Agenda item

Report of Senior Head of Regeneration, Planning and Assets.

Cabinet lead member: Councillor Steve Wallis.

CIL Governance Framework taken forward and form the basis upon which the Council will manage the spending of CIL receipts.

16.1 Councillors Jenkins and Freebody addressed the Cabinet.  Councillor Jenkins expressed concerns that under the CIL regulations developers would delay making their contributions and that smaller development sites were not subject to the levy.  Councillor Freebody argued that a link should be made between CIL funded expenditure and the neighbourhoods where the development that generated the funds had taken place.

16.2 Cabinet considered the report of the Senior Head of Regeneration, Planning and Assets.  The community infrastructure levy (CIL) had been introduced by the government in 2010 as a mechanism to allow local planning authorities to raise funds from liable developments in order to pay for the infrastructure that is required to support new development across the town.  CIL would be used to help fund strategic infrastructure, as identified in the council’s infrastructure delivery plan.

16.3 It was estimated that total CIL receipts for Eastbourne Borough Council for CIL liable planned residential and retail development within Eastbourne core strategy local plan (up to 2027) would be in the region of £2-3m.  It was noted that CIL was just one of many funding streams that could be used to fund infrastructure projects, and would only go some way in meeting the overall infrastructure costs to support development in Eastbourne.

16.4 The council had adopted its CIL charging schedule on 1 April 2015.  The charging schedule was found sound at examination, subject to one modification, which was to exclude residential apartments. 

16.5 The purpose of this report was to set out options and recommendations on how the council would decide to allocate money, collected through CIL contributions, to specific infrastructure projects . It would also formalise the arrangements for the transfer of money, and identify the relevant decision making bodies and groups that would be involved in the process.

16.6 It was considered that the council should adopt an automatic distribution approach of overall CIL revenue to specific infrastructure funds, as this would save on time and resources and would allocate CIL monies fairly, based on priorities.  This would remove the burden of determining on a case by case basis, the amount of money that should be proportioned/allocated.  There are 4 main funds that CIL money could be allocated to:-

·         County council fund – for infrastructure that would be delivered by the county, e.g. education provision, transport.

·         Other infrastructure providers fund – for infrastructure that would delivered by external partners, e.g. flood storage provision.

·         Eastbourne neighbourhoods fund – to be retained by Eastbourne Borough Council for localised spending on specific capital neighbourhood projects.

·         Administration fund – to be retained by Eastbourne Borough Council to meet the costs of administering CIL, e.g. software and maintenance costs.

16.7 The proposed CIL governance framework (appendix 2 to the report) identified the percentage of CIL revenue that could be automatically transferred to each fund at relevant timescales.  These percentages reflected the desire to:

·         Use CIL revenue to recoup administration costs incurred by the council in setting up, monitoring and maintaining CIL processes (5%).

·         Spend a meaningful proportion of CIL revenue on local neighbourhood infrastructure (15%).

·         Allocate a high proportion of CIL monies to the county council and other infrastructure funds (80%), in order to pass monies externally so that they could be spent on strategic infrastructure identified as a high priority in the council’s infrastructure delivery plan.

16.8 It was proposed that bidding would be undertaken by external infrastructure providers for the county council and other infrastructure providers funds on a 6-monthly cycle.  An outline of the bid details that would be required was given in the report and it was noted that further work would be undertaken to finalise the bidding process.  It was recommended that cabinet (who already had authority as a decision making body) were given a further specific remit to ultimately determine CIL bids, based on the advice and recommendations of the local plan steering group (as a CIL advisory board).  The process of decision making was illustrated in appendix 2 to the report.  A separate process would operate for the neighbourhood fund where the council’s capital programme steering group would identify neighbourhood projects which could be delivered wholly or partly through CIL monies, which would then be reported to Cabinet for approval.  These arrangements would be reviewed after 12 months operation (or sooner if necessary).

Resolved (key decision): That the CIL Governance Framework, as set out in the report, be taken forward, and form the basis upon which the council will manage the spending of CIL receipts.