Travel plan monitoring fees and review triggers

A travel plan monitoring fee is the council's charge for reading your surveys, checking whether you hit the targets and administering the obligation. It is lawful, it has been expressly permitted since the Community Infrastructure Levy Regulations 2010 were amended in 2019, and it has to satisfy the same tests as any other obligation: necessary, directly related to the development, and fairly and reasonably related in scale and kind.

That last test is where most negotiation happens. A fee calculated as a percentage of total obligations, with no link to the work of monitoring a travel plan, is vulnerable. A fee built up from officer hours against a stated number of monitoring reports is not.

What the fee actually pays for

Ask for the build up. A defensible monitoring fee is derived from the number of monitoring reports the obligation requires, the officer time needed to review each one, and the administrative cost of chasing and recording compliance.

Councils are required to report obligation and levy income, including monitoring sums, in an annual infrastructure funding statement. Read that document before you negotiate, because it tells you what the authority collected and what it says it spent, and it makes a general assertion about cost harder to sustain.

Where the same officer will review a travel plan report and a construction management report under the same agreement, ask whether the fees overlap. Duplicated monitoring across several obligations is a common and answerable point.

Setting targets that can be measured

The weakness in most travel plans is not the measures. It is the targets.

A target has to be specific, attributable to the development, and capable of being measured by a method both sides have agreed in advance. Mode share is the usual currency: a percentage of trips by car, by public transport, on foot and by cycle, measured at stated intervals.

Four things make a target workable.

• A baseline that is actually measured rather than assumed from a national dataset, taken either from the site's existing use or from the first survey after occupation.
• A tolerance, so that a small miss does not trigger the whole remedial machinery.
• A definition of the trip being counted, because commuting trips, all trips and peak hour trips give different answers.
• A survey method and sample size specified in the agreement rather than left to the monitoring report to choose.

Resist targets expressed as absolute vehicle numbers on a small residential scheme. Household car ownership changes for reasons that have nothing to do with your travel plan, and an absolute number turns ordinary variation into a breach.

Survey method, timing and response rates

The survey is the evidence, so the agreement should say how it is done.

1. Specify the survey instrument: a questionnaire of residents or staff, a cordon count, automatic traffic counts, or a combination.
2. Set a minimum response rate and say what happens if it is not achieved, because a 12 per cent response rate cannot support a mode share conclusion.
3. Fix the timing window in neutral months, avoiding August, the Christmas and New Year period, school holidays and half terms.
4. Set the first survey at a stated occupancy level rather than a date, because a scheme that sells slowly will otherwise be surveyed when a third of it is empty.
5. State how the results are reported, with the raw data appended rather than summarised.
6. Agree who pays for repeat surveys where a response rate is missed.

Timing to occupancy rather than to the calendar is the single most useful drafting change. A survey carried out at 30 per cent occupancy tells you about early movers, who are not representative, and the resulting mode share can be worse or better than the settled position for reasons nobody can control.

The detail of method and remedies is a subject in its own right, and we set it out in travel plan monitoring surveys and remedies.

Review triggers and remedial measures

A review trigger is the point at which missing a target obliges you to do something. The structure that works has three parts: the trigger, a defined process for agreeing remedial measures, and a cap.

The cap matters. Without one, an obligation to implement such further measures as the authority may require is an open ended liability, and a lender will notice. The usual answer is a schedule of additional measures drawn up at the outset with a maximum sum attached, so both sides know the ceiling.

Two consecutive misses is better than one, because a single survey can be distorted by weather, a road closure or a low response rate. Councils sometimes resist it. The compromise is a single miss triggering a review of the data and a second miss triggering the remedial plan.

Whether the fee meets the obligation tests

Regulation 122 of the Community Infrastructure Levy Regulations 2010 sets the three tests, and the Planning Practice Guidance on planning obligations adds that monitoring fees should be proportionate, should reflect the actual cost of monitoring, and should not be sought where the monitoring is already covered elsewhere.

So the questions to put to the council are narrow and answerable. How many monitoring reports does the obligation require. What is the hourly rate and the assumed time per report. Is any part of the fee duplicated in another obligation in the same agreement. Does the fee cover monitoring only, or is it being used to fund something else.

Where a scheme falls below the threshold at which a Transport Assessment would be required, the case for a full travel plan with a monitoring fee is weaker again. A travel information pack secured by condition, with no monitoring fee, is often the proportionate answer on a scheme of a dozen units.

Duration and the end point

An obligation without an end point is a defect. The travel plan should run for a defined period, commonly five years from first occupation, and it should be discharged when the final monitoring report is approved.

Say what happens if the authority does not respond to a monitoring report. A deemed approval after a stated period protects the developer from an obligation that never closes because nobody read the last report. Councils will usually accept a longer period with a deemed approval than a short period without one.

Also say what happens on transfer. Where plots are sold to a management company or to individual purchasers, the obligation needs to bind the right party, and an obligation that technically binds every homeowner is unenforceable in practice and a conveyancing problem in theory.

Negotiating a proportionate plan on a small scheme

Three arguments carry weight, and all of them work better at pre-application stage than after a committee resolution.

The scheme's trip generation is small enough that monitoring cannot detect a change attributable to it, so the survey cannot measure what the obligation requires.

The measures proposed are physical and permanent, such as secure cycle parking and an electric vehicle charging point, and physical measures do not need annual monitoring. A condition requiring them to be provided and retained achieves the same outcome.

The sums involved are disproportionate to the development, and the guidance requires proportionality. Putting the fee alongside the whole planning cost of a ten unit scheme makes the point more effectively than a policy argument.

If the council holds firm, get the build up in writing and check it against the infrastructure funding statement. And keep a copy of the agreed survey method, because in four years' time the person monitoring the plan will not be the person who negotiated it. The requirements that Active Travel England looks for at larger scales are covered in what Active Travel England looks for in an application, and the plan itself should be drafted around the structure a Travel Plan needs.

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 rather than legal advice, so take advice on the drafting of planning obligations for a specific scheme.