The Unbuilt Bargain: How to Audit Section 106 Promises Before the Local Plan Vote

Planning permission is never a gift. It is a bargain struck between a developer and the public. Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 lets councils secure obligations in exchange for consent: affordable housing, play equipment, highway works, education contributions, open space, bus subsidies and maintenance sums. The agreement is legally binding, and it can run with the land. But a signature is not delivery. Too often, the promises live in an appendix while the scheme is celebrated on the council's news page.

At We Say Enough, we treat the section 106 register as a campaign document. It is not a technical annex for planning lawyers. It is a ledger of what your council promised to your community and what it has failed to collect. In 2026, as councils finalise local plans and ask residents to accept new housing targets, that ledger deserves a public reading.

The bargain in the appendix

Section 106 obligations are negotiated site by site. They can include a fixed number of affordable homes, a commuted sum for off-site provision, a new pedestrian crossing, a contribution towards a primary school extension or a sum for maintaining a play area. They can be triggered by commencement, by the occupation of a certain number of homes, or by completion. The detail matters: a promise of “affordable housing” means little unless it specifies tenure, bedroom mix, rent levels and nomination rights.

Councils keep records of these agreements, and many publish a section 106 register. The quality varies wildly. Some authorities provide a searchable spreadsheet with delivery status. Others upload a decade of scanned PDFs and call it transparency. Your first job is to turn that paper trail into data.

Start with the register, not the press release

Ask the planning department for its section 106 register in a reusable format — CSV or XLSX, not a PDF. If the register is incomplete or only available as images, make a freedom of information request. Be specific. Ask for: the application reference, site address, date of agreement, a summary of each obligation, the trigger for delivery, any cash sum and indexation clause, the current delivery status, the named monitoring officer, and the date the obligation was last reviewed.

If the council refuses, ask for the information in aggregate form: total obligations, total cash received, total cash spent, total outstanding. You are not asking for anything exotic. You are asking for the council's own monitoring record. Keep a log of your request and, where appropriate, use WhatDoTheyKnow so the response becomes public. A council that cannot produce a current register is already telling you something.

Build a delivery ledger

Create a three-column table. The first column is the promise as written in the agreement. The second is the trigger: when the obligation should have been met. The third is the evidence: what proves it was met. Do not accept “secured” as a synonym for delivered. “Secured” means the council has a legal clause. “Delivered” means homes are occupied, play equipment is installed, cash is spent or works are signed off.

For affordable housing, record the number of units, tenure, bedroom mix, affordability threshold and nomination rights. For play space, record the square metres and whether the space was completed before the first occupation. For transport, record the junction improvement, bus contribution or cycle lane and the date it was due. For cash, record the amount, the receiving department, the spending deadline and any repayment clause. This is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is how you expose the gap between what was promised and what was built.

Match promises to completed schemes

Use the council's planning portal to pull the original committee report, the section 106 agreement and any discharge of conditions. Compare those documents with the register. Then look for independent evidence: housing department lettings data, registered provider confirmation, cabinet reports, scrutiny papers, and site visits with dated photographs. If a play area was meant to be finished before occupation, your photograph of a bare patch of grass is evidence. If affordable homes were meant to be for social rent, a letting advert at market rent is evidence.

Rank your evidence. A signed council monitoring report is strong. A planning officer's email is useful. A developer's brochure is not. Where the council claims delivery, ask for the date and the document that proves it. Where it claims an obligation was renegotiated, ask for the delegated decision and the legal advice, redacted where necessary. Viability reassessments are not private matters when they reduce what the public was promised.

Follow the money

Cash contributions are the easiest part of the bargain to lose. Ask for the section 106 monitoring report and the unspent balances. Contributions can sit in council accounts for years. Some deeds include repayment clauses if the money is not spent within a set period. Ask whether the council has returned any money, reallocated it or used it for a different purpose. Ask how indexation has been applied. Ask which projects have received the cash and whether those projects were the ones named in the agreement.

The answers should be in the council's financial records. If they are not, ask the section 151 officer. If the council says the information is commercially confidential, do not accept a blanket refusal. Section 106 agreements are generally public documents, and councils can release them with narrow redactions. Ask for the severable facts: the obligation, the trigger, the amount and the delivery status. If refused, request an internal review and then complain to the Information Commissioner's Office.

Turn findings into a public dossier

A dossier does not need to be long. It needs to be usable. Write a one-page summary: total obligations, total delivered, total overdue, total cash unspent. Add a table with application references and evidence links. Add a map showing sites with unbuilt obligations. Send it to the scrutiny committee, the local plan team, your parish council and your MP. Ask for a full council debate. Ask candidates in the 2026 local plan vote whether they will publish a delivery statement for every section 106 site.

Do not allege fraud. Show the gap. The public understands a broken promise when it is laid out in a table. The political question is not whether the council has a register. It is whether the council treats the register as a management tool or a filing cabinet.

The local plan test

A local plan is a statement of intent, but it is also a test of credibility. If your council's housing target depends on section 106 delivering affordable homes, examine its past delivery. If obligations have gone unbuilt while new permissions are waved through, the plan's assumptions deserve scrutiny. Demand a delivery statement alongside the plan. Demand that monitoring reports are published annually. Demand that unspent contributions are reported to cabinet, not buried in an appendix.

Housing targets without delivery mechanisms are just spreadsheets. Section 106 is where the public can check whether the bargain is real. Pull the register. Build the ledger. Publish the gap. That is how residents turn a planning clause into a campaign — and how we say enough.