Abstract

The English system of developer contributions, planning obligations, remained unchanged between 1990 and 2010 and attracted major criticisms of causing slow, opaque, unaccountable planning processes. In 2010, the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) was introduced to reform planning obligations and deliver a faster, more transparent, certain and accountable planning process. This paper seeks to determine whether these objectives have been achieved by means of an online survey submitted to all English planning authorities between October 2015 and June 2016. The results (82 respondents with a response rate of 27%) show that local authorities that have implemented the CIL find it able to deliver advantages in terms of greater transparency, speed, accountability and certainty. On the downside, especially local authorities that have not yet implemented the CIL think that the new system is overly demanding in terms of required time and personnel and reduces in-kind and financial contributions from developers.