Section 106 agreements and £213k going back to GSK
Not sure how many of you get Councillor Harmer's email bulletin but I found the extract below rather interesting :-----------------* Money troubles *I know it’s August and we are supposed to be taking it a little easier, but a potentially problematic issue has come up and I think it’s worth discussing. It starts a little drily, but stick with it if you can.Here’s the background. When a developer has a major planning application approved, it makes an arrangement with the council and other interested parties in order to make financial amends for the impact that the building and its uses will have. If the development includes housing, there’ll be a need to pay some money to the council’s education department to pay for the costs of providing extra school places. If it’s a hotel, there may be road improvements to pay for.These payments have a name – Section 106 payments, after the part of the relevant Act. They are quite targeted – they have to result directly from the building, and there’s a time limit to spend them. If the council don’t spend the money, the developer can say that the money isn’t/wasn’t needed and can ask for it back.As local councillors, we’ve made an effort to make sure all this money is spent. For example, the new street lights in Boston Park Gardens came about after I identified some unspent funds from a nearby building and the zebra crossing in Windmill Rd came about by Ruth asking officers to add together contributions from around five different schemes.To do this, we need to know that the money is available and this information has not always been forthcoming to us as councillors. There used to be a member of staff devoted to this task but he moved on and hasn’t been replaced. So you can imagine how surprised we were when we discovered, last week, about funding from the GSK development that hadn’t been spent - a little over £213,000 unspent.The trouble is, the legal agreement says that the money needs to be spent by Sept 14th. Not allocated, but spent, with receipts. After this date, GSK can claim it back. So our job now is to ask council officials to renegotiate with GSK.The importance of doing this becomes clear when we think what the money could be spent on. My first thought was that there was scope to do some work on the A4 crossings – make the crossings and central reservations safer and better-lit, for example. Other councillors have suggested other ideas – cycle lanes elsewhere in Brentford, for example.In time, we need to find out why councillors didn’t know about these funds. But first, we need to pull together and try and renegotiate the deadline. I’m pleased to say that we have cross party agreement on this. I’ll let you know how we get on.---------------This raises some thoughts with me :1) How ironic it would be if the Council lost out on £213k as a result of job cuts at the Civic Centre - to be fair I actually think the S106 Officer post had gone before the relatively recent job cuts, but I could be wrong.2) In the current climate Councils are being strongly encouraged to grant longer permissions for major developments and be prepared to re-negotiate S106 agreements which may have been drawn up in healthier economic times - as otherwise there is little likelihood of the related permission actually being implemented in the forseeable future. Yet in my experience getting such co-operation from Councils is like getting blood from a stone. I hardly therefore think it is likely that GSK are likely to be keen to play ball...indeed trying to juggle my personal/professional hats in a way I hope they don't play ball, because if they do one could cynically suggest that they are only playing ball in order to try and use it as some kind of 'leverage' towards support for any future development proposals they may have.3) On the subject of S106's I also know of one site in Hounslow where permission was granted subject to the applicant entering into a S106 agreement within a certain time-scale, which the applicant never did so the recommendation to approve was never finalised, yet I happened to notice driving past the site the other week the use (which is therefore unauthorised) continues to trade. Might be time to appoint a new S106 Officer ?!.
Adam Beamish ● 6134d14 Comments