, 2025 or similar. I have been unable to locate the relevant published HELAA reports, site schedules or site assessment pro-formas on the Council's website.
Please could you confirm where the relevant HELAA reports and site-level assessment records can be accessed?
To avoid limiting the request only to sites appearing on the Brownfield Land Register, I would be grateful if you could also confirm whether the Council holds a wider published or unpublished HELAA site schedule for the relevant Call for Sites exercises, including sites that were assessed but not subsequently included on the Brownfield Land Register.
If these documents are not currently published online, please treat this email as a request under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 for the recorded information held by the Council relating to the relevant HELAA assessments and Call for Sites outputs, including:
1. the relevant HELAA report or reports;
2. the site assessment schedule or spreadsheet for each relevant assessment year;
3. individual site assessment pro-formas or scoring sheets;
4. any methodology note used to assess suitability, availability and achievability;
5. any site maps or GIS outputs used to identify the assessed site boundaries; and
6. assessment records for sites submitted through the relevant Call for Sites exercises, including but not limited to those referenced in the Brownfield Land Register.
I am not seeking personal contact details for landowners, promoters or third parties, and I am happy for any genuinely personal information to be redacted.
If the Council considers that some of this information is already publicly available, please could you provide the relevant direct links, as I have not been able to locate the later HELAA material through the Local Plan evidence base pages or general website search.
Response
I have been reviewing Herefordshire Council's latest published Brownfield Land Register, particularly the sites listed as "not permissioned".
A number of these entries refer to sites having been submitted through a Call for Sites process and assessed through a HELAA in 2020, 2023, 2024, 2025 or similar. I have been unable to locate the relevant published HELAA reports, site schedules or site assessment pro-formas on the Council's website.
Please could you confirm where the relevant HELAA reports and site-level assessment records can be accessed?
To avoid limiting the request only to sites appearing on the Brownfield Land Register, I would be grateful if you could also confirm whether the Council holds a wider published or unpublished HELAA site schedule for the relevant Call for Sites exercises, including sites that were assessed but not subsequently included on the Brownfield Land Register.
If these documents are not currently published online, please treat this email as a request under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 for the recorded information held by the Council relating to the relevant HELAA assessments and Call for Sites outputs, including:
1. the relevant HELAA report or reports;
2. the site assessment schedule or spreadsheet for each relevant assessment year;
3. individual site assessment pro-formas or scoring sheets;
4. any methodology note used to assess suitability, availability and achievability;
5. any site maps or GIS outputs used to identify the assessed site boundaries; and
6. assessment records for sites submitted through the relevant Call for Sites exercises, including but not limited to those referenced in the Brownfield Land Register.
I am not seeking personal contact details for landowners, promoters or third parties, and I am happy for any genuinely personal information to be redacted.
If the Council considers that some of this information is already publicly available, please could you provide the relevant direct links, as I have not been able to locate the later HELAA material through the Local Plan evidence base pages or general website search.
Answer: In response to all the questions above, including questions 1-6, the requested Housing and Employment Land Availability Assessment (HELAA) is a technical, non-policy document created by local councils to identify sites that are potentially suitable, available, and achievable for housing or employment development. However the study is incomplete and work on it had to be paused as the new mandatory housing target assigned to the county by National Government with emphasis on delivery meant work on the current HELAA had to stop.
Therefore, all the previously submitted sites going back to 2020 as requested are being revised for the purposes of our new Call for Sites and plan making evidence.
This Call for Sites study is currently ongoing and therefore we have determined that the requested information is excepted under Regulation 12 (4) (d) of the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 - material in the course of completion, unfinished documents and incomplete data.
This exception is subject to a public interest test and accordingly I have weighed the reasons for and against disclosure in the public interest as follows:
The public interest in disclosure:
Openness and transparency regarding the previous HELAA information.
The public interest in not disclosing the information:
The Call for Sites study is, at the time of writing, ongoing, and as such the decision making process is not complete. Material still in the course of completion includes information created as part of the process of formulating and developing policy, when that process is not complete. This includes information from the previous HELAA.
Whilst this is ongoing, Herefordshire Council should be afforded safe space away from public scrutiny to review information from the previous HELAA and to collate any relevant information for the current Call for Sites study, and providing incomplete data at this time would hamper that decision making process.
Once the Call for Sites study is complete a Candidate Sites Register that identifies which locations are being considered as options for growth or not, will be made publically available on the council's website in approximately 6-12 months time.
Taking the above into consideration we consider the balance in favour of not disclosing the information at this stage outweighs the reasons for disclosure.
Documents
This is Herefordshire Council's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
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