Infrastructure contributions in Wales, and how England differs

The Community Infrastructure Levy exists in Wales. It rests on the same Planning Act 2008 powers and the same 2010 Regulations as in England, because the levy was made for England and Wales together. What has diverged is almost everything that happened to those Regulations afterwards, and a developer who prices a Welsh scheme from English experience will get the contributions position wrong in both directions.

This article is about Wales. Welsh applications are determined under Planning Policy Wales, Future Wales and the adopted Local Development Plan.

Whether a levy applies at all in Wales

The first question on any Welsh site is whether the charging authority has adopted a charging schedule. Not every Welsh authority has, and the answer decides how your contributions will be secured.

Where a schedule exists, the levy operates in the familiar way: a rate per square metre set by zone and use, applied to net additional floorspace, with the chargeable amount calculated under Schedule 1 to the Regulations and indexed. Where no schedule has been adopted, everything comes through planning obligations under section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990.

Check the authority's own planning policy pages rather than a national list, because schedules are adopted, reviewed and occasionally revised, and a stale list will mislead you.

The England-only reforms, and why they matter

Part 4 of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023 created powers for a new Infrastructure Levy. Those powers extend to England and have not been brought into force, and the policy position on whether they will be has shifted more than once since the Act was passed. Verify the current position on gov.uk before advising a client, and treat anything written about it in 2023 as out of date.

For a Welsh scheme the point is simpler. The 2023 Act's levy powers do not apply in Wales at all. Wales continues with the Community Infrastructure Levy and section 106, and there is no Welsh equivalent of the new levy in prospect.

Separately, the Infrastructure (Wales) Act 2024 created a unified consenting process for significant infrastructure projects in Wales. It deals with how those projects are consented, not with how contributions are collected, and the two are easily confused because of the word in the title.

How contributions are mostly secured

Section 106 does the heavy lifting in Wales. An obligation has to satisfy the tests in regulation 122 of the 2010 Regulations, which apply across England and Wales: 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.

In practice a Welsh major application negotiates the same heads of terms an English one would. Affordable housing. Education contributions where the authority can evidence capacity pressure. Open space and play. Highway works under section 278 of the Highways Act 1980. Ecological management and biodiversity measures. Community facilities where the Local Development Plan supports them.

Where a levy schedule is in place, work out early which items are levy-funded and which remain in the agreement, because the authority should not be collecting twice for the same infrastructure.

Pooling, and a divergence worth checking

Here is the trap for anyone working across the border.

The restriction that prevented an authority from pooling more than five planning obligations towards a single infrastructure project was lifted in England by amendment regulations made in 2019. That amendment was made for England. Before you assume the restriction has gone on a Welsh site, check whether any Welsh equivalent has since been made, because the starting position is that English amendments to the 2010 Regulations do not extend to Wales.

The same caution applies to the restriction on using obligations for infrastructure that a charging schedule was intended to fund. If the restriction still operates, an authority seeking a sixth contribution towards a named project is asking for something it may not be able to take into account, and that is a point worth making politely and early rather than at committee.

Ask the authority to identify, in writing, how many obligations it has already pooled towards each project it wants you to contribute to. The answer is sometimes illuminating.

Affordable housing in Welsh obligations

Affordable housing is secured by obligation rather than by levy, and the Welsh policy framework is its own. Planning Policy Wales sets the strategic requirement and Technical Advice Note 2 on planning and affordable housing provides the method, with the site-specific target coming from the adopted Local Development Plan and any viability evidence behind it.

The tenure definitions, the intermediate housing products and the local connection conditions used in Wales differ from the English ones. Drafting a Welsh agreement using an English affordable housing schedule produces obligations the registered social landlord cannot work with, which then has to be renegotiated after the committee resolution.

An Affordable Housing Statement for a Welsh scheme therefore needs the Welsh tenure terms and the Local Development Plan policy, not the English equivalents. Where you are arguing that the policy target is undeliverable, the Viability Assessment has to be built on Welsh policy inputs and benchmark land value evidence as well.

Transparency and monitoring

Annual infrastructure funding statements, which tell you what an authority collected and spent, were introduced in England by the 2019 amendments. There is no automatic Welsh equivalent, so the evidence of what has been collected and committed is harder to assemble.

Where you need it, the places to look are the authority's committee reports, its capital programme, any section 106 monitoring report it chooses to publish, and a request under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 if nothing is published. That evidence matters when you are resisting a contribution on the basis that the project it funds is already fully funded or has not been delivered.

Monitoring fees are the other divergence. The English basis for charging them was clarified in 2019. In Wales the position is less settled, so ask the authority to justify the fee by reference to the actual monitoring task rather than accepting a percentage.

Budgeting a Welsh scheme

Assume a section 106 heavy outcome unless you have confirmed a charging schedule, and price the obligation negotiation itself as a cost and a programme risk. Four practical steps:

1. Confirm in writing whether a charging schedule has been adopted, and get the rate and zone plan if it has.
2. Ask for the authority's standard section 106 template and its published contribution formulae at pre-application stage.
3. Request the pooling position for each infrastructure project the authority names.
4. Instruct Welsh solicitors on the deed. The drafting conventions, the registered social landlord sector and the local authority structures are not the English ones.

Wales runs 25 planning authorities including three National Park authorities, and practice between them varies more than the smaller number might suggest. Devolved systems are built differently rather than being variations on the English one, as our note on the two tier system in Northern Ireland shows from another angle.

For a Welsh site, start by asking the authority two questions in one email: is there an adopted charging schedule, and what is your standard set of heads of terms for a scheme of this scale. You can browse the report types by category to see which supporting documents the application will need, remembering that a Welsh submission needs its national policy references checked by whoever reviews the draft.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. Check the position with the local planning authority or a qualified Welsh planning solicitor before relying on it, and note that PlanScope's drafting is grounded in English policy, so Welsh applications need the relevant national policy checked by the reviewer. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.