Agenda item

To provide the panel with an overview of the Community Infrastructure Levy including the charging schedule, funds collected and funds spent.

Emma Williamson, Assistant Director for Planning, introduced the paper on the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) and S106 agreements, making the following points:

• Haringey’s local CIL was introduced in November 2014. There are three charging zones in the Borough with different rates for residential use – £265 per sq/m in the West area, £165 per sq/m in the Central area and £15 in the East area. There is a flat rate of £95 per sq/m for supermarkets and £25 per sq/m for retail warehousing. On top of this is the Mayoral CIL which is £35 per sq/m.
• A CIL review was consulted on in March 2017, which recommended raising the CIL rate in Tottenham Hale from £15 per sq/m to £130 per sq/m but, after it emerged that imposing this on some of the existing schemes in the area could result in having to renegotiate the levels of affordable housing, the implementation of this was delayed until at least January 2019. This has been further complicated in the meantime by government consultations on amendments to CIL which would also need to be taken into account. A new CIL review is therefore required to raise the CIL rate and this is a 16-month process.
• CIL money collected by Haringey to the end of Dec 2018 is £6.782m although it is important to note that CIL is only collected on implementation. This is split into 3 portions, 80% of which is the Strategic portion, 15% is the Neighbourhood portion and 5% is the Administration portion.
• £1.9m of the CIL money has been spent. This was on an expansion of Bounds Green primary school.
• The governance arrangements for the spending of CIL was agreed by Cabinet in October 2017 and all funding for new projects from the Strategic portion of CIL has to be spent on projects within the Capital Programme for the borough.
• In areas where there is a neighbourhood plan in place, the proportion of CIL allocated to the Neighbourhood portion is raised from 15% to 25%. Areas without a neighbourhood plan are formed into CIL Neighbourhood Groups and a consultation was recently held with the local community to generate ideas on how the CIL funding should be spent. Responses are currently being collated and analysed.
• All of the previous scrutiny panel’s recommendations on CIL were adopted.
• A review of the management process of CIL is due to be carried out by a specialist consultancy in Feb 2019.
• When CIL was introduced it limited the collection of S106 money to things that are specifically related to the site. S106 contributions must also be proportionate and cannot be used to pay for anything already covered by CIL. What CIL can be spent on is included on the Regulation 123 list, a revised version of which was adopted in 2017. 
• With more schemes now reaching implementation stage it has become necessary to put more resource into monitoring of compliance. However, there are not high levels of non-compliance at the current time.

In response to questions from the panel, Emma Williamson said:

• That the Strategic portion of CIL doesn’t have to be spent in the area that it is collected but the Neighbourhood portion does. This is required by the regulations.
• The new process for a review on the CIL rates (the 16 month process) was started just before Christmas. At that time it was not known that the government would be consulting again so that will have to be managed at the same time. There isn’t a quicker way of getting through the review process unfortunately.
• There are only two outline applications currently so it is not anticipated that there would be the same problems around viability of existing schemes over the raising of the CIL rate.
• A 25% Neighbourhood portion was being kept for the time being in Crouch End while waiting for the neighbourhood plan but if the plan does not proceed then thought would have to be given on how best to revert back to the 15% rate. 
• On whether the high CIL rates in the west on the borough put developers off from providing affordable homes, this tends not to be a problem due to higher land values and so 35-40% can typically be achieved.