3,000 Homes at Plumpton: How to Have Your Say in September

A public consultation has opened on plans for a new town of up to 3,000 homes on farmland between Plumpton Green and South Chailey. The land at North Barnes Farm is owned by Eton College, and the scheme is being promoted by Welbeck Land.

The developers are running three webinars and a consultation day at Plumpton Racecourse over the next three weeks. The campaign group opposing the scheme is running two events of its own.

Here is the part that has not been widely reported. The promoters have published their own indicative programme, and it puts the planning application in December 2026, three months after this consultation starts.

The dates

Developer events, from the North Barnes project website:

• Wednesday 2 September, 7pm to 8pm: community webinar
• Saturday 5 September, 10am to 5pm: all-age consultation day, Plumpton Racecourse, BN7 3AL
• Wednesday 9 September, 7pm to 8pm: community webinar
• Wednesday 16 September, 7pm to 8pm: community webinar

Campaign events, from Don’t Urbanise the Downs, which opposes the scheme:

• Saturday 5 September, 10am to 5pm: a presence outside the racecourse at the Ashurst Lane entrance, with the group asking supporters to come between 11am and noon
• Saturday 12 September, 10am to 2.30pm: public information day, All Saints Church Annex, Plumpton

East Chiltington Parish Council meets on Thursday 24 September at 7pm at Beechwood Hall, Cooksbridge. Members of the public may attend.

No closing date for the consultation is published on the project website. The Get Involved page lists the four events and nothing else. If you want your response recorded, the events are the route the promoters have set out.

What is proposed

The scheme is called North Barnes, and its own settlement strategy describes it as “a small market town”. From the document published on the project website, dated September 2026, the headline figures are:

• up to 3,000 homes, including affordable housing
• 6,000 square metres of commercial space, including a local supermarket
• 10,000 square metres of light industrial space across two yards
• a new primary school and childcare facilities
• a new health centre
• Wet Home Wood restored as a nature reserve of more than 15 hectares
• Bevern Valley Park, new parkland of more than 10 hectares
• a sports hub with a club house, to be called Valley Pavilion
• cycle links between South Chailey and Plumpton Green

The masterplanners are ADAM Architecture, the practice behind Poundbury in Dorset and Nansledan in Cornwall. The planning consultancy is ECE Planning. A “North Barnes Legacy Trust” is proposed as the long-term steward of the green space and community buildings.

The settlement strategy does not state the site’s area. Don’t Urbanise the Downs puts it at 450 acres and says Eton bought the land more than 27 years ago.

Why the December date matters

The settlement strategy contains an indicative programme. It is a single column of seven steps, and it is worth reading in order:

The public consultation is the fifth of seven steps. Four rounds of work with the council and a design review panel came first. Design development runs at the same time as the consultation, not after it.

The document is explicit about what comes next: “we’re working towards submitting an initial planning application by the end of 2026. This will be a hybrid application, establishing the principle of development for the whole community, while also including detailed plans for the first phase.”

A hybrid application asks for two things at once. It seeks outline consent for the whole 3,000 homes, fixing the principle that the town can be built, while seeking full detailed consent for the first phase only.

The bit at the bottom of the sign-up form

The Get Involved page ends with a note about what happens to the details you give:

“This information is compiled by the North Barnes Partnership; it will be treated in strict confidence and only used as part of the Support North Barnes campaign.”

The page describes itself as a consultation. The privacy wording describes the same exercise as a campaign for support. Both descriptions sit on the same page.

The council has already said no, twice

This is not a new proposal, and Lewes District Council has assessed it before.

In September 2023 the council published its preferred options for development sites. East Chiltington Parish Council recorded the outcome on its own website: North Barnes Farm was assessed as “Not deliverable or Developable” and was therefore “considered to NOT be a suitable location for development for this plan to take forward through this consultation”.

The site was left out again in the most recent round. The council’s phase two Local Plan consultation ran from 18 December 2025 to 28 February 2026, covering the spatial strategy and site allocations. The consultation document sets out a housing need of 682 dwellings a year for the Local Plan area, 15,004 over the 22 years of the plan. North Barnes is not among the allocated sites.

