Buckinghamshire Council will not restart the Farnham Park lease, it said on 19 August. A day earlier it set the environmental terms for the club's plans.

Buckinghamshire Council will not restart the process that handed Wycombe Wanderers a long lease of South Buckinghamshire Golf Course and Farnham Park Playing Fields. It published that decision at 12.49pm on Wednesday 19 August, in response to a petition signed by more than a thousand people. (Buckinghamshire Council, 19 August 2026)

The day before, the same council issued a separate document that matters more to what actually gets built. On Tuesday 18 August it published its Environmental Impact Assessment scoping opinion for the club’s scheme. That sets out what Wycombe Wanderers must assess before it can lodge a planning application. (Buckinghamshire Council planning register, PL/26/05840/EIASO)

No planning application has been submitted yet. The register holds only the scoping request, which was validated on 20 July 2026 and determined on 18 August.

What the club is actually proposing

The scoping opinion is the first council document to describe the scheme in full. Wycombe Wanderers is named in it as the applicant, and its scoping report was prepared by the consultancy Greengage.

At South Buckinghamshire Golf Course the proposal is:

  • change of use of part of the course to a football training facility
  • training pitches, a performance hub building and an indoor dome
  • groundworks, drainage, landscaping and boundary treatments
  • parking, access roads, service areas and alterations to the existing access
  • floodlighting
  • reconfiguration of the rest of the course into a revised layout with new golf facilities

At Farnham Park Playing Fields the proposal is enhanced community sports facilities and a community hub, with lighting, landscaping and associated works.

The site is at Beaconsfield Road, Farnham Royal, near Slough, in the Farnhams and Stoke Poges ward. Wycombe Wanderers play at Adams Park in High Wycombe.

Why a full environmental statement is needed

The scheme is not automatically caught by the Environmental Impact Assessment rules. It falls into Schedule 2 of the 2017 regulations, as an urban development project, and crosses the threshold because it covers more than five hectares.

The club did not ask the council for a screening opinion. It committed to carrying out a full assessment anyway, given what the scoping report calls the sensitivities of the site.

The council agreed the seven topics the club had already proposed to assess:

  • ecology
  • water resources and flood risk
  • landscape and visual impact
  • heritage and archaeology
  • transport
  • noise
  • air quality

It then added two more that the club had wanted left out. Climate change must be scoped in, covering both adaptation and how the development affects the ability of habitats and species to adapt. Soil must be scoped in as well, because the pitch construction, regrading and drainage involve significant earthworks. Both additions follow comments from Natural England.

The council agreed to leave out ground conditions and contamination, greenhouse gas emissions, materials and waste, microclimate, minerals, and a standalone lighting chapter. It also accepted that population and human health could be scoped out, saying benefits to health from more activity are likely but “not considered to be significant in EIA terms”.

The traffic questions the club has been told to answer

The council’s highways team set the longest list of requirements. The transport assessment must cover weekday peaks, weekend peaks, and combined academy and first-team operations on the same day. It must include seven-day automatic traffic counts, manual classified counts and a Stage 1 road safety audit, with the Park Road access assessed specifically.

The assessment must also model the traffic effect of four other large schemes in the area alongside this one:

  • Land west of Lent Rise Road, Burnham, 800 dwellings (PL/26/05353/FA)
  • Sefton Park, Bells Hill, Stoke Poges, 317 dwellings (PL/26/01820/OA)
  • Wexham Park Golf Course, 450 and 230 dwellings (PL/26/06178/OA and PL/26/06177/OA)
  • relevant developments inside Slough Borough Council’s area

The petition, and the council’s answer

The petition asking the council to restart the lease process opened on 22 July 2026, two days after the scoping request was validated. It had 1,072 verified signatures when we checked on 19 August. It is addressed to Buckinghamshire Council and does not ask for the scheme to be refused, only for the leasing process to be run again with an accurate public notice, fresh representations and a new competitive tender. (Petition, change.org)

The argument behind it is that the 2024 notice described something different from what is now proposed. That notice was published in The Gazette on 8 November 2024 under section 121(2) of the Charities Act 2011. It described “an 18 hole mature parkland course and clubhouse within 130 acres” and playing fields of “approximately 80 acres”, and advertised a leasehold disposal of a minimum of 25 years. Representations closed on 9 December 2024. (The Gazette, notice 4750245)

The council says that notice was sufficient. In its 19 August statement, acting as trustee, it says it “does not consider that the proposals that Wycombe Wanderers FC shared during their recent public engagement change the basis on which the lease was advertised, marketed or evaluated”.

It adds that the lease opportunity drew 10 initial proposals when it was openly marketed, including some that would have kept 18 holes, and that Wycombe Wanderers was chosen in August 2025 after an evaluation. Its conclusion is blunt: the trustee “does not consider that there is any basis for restarting the process and conducting a new competitive process”.

The statement does acknowledge the substance of the objection. It says the trustee “recognises that some people are concerned about the scale of the changes being proposed”, and that its own duty is to weigh public benefit across the site as a whole.

Who owns the land, and why that matters

Most of the land is charity land, not ordinary council land. It is held by the Farnham Park Sports Fields Trust, registered charity number 308164, and Buckinghamshire Council is the sole corporate trustee. The charitable purposes come from the Eton Rural District Council Act 1971, which ties the land to facilities for physical training, sport and recreation. (Buckinghamshire Council FAQs)

That is why this has run as a charity-law process rather than a normal property deal, and why the public notice in 2024 existed at all. The council says it is leasing, not selling, and that the lease will require the 1971 Act purposes to continue.

The trust reported income of £1.43m and spending of £1.33m in the year to 31 March 2025. (Charity Commission, 308164)

On the golf course itself, the council’s published position is that it “is planned to move to a 9-hole course”, run pay-as-you-play, because the course has seen declining usage and has been running at a loss. If planning permission for the training facilities is refused, the council says the site would continue as a nine or twelve-hole golf facility.

Key dates

Timeline of the Farnham Park and South Buckinghamshire Golf Course lease, from the November 2024 public notice to the scoping opinion issued on 18 August 2026

What it means for you

If you use the golf course or the playing fields, nothing changes on the ground because of this week’s two documents. The scoping opinion is a procedural step and the petition response refuses a procedural request. Neither grants permission for anything.

If you want to object or support, the moment that counts has not arrived. The planning application has not been submitted. When it is, it will carry an environmental statement running to at least nine topic chapters, and it will go through statutory public consultation with a formal comment period. That is the stage at which comments are weighed by planning officers.

If you want to be ready for it, the scoping opinion is public now on the council’s register under PL/26/05840/EIASO, and so is the club’s scoping report. Reading them before the application lands is the cheapest way to know what to look for.

There is a separate deadline that is live right now. The council’s scoping opinion points applicants to the draft Local Plan for Buckinghamshire, published for Regulation 19 consultation from 23 July to 6 September 2026. That plan sets the policies against which this and every other Wycombe-area application will be judged. Comments close on 6 September. (Buckinghamshire Council scoping opinion, 18 August 2026)

We track applications in the Wycombe area on our High Wycombe planning news page.

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