Planning levies are imposed when planning permission is granted and are designed to fund the provision by public authorities of infrastructure. Typically a planning permission will contain a condition requiring the grantee to pay certain planning levies or “charges” prior to the commencement of development. Up to now levies have been mainly designed to cover the cost of infrastructure that local authorities have traditionally provided, such as roads, water and waste-water infrastructure and parks etc.
In the recently published Planning and Development (Amendment) Bill 2009, planning levies will, in future, also have to reflect the cost of the State’s provision of school sites and telecommunications and broadband infrastructure. Essentially the Bill proposes to add school sites and broadband to the list of “public infrastructure and facilities” in respect of which financial contributions must be paid by persons granted planning permission.
However, a number of issues are unclear from the proposed wording in the Bill. As regards timing, it is not clear whether each local authority will, after the Bill passes into law, be required to amend and revise its existing “Development Contributions Scheme” so as reflect the current need in its area for additional school sites and broadband etc, or whether local authorities need only do so when their current plans next expire – which may not occur for a number of years. The Bill also leaves unanswered the question of the role, if any, that local authorities are expected to have in future in the provision of school sites and of broad band. In neither case, particularly the issue of schools provision, have local authorities had responsibility in this area up to now.
In the meantime the proposals, as they stand in the Bill, represent a considerable enhancement of the status of schools and schools’ infrastructure as planning issues within the planning process. They are a direct response to criticisms in recent years of the inability of the planning system to ensure the provision of adequate schools infrastructure to match the scale of residential developments granted planning. These proposed changes will mean that in future specific planning applications have to pay greater attention to schools and broadband, both from the point of view of recognising these matters are planning issues to be addressed in individual planning applications, and also from a cost point of view in terms of anticipating the full extent of charges to be levied by the planning authority.