Being left out of the Local Plan does not stop a planning application. It changes the ground it is fought on.

What is already lodged

There is one live record on the council’s planning register, and it is the clearest sign that the December date is real.

Application LW/26/0191 was received on 2 April 2026 and validated on 14 April 2026. It is a request for a Scoping Opinion under Regulation 15 of the Town and Country Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) Regulations 2017, and the description on the register matches the scheme exactly: “a hybrid planning application for the development of a small market town to provide up to 3,000 homes, community and education facilities, employment space, and green/blue infrastructure”. The address on the record is Highbridge Lane, East Chiltington.

A scoping opinion is the council telling a developer which environmental effects its assessment must cover. It is a normal early step before a large application, and it is not a decision on the merits of anything.

Its status on the register is still “Awaiting decision”. That is nearly five months after validation.

East Chiltington Parish Council responded to the scoping report in May and said it found the document “severely lacking”.

What the opponents say

Don’t Urbanise the Downs is asking people not to attend the developer’s events at all. Its post of 27 August, written by Madeleine Harper, calls developer-led consultations “a tick box exercise which only benefits them”, and asks supporters to respond instead to council-led consultation once a planning application is in.

The group also makes a point about who is behind the scheme. It notes that Eton College is more than 60 miles from the site, and that the companies involved are based in London or Eton.

James MacCleary, the MP for Lewes, wrote about the proposal in late August after a summer tour of the villages. The campaign published an extract of his statement on 29 August. He said the scheme came up repeatedly in meetings at East Chiltington, Westmeston and Plumpton, with residents raising concerns about countryside, water supply, sewage infrastructure, flooding and roads. He added: “I am not opposed to building homes. We desperately need more housing, but development must be in the right place and come with the infrastructure needed to support it.”

What the promoters say

The case for the site, from the project’s local context page, rests on four claims:

• It is next to a station. Plumpton has regular trains to London, Lewes and Eastbourne, and road access via the A275.
• It is outside the National Park. The whole site sits beyond the South Downs boundary, and the promoters say developable land outside the park is scarce.
• The land is poor. The settlement strategy says the site “has been intensively farmed and over 93% of the site is graded as ‘Poor’”.
• The alternative is worse. Without a single large site, they argue, the same housing goes on the edges of existing towns and villages “which delivers housing without the infrastructure and services we need”.

On need, the strategy states that average house prices in Lewes are 9.4 times average incomes and that rents rose 6% last year.

What it means for you

If you want to see the plans and question the team, go to one of the four developer events listed above. The consultation day at Plumpton Racecourse on 5 September is the only one where you can see the drawings in person.

If you want to object, note the campaign’s position: it argues the moment that counts is the council-led consultation that follows a planning application, not this one. On the promoters’ own timetable that application arrives in December 2026, and the formal comment period would follow in the new year.

If you live in the villages, the parish councils are the route into the process that has statutory weight. East Chiltington’s next meeting is 24 September. Chailey and Plumpton parish councils publish their own agendas.

If you only do one thing, watch application LW/26/0191 on the council’s planning register. The scoping opinion has to be issued before the environmental statement can be finalised, and the full application follows it.

We will report the scoping decision when it is issued, and the application when it lands. Our Lewes planning news page tracks the district’s bigger cases.

Sources

• North Barnes: Get Involved (event dates and privacy wording)
• North Barnes: Proposals
• North Barnes: Local Context
• North Barnes: Who We Are (landowner and promoter)
• North Barnes Settlement Strategy, September 2026 (figures and indicative programme)
• Application LW/26/0191, scoping opinion (Lewes District Council planning register, checked 30 August 2026)
• Eton Town “not deliverable” (East Chiltington Parish Council, 8 September 2023)
• Eton Town: response to scoping (East Chiltington Parish Council, 5 May 2026)
• How to respond to Eton’s PR campaign (Don’t Urbanise the Downs, 27 August 2026)
• Thanks for your continued support James MacCleary MP (Don’t Urbanise the Downs, 29 August 2026)
• Lewes Local Plan: a spatial strategy for development (Lewes District Council)