Travel Plan targets, monitoring and the section 106 clause

A Travel Plan is a document, and the section 106 clause that secures it is what makes the document happen. Get the clause wrong and you have a well written plan that nobody funds, nobody monitors and nobody can discharge. Get it right and the obligation runs for its stated period, produces two or three surveys, and closes.

The drafting matters more than the plan's prose because the obligation is the part that binds the land. It survives the sale of the site, it is enforceable against successors, and it usually outlives everyone who negotiated it.

What the plan is expected to deliver

Planning Practice Guidance treats travel plans as the mechanism for managing the transport effects of a development over time, alongside the assessment work done before permission. The plan sets out measures to reduce single occupancy car use and to support walking, cycling and public transport, and it commits the site to measuring whether those measures worked.

Measures fall into a short list that repeats across schemes: cycle parking beyond the minimum standard, showers and lockers on employment sites, public transport information and sometimes subsidised tickets, car club spaces, electric vehicle charging, welcome packs for new occupiers, and a named person responsible for running it all.

What separates a plan that gets approved from one that gets sent back is specificity. A measure that names the quantity, the location, the delivery trigger and the person responsible is deliverable. A measure that says the development will promote sustainable travel is not.

Baseline and target modal shares

Targets are meaningless without a baseline, and the baseline has to be established the right way.

For a new site, the baseline comes from a survey carried out after occupation has stabilised, commonly defined in the agreement as a point after a stated percentage of units are occupied. Predicting the baseline from a trip generation database at application stage is acceptable for the Transport Assessment, but the obligation should be measured against real survey data.

Express targets as a change in modal share over a defined period, with the mode split categories fixed in the agreement. Argue hard about the number at the negotiation stage. Highway authorities open with ambitious figures, and a target set 10 percentage points above what the site's bus service can deliver will be missed regardless of what the management company does.

Two things make a target defensible. First, the alternatives actually available: frequency and walking distance to the nearest service, cycle route continuity, local facilities within walking distance. Second, a comparison with monitoring data from a similar site where the authority holds it. Ask for that data during negotiation.

Survey methodology and monitoring intervals

The single largest source of argument after occupation is whether a survey was valid. Settle it in the drafting.

1. Define the survey instrument and who administers it, whether that is a household questionnaire, a staff travel survey or automatic counts.
2. Define the minimum response rate, and what happens if it is not achieved.
3. Define the survey period, avoiding school holidays and the weeks around Christmas, which is the same discipline applied to a Parking Survey.
4. Define the reporting timetable and to whom the report is submitted.
5. Define the intervals. Surveys at defined points after occupation, typically spread across the first five years, with the obligation ending on approval of the final report.

An obligation with an open-ended monitoring duty and no end date is a defect. Every agreement should say when the travel plan obligation is discharged.

The coordinator, and who pays

The coordinator role is real work: distributing information, running surveys, liaising with the authority, updating the action plan. On residential schemes it usually sits with the developer until a management company is established, then transfers.

Say so in the clause. Name the role, state who holds it during construction, during the sales period and after handover, and provide for the contact details to be given to the authority in writing whenever they change. Provide a funding sum or a covenant to fund, and say what it covers.

On an employment site the role often sits with the occupier rather than the developer, which creates a gap where the building is speculative and unlet at first occupation. Deal with that in the drafting by placing the duty on the owner until a tenant takes it on, and by requiring the obligation to be passed down in the lease.

Handover is the moment plans fail. A management company that inherits a travel plan it has never read, with a survey due in four months and no budget line for it, will miss the deadline. The agreement should require the outgoing party to hand over the approved plan, the previous survey data and the residual funds, and to notify the authority that the transfer has happened.

Monitoring fees and remedies

Local authorities may charge monitoring fees for planning obligations under the levy regulations, provided the fee is proportionate and reasonable in scale and kind and does not exceed the authority's estimated cost of monitoring over the lifetime of the obligation.

That gives you two questions to ask when a figure appears in a draft. What is the officer time behind it, and over what period. A fee calculated per obligation, per trigger, with a stated hourly rate and an estimated number of hours, is defensible. A percentage of the total contributions is not, and it is worth saying so politely and early.

On remedies, resist an automatic financial penalty for missing a target. The obligation should instead require a revised action plan with additional measures, agreed with the authority, followed by a further survey. Where the authority insists on a contingency sum, negotiate a ceiling and a mechanism for its release when a subsequent survey shows improvement.

Bonds occasionally appear on large schemes. If one is proposed, check what triggers a call on it and how it is released, because a bond with no release mechanism is a permanent cost.

Drafting so the clause can be discharged

The test to apply to any draft clause is simple: read it as the person who will one day want it signed off, and ask whether you could prove compliance.

That means defined terms for every survey, every target and every trigger. It means a named recipient at the council. It means a deemed approval provision if the authority does not respond to a submitted report within a stated period, which is the single most useful clause in the whole agreement. And it means an express statement that the obligation ends on approval of the final monitoring report.

Check also that the obligation meets the statutory tests: necessary to make the development acceptable in planning terms, directly related to the development, and fairly and reasonably related in scale and kind. An obligation failing those tests cannot lawfully be taken into account, which is a point better made in negotiation than at appeal.

Drafting a Travel Plan is straightforward work once the transport evidence exists, and an AI-assisted draft gives you the structure, the policy framing and the measures list to negotiate from. You can see what a drafted document costs before deciding whether to brief a consultant for the whole thing. Enter your postcode on PlanScope to check which transport documents your scheme triggers.

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, and the drafting of a planning obligation should be settled by a solicitor.