Planning Obligation

When granting planning permission, as well as imposing conditions on the permission, the Council may request (which in practice means require) that the applicant enters into a legal agreement, or ‘Planning Obligation’.

Planning Obligations are sometimes called planning agreements or, officially, S106 obligations (after the section of the main planning Act that gives Councils the power to make them); and just to confuse matters more, sometime in the future the Government may be calling them ‘planning contributions’. See also Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL).

The legal agreement provides a further means of controlling the nature of the development that is granted permission – in order to reduce any harmful public impacts (e.g. noise and pollution, traffic congestion), compensate for any loss to local amenities caused by the development (e.g. of trees and natural spaces), or to get the developer to contribute (financially) towards, or provide, infrastructure. It can, for example, restrict the development that is carried out, or stipulate that the developer does certain things related to the development.

Planning Obligations can go much further than planning conditions (especially dealing with matters off the development site). However, like conditions, their scope is circumscribed by law and by policy. In general Planning Obligations must be:

  • relevant to planning matters (and so should not be used for some unrelated purpose, like just getting a share of the developer’s profits from the development)
  • necessary, to make the proposed development acceptable (in planning terms – i.e. planning permission would otherwise have to be refused)
  • directly related to the proposed development, in terms of geography and function
  • fairly and reasonably related to the proposed development, in terms of scale and kind, and reasonable.

An example of the sort of thing a Planning Obligation might achieve is:

if the Council grant planning permission the developer will provide 30% of the housing being built as ‘affordable housing’ (or a contribution of £XXX in lieu of providing the affordable housing), £XXXX for the provision of traffic calming measures on nearby streets, and £XXXX for the provision of replacement trees and green space.