Planning obligations (funding agreements between the local planning authority and the developer) will continue to play an important role in helping to make individual developments acceptable. However, reforms have been introduced to restrict the use of planning obligations.
The CIL levy is intended to provide infrastructure to support the development of an area rather than to make individual planning applications acceptable in planning terms. As a result, there may still be some site specific impact mitigation requirements without which a development should not be granted planning permission (e.g. affordable housing, local highway and junction improvements, primary schools, health and landscaping). Therefore, there is still a legitimate and necessary role for development planning obligations to enable a local planning authority to be confident that the specific consequences of development can be mitigated. However items that are identified as being funded by CIL (those items detailed on the Reg. 123 list) cannot then also be required as part of a s106 agreement.