Planning obligations

We will secure planning obligations in accordance with the CIL regulations to ensure that the impact of development on local infrastructure (such as education, leisure, highways improvements and healthcare) is appropriately mitigated.

A planning obligation is a legal agreement between the planning authority, the developer and other interested parties. By law they must be:

• necessary to make the development acceptable in planning terms
• directly related to the development
• fairly and reasonably related in scale and kind to the development

An obligation cannot require the developer to solve an existing problem, obligations can only be secured to mitigate the specific impacts of the development. Obligations can be financial contributions or require the provision of land for a specific use or require the developer to deliver specific infrastructure.

We will secure planning obligations through formal Section 106 (S106) legal agreements, which is a legal contract agreed between the land owner to which the development relates and us. The legal agreement will set out the specific obligations being secured as well as a timeframe (trigger) for the provision of the relevant obligation.

An example of the formatting, provisions and setting out of a S106 legal agreement is provided below. Applicants can refer to this example for the likely provisions and detail that we will expect to see secured within such legal agreements.

View or download S106 example agreement (Word)

Please note that this is not a template. The first draft of the S106 agreement should be drafted by our solicitors in order to reduce the time and cost in completing such agreements.

The applicant will be expected to cover our legal costs on these matters.