Review of S106 Agreements - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)
Ouvert
|
En cours - juillet 2012
|
Dernière modification - May
Review of S106 Agreements
I am an elected Parish Councillor in a small parish in East Sussex. A village in the parish has agreement to build 80 houses which will have a considerable impact on the village especially on traffic generation. The concluded S106 agreement between the developers and local district council has a total of £240,000 to go towards the town centre traffic improvement scheme of the neighbouring town ! rather than to mitigation of traffic problems within the village which the development will exacerbate. Is this just a convenient instrument to extract money from the developers (ie to an existing scheme) , and is there any means to bring a review of this agreement in order to allocate agreed money primarily for the needs of the village, and then secondarily to the needs of the local town scheme?
The problem is that once the s106 has been signed and the permission issued it needs all the parties to agree to vary it in the short term. It sounds like your highway authority have a scheme planned that needs funding and have prioritised getting as much as possible towards it from this development. If the wording comits the money to a specific scheme then that is where it will have to be spent. If the wording is that it be spent on highway improvements in the vicinity of the development then you could lobby the highway authority to change their intentions. If the money is committed but the highway authority and the developer can be persuaded that there are more pressing works that the money should go to in the village then a deed of variation could be sought with the agreement of any other parties to the agreement. The developer may be amenable if adverse traffic conditions in the village might blight sales, but whether the highway authority will agree is another matter. Realistically this one's probably a lost cause, but it illustrates the value of parish council consultation responses speaking up loudly for anything that they feel needs addressing to make the development acceptable and pushing hard for the LPA case officer to require their concerns to be considered and responded to by the developer.
Based on the information given and on the understadning that S106 agreements appear to have a degree of latitude attaching to them compared to conditions, it still sounds like the residents of the village in which the development will take place, have been poorly served. Any S106 outcomes should have a direct relationship to the site/locality in which the development is taking place. In this case somebody must of made a very good case to justify spending the money somewhare else - or maybe not and the developer just agreed to get the permission. It strikes me that somebody ought to be able to question the arrangement, even if it is only via the monitoring officer or a letter to the CX asking for a plain english explanation of the rationale applied to the agreement. there is also an organsaition called Planning Aid who offer free advice to people attempting to challenge the system, although this is normally done before determination - no harm in asking, it's free!