Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) – Queen’s Park Community Council

Queen's Park Gardens Water Fountain — Queen’s Park Gardens Water Fountain

Community Infrastructure Levy Regulations (2010) enabled the Mayor of London to place a fee on certain developments that create new-build floor space of 100 square metres or more. In addition, Westminster City Council implemented a Westminster Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL), which came into effect on 1 May 2016 and is charged alongside the Mayor of London’s CIL.

CIL is divided between the City Portion (the ‘strategic’ pot), and the Neighbourhood Portion. Westminster City Council spends the City Portion of CIL delivering the infrastructure needed to support growth. The Neighbourhood Portion is made available to Communities to address local infrastructural, service and facilities needs.

Where a Neighbourhood Plan is in place, and the Queen’s Park Neighbourhood Plan was adopted in November 2021 following a local referendum, the Neighbourhood Portion is 25% of the CIL collected.

In most of Westminster Neighbourhood CIL is administered by the City Council and community groups bid for funds, but in Queen’s Park the funds are transferred to the Community Council as the Parish Council for the neighbourhood, and it has control over distribution. In March 2021 the Community Council decided that the funds would be held in an Earmarked Reserve and used to support infrastructure projects brought forward by the Council.

Queen’s Park Community Council is committed to utilising its CIL funding to forward the ambitions outlined in the Neighbourhood Plan, alongside other services, facilitates and infrastructure projects that meet new needs identified in the community.

Since implementation of the scheme the value of of Neighbourhood CIL collected in Queen’s Park totals £2,819.83 as set out in the table below.

Application	Addresses	Value	Collected by WCC	Transferred to QPCC
12/07672/FULL	W10 4LG	£ –	30/06/2014	17/12/2020
16/02166/FULL	W10 4NJ	£1,488.00	17/06/2018	17/12/2020
18/04223/FULL	W9 3EL	£609.74	02/07/2019	17/12/2020
21/02008/FULL	W10 4LA	£148.00	08/10/2021	22/02/2023
20/04734/FULL	W9 3BQ	£574.09	02/02/2022	22/12/2023

Queen’s Park Community Council has not yet spent any on the Neighbourhood CIL and it remains in the Reserve Account. An allocation of funds to the provision of a drinking fountain it Queen’s Park Gardens was approved by the Council but when an alternative source of finance was found the funds were returned to the pot.

If Neighbourhood CIL remains unspent five years after it is transferred to the Community Council it must be returned to the City Council. No transaction has yet reached this stage.