Planning Minister Nick Boles has outlined plans to give up to 25% of the CIL charged on new homes directly to community bodies such as parish councils, in a bid to ease local objections to new development.
The official line is that the payments are ‘incentives’ rather than institutionalised bribery.
“This government is determined to persuade communities to accept more house-building by giving them a tangible share of the benefits it brings,” Mr Boles said.
However, the FMB restated its opposition to CIL in principle, saying that the building industry needed less bureaucracy and red tape, not more.
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FMB chief executive Brian Berry said: “While we appreciate the government’s attempts to tackle the yawning housing deficit by incentivising new development, it is difficult to see how this latest announcement is going to kick-start the building of the quarter of a million new homes Britain needs every year just to keep up with demand.”
He added: “A better way to give house-building the shot in the arm it so desperately needs is to reduce the twin burdens of planning red-tape and taxation on developers, and to speed up the introduction of the Business Bank to make finance available to cash-strapped SME developers.”
It is anticipated that by 2014 around half of all councils in England and Wales will choose to charge CIL on any new home requiring planning permission, including self-build projects.
The British Property Federation said that as long as CIL was spent on infrastructure, it should not be considered what it called ‘a bungs’.
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