Health and education contributions and how they are evidenced

An education contribution is a sum calculated from a pupil yield factor, a cost per pupil place and an assessment of spare capacity in the relevant schools. A health contribution has no equivalent settled method, which is why education requests survive scrutiny far more often than health ones.

Both have to pass the same three tests in regulation 122 of the Community Infrastructure Levy Regulations 2010: the obligation must be necessary to make the development acceptable in planning terms, directly related to the development, and fairly and reasonably related in scale and kind to it. Those tests are the whole of the negotiation. Everything else is arithmetic you can check.

Where the request originates

The planning authority consults the education authority and the integrated care board, and what comes back is a response from a service provider rather than a planning judgement. That distinction matters. An education officer's job is to secure school places, and the response will quantify the places the development generates without asking whether the test of necessity is met.

The planning officer then has to apply regulation 122 before the request becomes a requirement. In practice many authorities pass the figure through unexamined, and the applicant is the only party with an interest in testing it.

Ask for the underlying evidence early, at pre-application stage, because it is far harder to unpick a figure that has reached a committee report. Request the pupil yield factors with their derivation, the capacity data for the named schools, the catchment used, and the cost multiplier applied.

Pupil yield factors and how they are derived

A pupil yield factor states how many pupils of a given age range a dwelling generates. Authorities derive them from local census and school census data, cross-referenced to dwelling type and size, and they are usually expressed per dwelling by bedroom count, with separate factors for primary, secondary and post-16.

Three features of a well-derived set of factors:

• Separate factors by bedroom count, because a one bedroom flat generates close to no pupils and a four bedroom house generates several
• Separate treatment of affordable and market tenures where the local evidence supports a difference
• A stated base date and data source, so the factors can be checked against the published school census

Where an authority applies a single flat rate per dwelling regardless of size, a scheme of small flats is being asked to fund places it will not generate. That is a direct challenge to the fair and reasonable relationship test, and it succeeds often enough to be worth making.

The Department for Education guidance on securing developer contributions for education sets out what it expects authorities to do, including publishing their methodology and basing contributions on the need the development actually creates. Quote it back where the local approach departs from it.

Capacity evidence from the education authority

Yield establishes demand. The contribution should only cover the part of that demand the existing system cannot absorb, so the capacity assessment is where most of the money is won or lost.

The statutory walking distances for home to school travel, two miles for children under eight and three miles for older children, give a defensible basis for defining the area of search. A catchment drawn more tightly than that needs justifying, and a catchment that happens to exclude the one school with 40 spare places needs explaining.

Check whether other developments in the pipeline have already funded expansion at the same school. Pooling restrictions on obligations were lifted in 2019, so several schemes can contribute to one project, and a transparent authority will tell you what has been collected and committed.

Health contribution methodologies and their weaknesses

Health requests usually arrive calculated either per head of new population against a capitation rate, or from a floorspace requirement per registered patient converted to a capital cost. In London the Healthy Urban Development Unit model is widely used and at least gives a consistent method.

The arguments against a health contribution, in rough order of strength:

The service is funded nationally through general taxation and the core allocation, so an obligation to fund it may not be necessary to make the development acceptable. A request with no identified capital project fails the directly related test, because there is nothing for the money to be spent on. A capitation-based figure funds revenue rather than capital, and planning obligations are generally a poor fit for running costs. And a model that assumes every new resident is a new patient ignores internal migration within the area.

None of that means health contributions are never justified. A scheme of 500 homes in a town with a single practice at capacity and a published estate strategy for a new surgery is a straightforward case. A scheme of 30 homes in a city with no identified project is not, and a Health Impact Assessment that describes the local position honestly is better evidence than silence.

Testing whether the test of necessity is met

Work through regulation 122 explicitly in the planning statement rather than leaving it to the officer.

Necessary: identify the harm the obligation addresses and what would happen without it. If the answer is that children would still get school places, just not at the nearest school, say so and let the officer weigh it.

Directly related: name the project, the school or the facility. A contribution to a general fund with no project attached is vulnerable.

Fairly and reasonably related in scale and kind: show the arithmetic. Yield times cost per place, less capacity, equals the sum. Where the authority's figure cannot be reproduced from its own inputs, ask for the calculation sheet.

Where viability is tight, the obligations package as a whole goes into the Viability Assessment, and the order in which obligations are reduced is a policy question the authority answers. Affordable housing is usually protected last. When an inspector reopens viability at appeal covers what happens when that balance is tested.

Indexation and spending deadlines

Contributions are almost always index linked from the date of the agreement to the date of payment, usually to a published construction cost index. Check which index and which base date, because a five year gap between agreement and payment on a construction index can add a substantial amount.

Negotiate a spending deadline, commonly five or ten years, with repayment of unspent money with interest. Authorities resist it and most accept it, and it is the clause that gives the obligation a purpose beyond collection. The annual infrastructure funding statement each authority publishes will show whether that clause has ever been used.

Also settle what happens on a section 73 variation, because obligations do not automatically carry over to a new permission, and whether a deed of variation is needed. Do section 106 obligations carry over to a section 73 permission deals with that question directly.

Negotiating scope and quantum

Quantum arguments turn on arithmetic. Scope arguments turn on regulation 122, and scope is where the larger savings are. A request for a contribution towards a facility that was going to be built anyway, or that serves a catchment the development sits outside, is a scope argument.

Offer in kind provision where it works. Land for a school on a large site, or a serviced site with access and services to the boundary, is often worth more to the authority than the equivalent cash and costs the developer less. Where an obligation turns out to be unnecessary later, discharging a section 106 obligation that no longer serves sets out the route.

PlanScope can draft the planning and viability sections that frame an obligations case from a postcode and a set of answers, flagging where local capacity evidence is needed rather than inventing it. Viability work needs a suitably qualified author and councils expect that author to be named. Reports should be reviewed before submission and PlanScope does not guarantee planning approval. This is general guidance, not legal advice. Check the current regulations and the authority's published methodology before relying on a figure.