Finding section 106 and levy spend data locally

Every authority that collects planning obligations or the Community Infrastructure Levy has to publish an infrastructure funding statement each year, and that document is where the money is accounted for. It covers a financial year running from 1 April to 31 March and must be published by 31 December following. If you want to know what your council received from developers, what it spent and what it is still holding, that is the file to download, usually from a planning policy or developer contributions page on the council's website.

It is not an easy read. The headings are dictated by regulations, the numbers are presented without much explanation, and the most interesting figure, the amount sitting unspent, is rarely stated as such.

What the annual statement must report

The Community Infrastructure Levy Regulations 2010, as amended, prescribe three parts.

A levy report, covering the amount received during the year, the amount collected in earlier years but not yet spent, the amount spent and on what, the amount passed to parish and town councils as the neighbourhood proportion, and the amount applied to administrative expenses.

A planning obligations report, covering the number of agreements entered into during the year, a summary of the obligations in them, the sums received, the sums spent, and the sums retained at the year end including any held for monitoring.

And a statement of the infrastructure projects the authority intends to fund wholly or partly from levy receipts. This replaced the older list of infrastructure that the levy could be spent on, and it is the part most useful to a reader trying to work out intentions rather than history.

Receipts, allocations and spend are different things

Three words do most of the confusion.

Receipts are money that has arrived. For the levy this follows the start of development and the demand notice. For obligations it follows the trigger in the agreement, which might be the start of works, a given number of occupations, or practical completion.

Allocations are money earmarked for a project, often by a cabinet or committee decision. Allocation is a commitment on paper. Nothing has been built and nothing has been paid out.

Spend is money that has left the account.

The gap between these three is where most of the public frustration about developer contributions comes from. A council can honestly report large receipts, a long list of allocations and modest spend, and all three figures can be correct. A playground promised in a 2019 agreement may sit as an allocation for years while a delivery route is found.

When you quote a figure, say which of the three it is. An objection that confuses allocation with spend is easy for an officer to correct, and the correction undermines the rest of your point.

Reading the schedule of obligations

Larger authorities publish the obligations part as a schedule, sometimes with one line per agreement. What to look for, in order:

• the planning application reference, which lets you find the scheme on the public register and read the officer report
• the heads of terms, meaning what each sum is for, such as education, open space, highways or affordable housing
• whether the obligation is a financial contribution or an in-kind provision, since in-kind delivery appears as a non-financial obligation and no money moves
• the trigger for payment, which explains why a sum agreed in 2021 has not been received
• indexation, because a sum expressed in the agreement rises with an index and the figure received will differ from the figure agreed

In-kind obligations are the most misread. An agreement requiring the developer to build and transfer a play area shows no receipt and no spend, yet the play area exists. Check the officer report before concluding that nothing was delivered.

Where infrastructure capacity is the argument, the evidence base in a Social Infrastructure Assessment for a current application will often cite the same figures, and comparing the two is a quick way to test whether an applicant's account of local capacity matches the council's own.

Monitoring fees and administration

Two deductions appear in every statement and surprise people who have not seen them before.

The levy allows the charging authority to apply a proportion of receipts to the cost of administering the levy, subject to the cap in the regulations. That money funds the staff who issue liability notices, chase payments and keep the register. It is not a diversion.

Monitoring fees on planning obligations work differently. The regulations permit an authority to seek a sum towards monitoring and reporting on the obligations in an agreement, provided it is proportionate and reasonably related to the monitoring actually required. These fees are published in many authorities' obligations guidance, and they appear in the statement as sums retained.

A fair question for a consultation response is whether monitoring fees collected are matched by monitoring carried out. If the statement shows fees retained year after year with no reported monitoring activity, that is worth asking about at a committee or scrutiny meeting.

Comparing years and spotting underspend

One statement tells you little. Three consecutive statements tell you a great deal, because the unspent balance carried forward is the figure that reveals whether money is moving.

Build a simple table from the published statements:

Then look at three things. Whether the carried forward balance is rising steadily, which suggests collection outpacing delivery. Whether obligations received and obligations spent diverge persistently in the same category, such as open space or education. And whether the neighbourhood proportion has actually been passed to parish councils where one exists, since that money is theirs to spend.

Watch for repayment clauses. Many agreements require unspent contributions to be returned to the developer after a stated period, often five or ten years. Contributions that are approaching that deadline unspent are the strongest version of this argument, because the money is about to leave the area entirely.

Using the data in a consultation response

For an objection or a representation on a live application, the statement is useful in a specific way: it lets you say something factual about infrastructure delivery rather than something general about pressure on services.

Three usable arguments. First, that a named facility was funded by an earlier obligation and has not been delivered, so a further contribution towards the same facility needs a delivery mechanism rather than another promise. Second, that the authority's own statement identifies a project your area depends on, which supports a request that this scheme contribute to it. Third, that a type of contribution has repeatedly gone unspent locally, which supports asking for in-kind delivery instead of a payment.

Reference the statement precisely: its title, the year it covers, and the page or table. A parish council quoting the council's own published figures is in a much stronger position than one asserting that money has disappeared.

Where open space or play provision is the issue, the quantitative standards in an Open Space Assessment and the tenure detail in an Affordable Housing Statement are the documents that set the scheme's own commitments, and they can be compared with what earlier schemes actually produced.

Where the data is incomplete

Be realistic about the limits. Authorities that do not charge the levy publish only the obligations part. Some statements aggregate obligations by category with no scheme-level detail, which makes it impossible to trace an individual agreement. Figures are often restated between years without explanation. Historic agreements from before systematic record keeping may be missing or incomplete. And in-kind delivery is inconsistently reported.

Where the statement does not answer your question, a request to the authority for the specific figures usually works better than inference from the published tables. Ask for the sums received and spent against a named agreement reference, and the date of any repayment deadline.

The reform position also matters. The Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023 contains powers for a different levy to replace the current one in time, and the date those powers take effect has moved more than once, so check the current state before describing the future system. The timeline at planning law updates is the place to follow it.

Download three consecutive statements before drawing any conclusion, because a single year's numbers rarely show the trend. Browse all 66 PlanScope report types to see which documents set out a scheme's own infrastructure commitments.

This is general guidance, not legal advice; check the position with your local planning 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.