An analysis is performed to study the influence of local thermal non-equilibrium (LTNE) on unsteady MHD laminar boundary layer flow of viscous, incompressible fluid over a vertical stretching plate embedded in a sparsely packed porous medium in the presence of heat generation/absorption. The flow in the porous medium is governed by Brinkman-Forchheimer extended Darcy model. A uniform heat source or sink is presented in the solid phase. By applying similarity analysis, the governing partial differential equations are transformed into a set of time dependent non-linear coupled ordinary differential equations and they are solved numerically by Runge-Kutta Fehlberg method along with shooting technique. The obtained results are displayed graphically to illustrate the influence of different physical parameters on the velocity, temperature profile and heat transfer rate for both fluid and solid phases. Moreover, the numerical results obtained in this study are compared with the existing literature in the case of LTE and found that they are in good agreement.