More than £1million of funding provided by developers across Lichfield and Burntwood will be spent on infrastructure projects, council chiefs have said.
The Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) is made up of money provided to support new developments.
Lichfield District Council’s cabinet agreed in June that a new approach would be taken to allocated the money to ensure projects were of “a sufficient scale to benefit” the whole area.
Over the next two months the local authority will be inviting and evaluating applications against the new criteria that focuses investment on large infrastructure projects.
Cllr Iain Eadie, cabinet member for economic development, said:
“The funding available from the Community Infrastructure Levy has the potential to have a real impact on some significant infrastructure projects around the district.
“The new approach we’ve introduced, to manage the funds that we have gathered over the past three years, makes it easier for us to identify projects based on whether they are critical to enable development or designed to mitigate the effects of the development.”
Cllr Iain Eadie, Lichfield District Council
Parish councils also receive a proportion of CIL funding from developments within their areas.
Those with a neighbourhood plan receive 25% and those without receive 15%, meaning each parish also has a pot of money to invest.
For more information on how to make an expression of interest in the funding for an infrastructure project before the deadline of 5pm on 1st October go to www.lichfielddc.gov.uk/cil.
“ Infrastructure Projects” One Million Pound .. A drop in the Ocean for developers. ..Very Misleading. This is NOT to improve Schools, GP,s Roads and Retail. This is for Developers to build access to their intense Housing Estates.
A decent footpath between Burntwood and Lichfield would benefit the whole area. It would also tick all the boxes for improving the health of the local community and reducing pollution from car use.
Spot on CRB in other words a money trail to houses it’s about time the planning department starting stipulating that all new build houses MUST have solar panels & or underground heat pumps ? Let’s see how keen the developers are to build on mass in Lichfield?
So the money collected over the past three years amounts to about one million? In all probably less than the nett value of one medium property each year spread across the buiding industry. I rather suspect this very modest sum will not impact the infrastructure in any meaningful way. I further suspect that the extra rates for the council from rampant over development has been the real incentive. Over the last decade I have wondered just who the council represents.
Certainly not us Philip. Apart from the odd Cllr I think we are completely ignored most of the time. We need significant change in this District so our views start being better represented.
Well said Clare Sholl. You only have to look at the levels of traffic in this area now, which are worse than before the pandemic, to realise that improving the infrastructure must include measures to promote reductions in car use. Our current dependency on cars is not sustainable, and the whole area is rapidly approaching gridlock.