CIL Demand Notices - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)

Hi Tim

Having just gone through year end with our finance people perhaps I can alert you to a potential issue with the invoicing.

We used the satandard invoice with a load of CIL advisories attached and this approach is fine provided the amount does not involve installments.  As soon as installements are involved it becomes tricky since if you invoice the full amount at the start then you have an automatic debt liability, which might not be paid for a couple of years.

This means that your CIL account might be constantly showing a massive debt liability especially if you have major developments on strategic sites of a couple of thousand units and you are going to have to be constantly writing reports to Members and Senior officers explaining this.  We are now looking at doing seperate invioces each time a payment is due in the future to only have actual invoiced debt shown.

As for your second point yes CIL is a tax and yes planning officers arnt debt collectors BUT 1) someone needs to be able say development has commenced and be able to argue with developers about commencements and can that reaaly be a finance officer? and 2) this is income for the Council and as more budget cuts come along each missed CIL charge could be that planning officers salary next year.

I have a CIL team of two who work in planning (one is a planner) and they do all the invoicing as such but as soon as the payment trigger is missed it is a straight forward formal debt recovery process.

Good luck

Bryan

Tim

We only send  out the Demand Notice in the form required by the regs - with a reference number. We have taken the view that it would be confusing to send out an invoice that says pay within 30 days at the same time we send the Demand Notice  saying pay within 60 days or in line with our instalment policy. We  raise an invoice in the background and that sets out the financial codes to which the funding needs to be sent  5% admin/15% parish/80% infrastructure fund so, as long as the payment has the correct reference on it, the funding on receipt gets paid into the correct funding pot .

Re collection of debts -  my view is that the best solution is a dedicated CIL/S106 officer who understands the instalment period - and the ability to add 5% surcharges etc. The Regulations give stronger powers of recovery than the standard council debt collection process.  You may wish to be kind and use discretion  when the first CIL payments become due and allow payment  on sale or  in smaller installments as small developers find payment 60 days from commencement difficult. We hope that as they become more familiar with the process that the issues will reduce.

Alison

Hi Tim,

We raise an invoice but don't send it and just put the invoice reference in the demand notice.  We have also had the instalment issue raised above about raising the full debt and it not being paid for a couple of years.  However, our Finance are currently allowing us to do that.

With regard to recovery, as the Admin Team Leader responsible for CIL I am initially doing all the chasing of monies and enforcement processes, but will roll out to the admin team as the volume of CIL applications increase.

Regards

Claire