Folkestone & Hythe Developer Contributions: CIL & Section 106 Millions, Missing Data, and Infrastructure Funding Statement Compliance Failures (2020–2025)

Folkestone & Hythe District Council’s Infrastructure Funding Statement (IFS) is meant to be the public’s annual “receipt and report card” for developer contributions: the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) and Section 106 (S106) planning obligations. In plain English, it should tell residents what money was raised from development, what it was spent on, what is still sitting unspent, and what infrastructure the council says it may fund in future.

There is a second, closely related document sitting beside it: the Infrastructure Schedule. If the IFS is the annual bank statement, the Schedule is the forward plan—an evolving list of infrastructure schemes (roads, schools, health, green spaces and so on), their indicative costs, and likely funding sources and gaps. The council itself links the two: in its 2024 IFS it says the Infrastructure Schedule “documents those infrastructure projects… necessary to support planned growth.”

The missing documents question: are the schedules complete?

From what the council publishes and what you’ve supplied, the IFS series is annual (2020–2025). The Infrastructure Schedule, however, is not annual: the Council have adopted Schedules for 2020, November 2022, 2023 and June 2025 The “missing years” are therefore best understood as “no standalone Schedule update issued” rather than “no Schedule exists.” Notably, the council’s IFS web page links to an Infrastructure Schedule alongside the IFS, but for IFS 2024 the “Schedule” linked is the 2025 adopted version—effectively skipping a distinct 2024 schedule update.

IFS vs Infrastructure Schedule: the simple difference

The distinction matters because they answer different democratic questions:

The Infrastructure Schedule asks: What infrastructure is needed, what might it cost, and who might pay? In the Schedule 2020, for example, the transport section alone shows an indicative cost of £6.21m with a £3.30m funding gap, and the education section shows £19.29m with a £9.09m gap.

The Infrastructure Funding Statement asks: What did we actually collect last year, what did we actually spend, and what’s sitting in the pot? It also contains the legally-required “infrastructure list” of what CIL may be used for.

Seen together, you get the full story: the Schedule can show tens of millions of “need”, while the IFS often shows only low single-millions actually flowing each year.

What councils are actually allowed to spend CIL and Section 106 on

Both CIL and Section 106 are “developer contributions”, but they are governed by different rules and, crucially, they have different levels of flexibility.

With CIL (Community Infrastructure Levy), a district council can spend the money on infrastructure needed to support development in its area. That includes things like transport improvements, schools and education facilities, health facilities, green spaces, flood defences, community facilities, and other capital projects that enable growth. CIL can also fund “infrastructure” more broadly where the authority has decided it supports development, but it is still meant to be tied to the impact of growth rather than day-to-day running costs.

CIL is also constrained by how it is split. A portion must be passed to town and parish councils (Neighbourhood CIL, where it applies), and a small proportion can be used for administration of the CIL system. The remainder is the strategic pot, which should be allocated to identified infrastructure priorities.

With Section 106 (S106), the council’s discretion is much tighter. S106 money is not a general “infrastructure pot”: it is legally tied to the specific planning permission and the agreed purpose written into the obligation. If the agreement says the contribution is for, say, a primary school expansion, a junction upgrade, or an NHS facility, it cannot lawfully be diverted to something else just because that other thing is desirable. In many cases, S106 includes detailed triggers (for example, payment on occupation of the 50th dwelling) and time limits, and if the money is not used as specified it may have to be returned.

In simple terms: CIL is a more flexible, plan-led infrastructure funding stream; S106 is a restricted, contract-like obligation for specific mitigation. The Infrastructure Schedule tends to describe the “universe of need”, while the IFS is supposed to show how much CIL and S106 actually came in, what was allocated, what was spent, and what is still held—so residents can see whether infrastructure promises are being honoured in practice.

The money, year by year: did CIL and S106 go up or down?

CIL: volatile income, rising invoice values

Across the five financial years covered by the 2021–2025 IFS documents, CIL receipts swing sharply:

• CIL receipts received: £318k (2020/21) → £1.368m (2021/22) → £918k (2022/23) → £1.702m (2023/24) → £1.623m (2024/25).

• CIL invoiced (demand notices): £23k (2020/21) → £934k (2021/22) → £1.656m (2022/23) → £1.478m (2023/24) → £2.792m (2024/25).

For lay readers, the key point is the council’s own warning: invoiced does not equal received—demand notices can be reissued, and payments can land in later years.

