These agreements allow us to enter into a legally-binding planning obligation with a developer in association with the granting of planning permission.
The aim is to offset the impact of large-scale developments, and ensure necessary services and infrastructure, such as highways, recreational facilities, education, health and affordable housing, are provided to support new large scale developments.
Section 106 agreements can be used to:
- restrict the development or use of land
- require specific operations or activities to be carried out in relation to the land
- require payment of a sum or sums of money - e.g. towards future maintenance costs
- require land to be used in a certain way.
The obligation can either be a bilateral agreement between us and the land owner or unilateral undertakings by the land owner or developer. The scope of these agreements must meet the following three tests as set out in the Community Infrastructure Regulations 2010:
- 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.
Each section 106 agreement is attached to a specific planning permission and you can therefore search for a specific agreement by entering the planning application number into the search tool.
For guidance on searching for section 106 agreements by planning application number, see Section 106 Financial Transparency Schedule November 2017 (pdf) .
We update the transparency schedule every three months.
Depending on the agreement, developers make their section 106 contributions when work starts on site, is completed or the site is occupied.
Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL)
This is a new power which enables us to levy a charge on the net increase in gross internal area floorspace arising from development, in order to help pay for infrastructure that is needed to support development in the area.