The independent panel conducting a review into the community infrastructure levy would “not hold back” from recommending scrapping the tax, if evidence from the review supported this decision.
Speaking at the Midlands Planning Conference in Nottingham yesterday, themed: The Devolution to City States – an Opportunity or Threat to Development, held by JLL and No5 Chambers, Liz Peace CBE, former chief executive of the British Property Foundation and chair of the panel, which is conducting the review on behalf of the government, said she had an “open mind” on the findings of the review.
“I made it clear that I wanted this to be a full review and that I had a completely open mind about where it would go. But equally, if at the end of the day we thought that CIL should be scrapped, then we would not hold back from recommending it.”
Peace said that the panel had not reached a decision yet and added: “We’re collecting views and then we will debate them. The evidence so far is that CIL provides 5-10% of the infrastructure requirement so it’s only a partial contributor to infrastructure needs. Perhaps one of the bigger questions which my review group is not poised to answer is how on earth do we meet that infrastructure need? Without infrastructure, you can’t do development.”
Peace’s speech centred around her thoughts on devolution and what it means for property. She said: “The devolution genie is definitely out of the bottle and there’s no putting it back. We all need to make it work.”
She thought that on balance, devolution was a positive for property development and investment and was “certainly likely to be more successful than top down imposed growth targets”. She said that she thinks the industry had to accept that devolution would not necessarily bring clarity and that there will be “large regional variations, meaning different conditions for development in different places. Which may encourage the industry to shop around.”
Whether or not devolution will support greater than local planning, especially for housing, Peace said is still “an open question”. Adding: “If it doesn’t, it’s a missed opportunity.”
She warned that there was still plenty that could go wrong with the devolution agenda, especially around gaining new finance for infrastructure projects. “We need access to new money,” she said.
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