Monitoring disqualifying events - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)
Monitoring disqualifying events
In the CIL regs, persons are required to notify the charging authority of a disqualifying event. In reality however, I'm not sure that many people will readily disclose an event so as to volunteer themselves to pay for a CIL charge, irrespective of the penalties. Instead, why not take the gamble on the authority having to find out?!
So, how, and to what extent, are authorities monitoring disqualifying events?
All our CIL charges, and respective clawback periods, are recorded on a GIS layer so that our land charges can flag up any land searches that appear on CIL sites - which may alert to some activity. However, land searches can be submitted for a range of things, not always in relation to a potential change of ownership. And we can try and monitor ownership through council tax records / business rates / electoral roll, but due to data protection its not always easy for us to get hold of the data. Whilst running checks through the land registry will get expensive! Clearly, there is a cost / benefit argument here against the time and effort involved in securing CIL revenue from (most likely) a handful of cases. I'm interested in seeing how others have approached this.
Thanks
Rebecca Randall, modified 8 Years ago.
RE: Monitoring disqualifying events
Enthusiast Posts: 60 Join Date: 06/05/14 Recent PostsHi Helen,
We have only been charging CIL for 6 months so won't have any clawback periods reached for some time. We are intending to:
Using Acolaid Enterprise, I input a clawback date 3 or 7 years from issue of the liability notice, which will then create a task for me to monitor the site in the future (appreciating clawback period is not linked to issue of the liability notice but at that point I dont have a commencement date or compliance certificate date).
I will be carrying out land registry searches if I need to when my monitoring tasks come through. It's only £3 for the title, and a further £3 if you need the title plan. In comparison, some of our residential extensions over 100m2 for example, have a CIL liability of £10,000+. I will also check with our revenues team for council tax records, etc.
When I am receiving Commencement Notices I notify our building control, revenues, and planning team (to check discharge of conditions) to help streamline services. I am hoping that we can build on this by getting reports back from those teams so that I can update my records where any of the other teams pick up activity. I dont seem to have any problems getting information on business rates and council tax records.
I have a Crystal report that shows all of my exemptions granted (by site and type of exemption) on one page. I am currently tying in my monitoring with Case Officer visits i.e. if I know they are going to a specific village I ask them to drive by my nearby site too.
I am considering how we can use our Parish Council links to monitor sites. I am sending out my first meaningful proportion amounts this week and am providing a list of CIL chargeable developments to the parish Councils and whether I think they have commenced or not, and asking for feedback if they know better.
Its fair to say that we are taking a proactive approach to monitoring. We have had significant issues with the lack of monitoring of S106s previously, both financially and reputationally, so I think we are keen to ensure both systems are proactively monitored. I suppose it depends on your resourcing though, we have a dedicated S106/CIL Monitoring Officer (yours truly!)
Rebecca.
This is a problem for all of us.
At present we get automatic alerts when a local search is made on a property that is subject to a discount/exemption clawback period. We then carry out checks. Of course even that crude system will be lost when the Land Registry take on local searches.
In any event it is not just a change of ownership that could trigger a repayment requirement. for example a dwelling that was originally given self-build exemption could cease to be teh claimants main residence but remain in his/her ownership.
I have considered the possibility of writing to each claimant each year asking them to confirm that a disqualifying event has not occurred, but that would need an extra system setting up.