Welcome for statutory planning charge

17 October 2007

Senior county officals have backed the Government’s proposed new statutory planning charge (SPC) to plough some of developers’ windfall gains into infrastructure, but warned that implementation was key.

The County Surveyors Society sees the charge as simpler and more transparent than the planning gain supplement idea – which, last week, ministers confirmed they were abandoning – to raise extra funds for transport improvements.

Planning minister, Yvette Cooper, said: ‘Only a small proportion of all developments currently contribute to the costs of infrastructure through Section 106 agreements.’ The new charge would help ‘to mitigate the cumulative impacts of development’.

She stressed that charge levels would reflect the need in each locality, and that the income would be additional to £1.7bn in Government funds for growth areas.

Miles Butler, the County Surveyors’ Society planning and regeneration committee chair, said the proposal ‘has the potential to provide much-needed additional income for infrastructure improvements in areas without large brownfield sites or major extensions’. In Bournemouth, in Butler’s county of Dorset, for example, most new housing was infill development, but this ‘puts more and more strain on local transport’, said Butler. But councils ‘don’t have the resources to negotiate planning gain agreements for all these sites’.

Councils in growth areas have already introduced voluntary tariff arrangements, and in Milton Keynes alone, they will contribute £311M to the £1.7bn cost of infrastructure.

But Butler’s CSS colleague, Huw Jones Bedfordshire County Council’s environment director, welcomed the charge, but warned that the so-called ‘roof tax’ in Milton Keynes – on which the SPC is modelled – ‘only worked because English Partnerships acted as banker’.

London Councils, however, was less enthusiastic about the statutory planning charge proposal, fearing that it would generate less money than was currently negotiated through Section 106 agreements.

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