S106: receipts rise and stabilise, but retained balances keep climbing

Using the “headline figures” tables in each IFS:

• S106 money received (whenever agreed): £255k (2020/21) → £1.261m (2021/22) → £1.306m (2022/23) → £1.306m (2023/24) → £1.299m (2024/25).

• S106 retained at year-end (excluding commuted sums): £2.352m (2020/21) → £2.603m (2021/22) → £3.782m (2022/23) → £3.782m (2023/24) → £4.479m (2024/25).

Whatever else is happening, the retained S106 balance is moving in one direction over time: up.

What’s been done: matching “the plan” to “the spending”

A fair reading of the documents shows the council slowly trying to tie the two worlds together—its forward-looking Infrastructure Schedule and its backward-looking IFS.

One clear example appears in the June 2025 Infrastructure Schedule: it records £77,535 of CIL committed through IFS 2024 towards the Seabrook and Aycliffe Road Active Travel Improvements scheme. That is precisely what the system is supposed to look like: a scheme is identified in the Schedule; the IFS records that CIL has been committed/spent.

Likewise, the IFS explains that its “infrastructure list” is intended to identify projects that may be funded by CIL, while signalling other funding sources that can be pooled alongside it—again pointing back to the Schedule as the catalogue of need.

But when you line up the Schedule’s scale against the IFS’s cashflows, you see the structural problem. The 2023 Schedule includes major big-ticket items—such as Harbour Line and Tram Road with £25m identified and a £20.97m funding gap—numbers that dwarf annual CIL receipts. This is why residents can feel “nothing is happening” even when the IFS shows money moving: the gap between infrastructure ambition and available developer funding is enormous.

Compliance: why the council’s own material points to regulatory failure in the last four financial years

Here is the core legal point, reproduced in the council’s own annexes: “no later than 31st December in each calendar year” the authority must publish its annual IFS on its website.

On the face of the published documents, three of the last four completed financial years appear to have IFS documents dated after that deadline:

• IFS for 2021/22 is dated January 2023.

• IFS for 2022/23 is dated April 2024.

• IFS for 2023/24 is dated June 2025.

If those cover dates reflect publication timing (as readers are entitled to assume unless the council states otherwise), then the council’s own paperwork indicates repeated late publication against the “no later than 31 December” rule.

The fourth year in that “last four” set—2020/21—carries a different, but equally troubling compliance marker: the IFS leaves a mandatory S106 headline item as “£TBC” (“total amount of money to be provided under any planning obligations entered into during the reported year”). The regulations don’t say “publish an estimate later”; they require the figure to be included in the report.

Taken together, the pattern is stark: one year where a required figure is left blank (“TBC”), followed by three years whose cover dates suggest publication after the statutory deadline.

The government’s open-data push: where Folkestone & Hythe falls short in plain sight

Government guidance is explicit that the IFS is the annual statutory publication, and it sets out how authorities should publish “developer contributions data” as usable spreadsheets, not just PDFs.

Folkestone & Hythe’s own IFS page contains a remarkable admission: it says only one (of three) spreadsheets is available, and the other two were “outstanding” and expected “in early 2021.” Four years on, the page still presents the same position—meaning the council is not meeting the government’s open-data direction in practice, and not meeting its own published promise to residents.

This matters because transparency isn’t a “nice to have” in developer contributions. It is the only way the public can independently test whether money is being (a) collected, (b) held lawfully, (c) allocated correctly, and (d) spent on what was promised.

The good, the bad, and the ugly

The good is that the council does publish an IFS series and it increasingly explains how CIL and S106 are meant to work in the district, including the link between the IFS infrastructure list and the Infrastructure Schedule. It also starts to show CIL commitments appearing back in the Infrastructure Schedule (the “paper trail” residents should demand).

The bad is the underlying financial reality the documents reveal. The Infrastructure Schedule describes multi-million and, in places, multi-tens-of-millions infrastructure gaps, while annual CIL receipts rise and fall unpredictably and S106 retained balances build up over time. In other words: the plan is huge, the developer-funding streams are lumpy, and the pace of visible delivery will always struggle to match public expectation.

The ugly is the accountability failure. On the council’s own evidence, residents see late-dated IFS documents against a firm publication deadline, a year where a required headline figure is left as “TBC”, and an official webpage still acknowledging that two of the three promised datasets were never uploaded. Add to that the unsettling repetition of identical S106 headline figures across the 2023 and 2024 IFS tables—down to the penny—which raises obvious questions about copying-forward and quality control in a statutory transparency document.

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The Shepway Vox Team

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