Response - Planning-Gain Supplement

We welcome the Planning-Gain supplement as a valuable means of funding the infrastructure needed to support development and of incentivising local authorities to deliver growth. However, we do have some reservations about the details of how it would work in practice:

• A key point in determining our support is that any Planning Gain Supplement should be set at a rate which finances additional infrastructure "while preserving incentives to bring forward land for development". We believe there is no point in proposing a mechanism that inhibits development and we recognise that affordable housing provision now depends substantially on private development continuing to take place.

• The PGS must be designed in such a way as to be simple to operate and to keep administration costs to a minimum.

• We believe that there will need to be a transition regime that exempts land currently held or being processed through the planning system from PGS.

• In the past, landowners and developers have sat on land waiting for similar taxes to be abolished by a new Government. It will therefore be important, as far as possible, to establish cross party consensus on how the PGS should be implemented.