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Response 3762678

Response to request for information

Reference

3762678

Response date

12 June 2025

Request

Re Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL)

  1. Does the Council exercise discretion if genuine homeowners developing their own homes for personal use (such as extensions, annex, self-build) have unintentionally submitted a form late (e.g. an exemption form or commencement notice), does the Council not charge the full levy?
  2. If so, please provide:
  • Any internal policy, guidance, or precedent the council refers to in such cases.
  • Only if possible and easy to ascertain: the number of instances over the past five years where the council has waived or reduced the CIL charge due to late form submission in these cases.

Response

Thank you for your enquiry, in response to your query CIL is essentially a ‘tax’, it is controlled by a series of regulations which stipulate how the levy must be applied. There are a number of reliefs which can be applied for but again these are closely stipulated within the regulations and there is no provision for ‘discretion’ in how the regulations are applied.

There is a provision for ‘exceptional circumstances relief’ under paragraph 55 of the regulations, however paragraph 55(3) makes clear that this can only be sought where an authority has adopted this provision (when we adopted CIL charging back in 2019 the Council opted to not include exceptional circumstances relief as a provision), and a section 106 obligation must be entered into. The provision further states that exceptional relief from CIL can only be granted if the LPA is satisfied that the costs of complying with the s106 obligations would be greater than the CIL charge. So this relief is only really a relief where a development would otherwise have to make substantial s106 and CIL contributions the combination of which might make that development unviable.

As such the only way to waive CIL outside of the usual applied for reliefs is if a S106 existed which would be more expensive to comply with – and then only if we had adopted the exceptional circumstances relief, which we have not.

 

FOI Planning