The Southwark Liberal Democrats have today formally responded to a draft version of new rules that developers must follow to call for student housing developments to be charged
a fee on equal footing with hotels.

The Supplementary Planning Documents (SPD) – which are technical papers outlining how developers should comply with local, regional, and national planning rules – are currently out for consultation.

Whilst the Liberal Democrats support the overall draft SPDs, they are calling for changes to the charging schedule for the Community Infrastructure Levy. The current schedule currently charges developers a lower fee for student houses than residential, hotel, or other commercial units. It has not been reviewed since 2017.

The Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) is a one-off charge collected by the council from developers to be spent on local facilities that mitigate the impact of development, and to improve the local area. The Liberal Democrats recently succeeded in getting £20 million released that the Labour council had been sitting on for years.

In the wake of thousands of student flats being proposed in the North of the Borough, the Liberal Democrats question whether the rules around CIL should be changed in recognition of the significant impact these blocks will have on local services and the character of communities. They are suggesting that student housing developments be charged at least what hotels are charged – which currently can be charged more than twice what student flats are, depending on where they are in the Borough.

Building on their recent campaign, the Liberal Democrats also have called on the way that CIL is allocated to be embedded into these documents to ensure that money collected through CIL is spent where it is raised, and decided on by local ward councillors.

Commenting, Southwark Liberal Democrat Housing Spokesperson Cllr Emily Tester said:

“After our successful campaign to release millions for community projects, we’re going further in locking that process in for years to come.

We also need to make sure that residents get genuine benefit from the volume, pace, and type of development they’re seeing. Dedicated student housing plays a role in ensuring that students are not outbidding residents in an already overheated housing market, but it’s absolutely critical that residents get tangible benefits, and that means asking developers to put their hands in their pocket to fund real, tangible improvements.”