Infrastructure funding statements: what your council collected

Every English local planning authority that charges the Community Infrastructure Levy, or that has entered into section 106 agreements, has to publish an infrastructure funding statement by 31 December each year. It covers the financial year that ended on the previous 31 March. The duty comes from the Community Infrastructure Levy Regulations 2010 as amended in 2019, and the statement replaced the old regulation 123 list.

It is the most useful planning document most people have never opened. If you want to know what developers paid, where it went and what is still sitting in an account, this is the primary source rather than a press release.

What the statement must contain

Three parts, and councils present them in that order.

The levy report sets out receipts for the reported year, the total collected in all years, expenditure by item, the amount applied to administration, the neighbourhood share passed on or retained, and the closing balance. The section 106 report sets out the number of agreements entered into, the total obligations agreed, the amounts received and spent in the year, what remains unspent and what has been allocated to particular purposes. The infrastructure list names the types of infrastructure the authority intends to fund wholly or partly through the levy.

That list matters more than it looks. A council cannot use a section 106 obligation to fund the same infrastructure it is funding through the levy where doing so would breach the tests, so the list marks the boundary between the two routes.

Reading levy income, expenditure and balances

Start at the bottom of the levy table with the closing balance, then work upwards.

Receipts in the year tell you how much chargeable floorspace was actually built, which lags planning permissions by two or three years. Expenditure tells you what was commissioned. The gap between the two, accumulated over several years, is the balance.

A few figures are fixed by the regulations and are worth checking:

• Administration is capped at 5 per cent of levy receipts. A figure materially above that needs explaining.
• The neighbourhood share is 15 per cent of receipts, capped at £100 per council tax dwelling per year, or 25 per cent uncapped in a made neighbourhood plan area.
• Exemptions and reliefs, including self-build, residential extensions and social housing relief, reduce receipts without appearing as expenditure, so a low income year may reflect the mix of development rather than a lack of building.

Illustrative example: a district reports £4.2 million of cumulative levy receipts, £1.1 million spent, and a balance of £3.1 million, of which £2.4 million is allocated to a named secondary school expansion due to start in two years. That is a healthy statement. The same balance with no allocation named is the one to ask about.

Tracking obligations by agreement and by trigger

The section 106 side is harder to follow, because obligations are negotiated per site and paid on triggers. A contribution might be due on commencement, on occupation of the tenth dwelling, or in instalments.

Better statements list each agreement by planning reference with the obligations attached. Weaker ones aggregate everything into totals by category: education, open space, highways, health, affordable housing. If yours is the aggregated kind, the route to detail is a written request to the section 106 monitoring officer quoting the application reference.

Watch for three things. Obligations agreed but never triggered, because the permission was never implemented. Money received and held against a project that has since been dropped, which may be repayable to the developer under a clawback clause. And monitoring fees, which councils may charge and which should be reported separately.

The neighbourhood share and who spends it

Where there is a parish or town council, the neighbourhood portion is paid to it and the parish decides how to spend it on infrastructure or on anything else that addresses the demands development places on the area. That is a broader power than the levy generally, and it is why parish councils sometimes fund things that look unrelated to the development that generated the money.

Where there is no parish, the district or borough retains the share and is expected to engage the local community about how it is spent. In practice that engagement varies a great deal, and the statement is the document that lets you check whether it happened at all.

Parish spending is reported by the parish rather than by the district, so the district's statement often shows only the amount transferred. The parish council's own accounts and minutes are where the spending appears. But the transfer figure in the district statement is the number to take to a parish meeting when you want to ask what happened to it.

Using the statement to test a contribution request

If a council asks for a contribution on your application and you think it is excessive, the statement is evidence. Regulation 122 requires every obligation to be necessary to make the development acceptable in planning terms, directly related to the development, and fairly and reasonably related in scale and kind. Those three tests are legal, not advisory.

So if the authority is asking for a library contribution while its own infrastructure list shows libraries funded from the levy, or its section 106 report shows a large unspent library balance with no project, that is a point to make in the negotiation. It is also a point that reads well in a Planning Statement or, on a larger scheme, in a viability assessment where the cumulative burden of obligations is being tested against scheme economics.

Affordable housing is usually the largest obligation by value, and where a scheme proposes less than policy the case is made in an affordable housing statement supported by viability evidence.

Gaps and inconsistencies to expect

Statements are produced by finance and planning teams with different systems, and it shows. Common problems include categories that change name between years so trends cannot be tracked, opening balances that do not match the previous year's closing balance, section 106 figures reported on a cash basis in one table and an accruals basis in another, and infrastructure lists that are copied forward unchanged for years.

None of that is sinister. It does mean you should read three consecutive years together before drawing a conclusion, and put any discrepancy to the council as a question rather than an accusation.

The questions that get useful answers are specific ones: which agreements make up the unspent balance in this category, what is the trigger and expiry date on each, which project is this allocation held against, and when does the council expect to spend it. Ask for the answer in writing and quote the statement's own table.

If a request under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 is refused or delayed, the council has to give reasons, and developer contribution records are rarely exempt. Most monitoring officers would rather answer a precise question than handle a formal request, so start with the email.

To see which supporting documents a proposal of your own would need, enter your postcode on PlanScope. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.

This is general guidance, not legal advice; check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it.