Appealing a CIL charge: grounds and deadlines

CIL appeal grounds are narrow and the deadlines are short. You can challenge how the collecting authority calculated the levy, how it apportioned liability between owners, how it dealt with a relief claim, or whether a surcharge was properly imposed. You cannot appeal because the charge makes the scheme unviable, and you cannot reopen the charging schedule itself.

The sequence also matters. For a dispute about the amount, you must ask the collecting authority to review its own figure before any appeal can be made, and the window for that request opens on the date of the liability notice. Miss it and the amount stands however wrong it is.

The grounds of appeal that exist

The Community Infrastructure Levy Regulations 2010 create a set of separate appeal routes, each with its own ground, its own decision maker and its own time limit.

Treat that table as a map rather than the authority. The appeal regulations have been amended repeatedly since 2010, so check the regulation number and the period against the current consolidated text before you file. An appeal lodged a day late is not heard.

Requesting a review of the chargeable amount first

The review is a condition precedent for an appeal about the amount, and it is also the least costly fix available. You write to the collecting authority within 28 days of the liability notice, say which part of the calculation is wrong, and provide the evidence. The authority has a short period to review and notify you of the outcome.

In practice a large proportion of disputes end here, because most errors are arithmetical or factual rather than legal. The authority has used the wrong charging zone, applied the wrong index figure, missed a demolition, or taken the gross internal area from the wrong drawing. Officers correct those readily once they are shown.

Write the request as a calculation rather than a complaint. Set out the authority's figure, your figure, and each line of difference with the source for your number. A reviewer who can see the arithmetic can agree with it in an afternoon.

Which body hears which appeal

The split is roughly between valuation questions and procedural ones.

The Valuation Office Agency appoints a valuer to decide anything that turns on measurement, floorspace, apportionment between interests in land, or entitlement to relief on the facts. These are specialist valuers and they expect specialist evidence.

The Planning Inspectorate decides appeals about surcharges, about the date the authority says development started on site, and about stop notices. Those are procedural disputes about what happened and when.

Neither body has a discretion to reduce a correctly calculated charge. That is the single most important thing to understand before spending money on an appeal. If the authority has applied the charging schedule correctly to the floorspace you are building, there is nothing to win, and the money is better spent on a relief claim you can still make or on a phasing strategy.

Deadlines and why they are unforgiving

The periods run from the date of the notice, not from the date you opened the envelope or the date your agent forwarded it. There is no general power to extend them, and no equivalent of the discretion an inspector has over a late planning appeal.

Two further timing traps are worth naming. An appeal about the chargeable amount cannot be made once development has started, so if you are minded to challenge the figure, do not issue the notice of the start of works and do not let a contractor begin site clearance while you think about it. And relief claims have their own hard sequence: the exemption has to be claimed, granted and followed by notice of the start of works before any work begins, and starting first loses the relief outright with no appeal route back.

Self-build exemption is where this causes the most damage. A householder who demolishes an outbuilding before the exemption is granted has lost it, and no appeal, review or sympathetic officer can restore it.

Evidence that succeeds on a measurement dispute

Gross internal area is where most chargeable amount appeals are won or lost, and the arguments are repetitive:

1. Existing floorspace that qualifies for offset. The building has to have been in lawful use for a continuous period of at least six months within the three years ending when permission first permits development. Business rates records, utility bills, tenancy agreements and dated photographs are the evidence that works. Recollection is not.
2. Measurement convention. Produce a measured survey and a schedule of areas prepared to a recognised code of measuring practice, floor by floor, with the drawing reference against each figure.
3. What counts as floorspace at all. Open balconies, external plant decks, voids and unenclosed car ports are frequent sources of difference.
4. Mezzanines and plant rooms. These are often omitted from an applicant's schedule and included in the authority's, or the reverse.
5. Indexation. Check the index figure the authority applied against the figure for the year the charging schedule took effect and the year permission was granted.

Submit the schedule as a table with a reconciliation to the authority's figure. An appointed valuer deciding between two bare totals will usually prefer the authority's.

Appeals against surcharges and notices

Surcharges attach to procedural failures: not assuming liability, not serving the required notice before works start, late payment, not responding to an information notice. They are added automatically and they are not small.

The grounds are limited to whether the surcharge was properly imposed. That means showing either that the breach did not happen, or that the authority failed to follow the procedure the Regulations require of it, including service of the relevant notices at the relevant addresses. Service defects are the most commonly successful ground, because the Regulations are prescriptive about what the authority must send and when.

Appeals about the deemed date of starting work turn on a date. If the authority has concluded development began on a date you dispute, the evidence is site photographs with metadata, contractor records, delivery notes, building control inspection records and utility connection dates. Produce a chronology rather than an argument.

What an appeal does not achieve

It does not reduce a correct charge on viability grounds. The levy is deliberately non-negotiable, which is the trade-off for its administrative simplicity, and viability arguments belong with the planning obligations that sit alongside it rather than with the levy. That is why the negotiation effort on a marginal scheme goes into the section 106 package, and why the Viability Assessment addresses obligations rather than the levy, a distinction that also shapes when an inspector reopens viability at appeal.

It does not create relief you failed to claim in time. It does not suspend payment, so interest and surcharges keep accruing while the appeal runs unless the authority agrees otherwise. And it does not help with a charging schedule you think is too high, which could only have been challenged at examination.

Where the real problem is the obligations rather than the levy, the routes are different and more flexible: renegotiation, a review mechanism, or discharging a section 106 obligation that no longer serves. And on an amendment application it is worth checking early whether section 106 obligations carry over to a section 73 permission, because a varied permission generates a fresh levy calculation.

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This is general guidance, not legal advice; check the position with your collecting authority or a qualified professional before relying on it. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.