Bellway's 83-home Elmfield Green is selling now, showhome in October, first residents from January 2027. Its water neutrality conditions are being dropped.
The first homes at Billingshurst’s newest housing estate are on sale, and the first residents are due to move in early next year. Bellway is building 83 homes at Elmfield Green, on 15 acres of land at Duckmoor, west of Wooddale Lane on the eastern edge of the village.
Sales opened at Billingshurst Community Centre on Saturday 25 July. The showhome is expected to open in October, the first homes should be ready to live in from January 2027, and the whole scheme is due to be finished by the end of 2028 (Bellway, 20 July 2026).
That is the visible half of the story. The quieter half is on the planning register, where the site is now unpicking the water rules that governed it, because those rules no longer apply anywhere in the district.
What is actually being built
Bellway’s own figures for the scheme are:
- 54 homes for private sale, three to five bedrooms
- 29 affordable homes, one to four bedrooms, a mix of houses and apartments, for shared ownership and affordable rent
- roughly a third of the 15-acre site as open space, with play areas, grassland and woodland
The money that comes with it is split between two pots. The Community Infrastructure Levy payment is put at more than £1 million, shared between Horsham District Council and West Sussex County Council. The section 106 agreement adds a smaller package aimed at getting people out of cars. Bellway’s September 2025 release itemised it as:
- £15,000 towards improving a public right of way
- £5,000 for eight cycle parking spaces on the High Street
- £12,450 in cycle vouchers for residents
- £4,150 in bus vouchers
Bellway’s more recent release puts the rights of way and sustainable travel package at “more than £49,000”, so the two statements do not itemise the same way. We have not been able to reconcile the difference from the council’s published record.
It only exists because of an appeal
Elmfield Green is not a scheme Horsham District Council chose. The outline application, DC/20/2607, went to the Planning Inspectorate and was allowed on appeal on 18 January 2023, under reference APP/Z3825/W/21/3283823. The appellant was Reside Developments Limited, not Bellway (Planning Inspectorate case record).
The detail came later. Reserved matters for the 83 dwellings, the open space, the children’s play provision and the parking were approved under DC/24/0768. Bellway bought the land and began preliminary work in September 2025.
The water rule that held Sussex back has gone
For four years, almost nothing could be built in this part of West Sussex without proving it would use no extra water. Natural England’s position statement of September 2021 tied new development to abstraction at Hardham and the protected Arun Valley habitats, and Billingshurst sat squarely inside the affected Sussex North zone.
That changed on 31 October 2025, when Natural England issued a withdrawal statement retiring the 2021 position. It followed an agreement with Southern Water and the Environment Agency to cut the cap on the abstraction licence, which the council says “removes the connection between abstraction and growth” (Horsham District Council: water neutrality in Horsham district).
For anyone applying to build in the district since 1 November 2025, the practical effect is:
- no water neutrality statement is required
- no payment into the Sussex North Water Certification Scheme is needed, and that scheme will now never launch
- no bespoke water neutrality conditions or section 106 obligations are imposed
- new homes instead get a condition requiring the Building Regulations Part G optional standard, currently 110 litres per person per day, under Policy 37 of the Horsham District Planning Framework
Two caveats sit alongside it. The licence change itself had not taken effect when the council wrote that page, which refers to March 2026, so officers still carry out an Appropriate Assessment under the Habitats Regulations on each application. And the area is still classed as being under significant water stress.
What Elmfield Green is doing about it
The council also said it would accept applications to strip the old water conditions out of permissions already granted. Elmfield Green is doing exactly that, in two steps:
- DC/26/0401 varied conditions 3, 9, 10 and 21 of the outline permission, including condition 21 on off-site water neutrality measures. It was permitted on 22 May 2026 (planning register).
- S106/26/0019, an application to modify the water neutrality obligations in the legal agreements attached to DC/20/2607 and DC/24/0768, was validated on 24 April 2026 and is still shown as registered, meaning undecided (planning register).
Other conditions on the site have run their normal course. One required a European Protected Species licence for hazel dormice before works could start; another required a biodiversity net gain scheme.
What it means for you
If you are buying at Elmfield Green, the dates to hold are October for the showhome and January 2027 for the first completions, with the site finishing at the end of 2028. Building on a live site continues around early residents for two years after that first move-in.
If you live on Wooddale Lane or nearby, the construction management plan for the site is itself a planning application, currently undetermined, and is open for comment on the council’s register. Anyone can read it and respond, the same as for any application.
If you are trying to build anything in the district, the water neutrality burden is off, but not the water efficiency standard. Every new home still has to meet 110 litres per person per day. If you hold an older permission carrying bespoke water conditions or obligations, the council has said it will consider applications to remove them.
You can search any of these references yourself on the council’s planning register, and we track the district’s bigger schemes on our Horsham planning news page. What 83 extra homes do to local values is a separate question; the district’s current averages are on our Horsham house prices page.
Sources
- Bellway: new image of Billingshurst development revealed as first homes set to go on sale (20 July 2026) and work starts on 83-home development in Billingshurst (5 September 2025)
- Planning Inspectorate: appeal APP/Z3825/W/21/3283823, Land at Duckmoor, east of Billingshurst, allowed 18 January 2023
- Horsham District Council: water neutrality in Horsham district
- Horsham District Council planning register: DC/26/0401, S106/26/0019 and the reserved matters approval DC/24/0768
Checked against the sources above on 18 August 2026. Bellway has not published prices for the private homes at Elmfield Green, so none are quoted here.
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