Community Infrastructure Levy

One of the key arguments for growth-dependent planning is that part of the wealth generated by market-led development can be siphoned off and used for social and/or environmental benefits. This has long been the claim made for extracting 'planning gain' (although that rather makes it sound like a bad tooth). However, governments - Conservation, Labour and Coalition - have also argued that too much planning gain can delay developments through lengthy negotiations, add costs through complexity and even deter development through excessive demans for such benefits. The Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) was intended to overcome some of these problems. Local authorities would decide on their infrastructure needs alongside the scale of development that they intended to permit over a given timescale. Divide the cost of this infrastructure alongside the amount of development and you have a tarrif to charge developers to fund it. Non-infrastructure social and environmental benefits would still be met through negotiating planning gain and Section 106 agreements as before. Yet the CIL system is already under reform before it is fully implemented. The tension between maximising the profit from private sector development and meeting locally identified social and environment needs does not go away. The point at which the scale of these benefits threatens the viability of such development remains ambiguous for many planning authorities; open books for the development are, not surprisingly, not the norm. The tariffs themselves seem a rather blunt instrument, a means of raising funds but not necessarily shaping the locality in the desired direction. But, above all, such planning gain - whether achieved through CIL or Section 106 agreements - only works at all where there is profitably private sector development. This restricts the ability of planners to plan for community benefits to specific sites and locations. A limited tool indeed.