Who prepares a social infrastructure assessment

A social infrastructure assessment is written by a planning consultant, but almost none of its numbers originate with the author. School place capacity comes from the local education authority's place planning team. Primary care capacity comes from the integrated care board. Library, community centre and sports provision come from the authority's own service departments and its infrastructure delivery plan. The consultant's job is to assemble those datasets, apply the authority's published yield factors to the proposed mix, and then test whether the resulting contribution request survives the legal tests for a planning obligation.

That last step is why the document is worth commissioning properly. A request that fails regulation 122 cannot lawfully be taken into account, whatever the service department wants.

What the assessment has to quantify

The question is not whether local services feel busy. It is whether the development generates additional demand that existing capacity cannot absorb, and whether the mitigation proposed is necessary to make the development acceptable.

A usable Social Infrastructure Assessment works through each service in the same order: the catchment, the existing capacity within it, the committed changes to that capacity, the demand the development generates, and the resulting shortfall or headroom. Where there is headroom, say so, because an authority that cannot show a shortfall cannot justify a contribution.

Catchment definitions do most of the work. A primary school catchment behaves nothing like a secondary catchment or a GP list, and using a single radius for all three produces numbers nobody will accept.

Child yield and school places

Pupil yield is calculated by applying the authority's own yield factors to the housing mix. Those factors sit in the developer contributions supplementary planning document and vary by dwelling size, tenure and sometimes by area, which is why borrowing a neighbouring authority's figures is a false economy.

The method is straightforward once the factors are in hand.

1. Set out the housing schedule by number of bedrooms and tenure.
2. Apply the published yield factor for each category to get primary, secondary and post 16 pupil numbers.
3. Deduct any existing dwellings being replaced, using the same factors.
4. Compare the yield against surplus places in the relevant planning area, taken from the authority's school capacity return.
5. Where a shortfall exists, apply the authority's published cost multiplier per place.

Step four is where the arguments happen. Authorities publish forecast surpluses and deficits by planning area, and those forecasts carry assumptions about birth rates, in migration and the delivery of other consented sites. A development double counted in both the forecast and the contribution request is paying twice.

The duty behind all of this is the authority's obligation under section 14 of the Education Act 1996 to secure sufficient schools for its area. That duty is not discharged by developer contributions, which is a useful point when a request is pitched as funding the whole of a new school.

Primary healthcare capacity

Health contributions are the least standardised part of the assessment. An integrated care board will usually provide list sizes for practices within a defined radius, the practice floor area, and a view on whether the practices can absorb additional patients.

The weakness in most health requests is the link to a specific scheme. A contribution towards unspecified improvements across a locality will struggle against the requirement that an obligation be directly related to the development. A contribution towards extending a named practice that will take the new residents is much easier to defend.

Where a Health Impact Assessment is also required by local policy, the two documents should share their evidence base. The social infrastructure numbers are the quantitative half of the health assessment's access analysis.

Community, library and sports provision

These are usually assessed against the authority's own adopted standards expressed as provision per thousand population, which means the first task is converting dwellings to population using the authority's published occupancy assumptions.

Sports and open space sit alongside this work rather than inside it. Playing pitch strategies, built facility strategies and open space audits are separate evidence documents, and an Open Space Assessment or Play Space Assessment will carry the detail. The social infrastructure document should cross refer rather than duplicate.

An illustrative example

This example is illustrative. A scheme of 120 dwellings comes forward in a town where the authority's forecast shows a surplus of primary places in the relevant planning area for the next five years and a deficit from year six.

The authority requests a full primary contribution. The applicant's assessment accepts the secondary figure, which is supported by the capacity return, but challenges the primary request on two grounds: the forecast surplus covers the build out period, and two of the consented sites in the forecast have lapsed, which changes the year six position in the applicant's favour rather than against it.

The outcome is a reduced primary contribution with a trigger linked to occupation of a later phase. The point of the example is not the figure. It is that the challenge only worked because the applicant had the same capacity return the authority was working from.

Getting hold of the data

Most of it is published, and the rest can be requested.

• The developer contributions supplementary planning document, for yield factors, cost multipliers and occupancy assumptions.
• The infrastructure delivery plan or infrastructure funding statement, for committed projects and for how previous contributions were spent.
• School capacity and forecast returns, usually published by the education authority annually.
• The integrated care board, for practice list sizes and premises capacity.
• The authority's open space, playing pitch and built facility strategies.

An infrastructure funding statement is the most useful single document in a negotiation. It shows what the authority collected, what it spent and what remains unspent, and an unspent balance held for years against the project you are being asked to fund is a legitimate point to raise.

Testing the authority's figures

Three checks catch most of the overstatements.

Check the catchment. A request based on a radius wider than the published admission arrangements captures schools the development's children will not attend.

Check for double counting between the development plan allocation and the contribution request. Where the site is an allocation, the infrastructure needed to serve it may already be funded through the plan's own infrastructure strategy or through the levy.

Check the regulation 122 tests on each item. An obligation must be necessary to make the development acceptable, directly related to the development, and fairly and reasonably related in scale and kind. Where the levy already funds a type of infrastructure in the charging schedule, an obligation for the same item needs a clear explanation.

PlanScope drafts a Social Infrastructure Assessment with the policy structure and the obligation tests in place and inserts "TO BE CONFIRMED" flags wherever the authority's own capacity data has to be dropped in, and the professional directory is the route to independent review before the figures go into a negotiation.

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.