Otterpool Park’s 1001-Day Section 106 Delay Exposes England’s Planning Logjam

On 4 April 2023, Folkestone & Hythe’s Planning and Licensing Committee resolved to grant outline planning permission for Otterpool Park—a new garden town proposed at up to 8,500 homes—but only subject to conditions and the completion of satisfactory Section 106 agreement(s). 

That caveat matters, because it means the “yes” is not the final, bankable, legally effective permission until the legal agreement is actually signed and sealed.

And here is the part that should make anyone who pays council tax sit up straighter than a cracker hat: as of today, 30 December 2025, the Otterpool Park Section 106 process has been running for 1,001 days, or 2yrs, 8 months and 26 days since that committee resolution. Local reporting has continued to highlight the project’s dependence on completing the Section 106 machinery before it can properly move from “approved in principle” to “fully unlocked and deliverable”. 

So, at Christmas 2025, Otterpool Park’s Section 106 is basically an advent calendar with 1,001 little doors, and behind most of them is the same surprise: “Draft still under review.”

The uncomfortable point is that Otterpool is not some bizarre outlier. It is a very large, very visible example of a national pattern.

What a Section 106 agreement is — in plain English

A Section 106 (S106) agreement is a legally binding contract between a developer and the local planning authority. It is how councils secure the practical “give and take” that makes development acceptable: affordable housing, funding for schools, roads, public transport, parks, health and community facilities, and a long list of other obligations.

In many cases, councils only grant permission on the basis that these obligations are nailed down in an S106. So when an S106 stalls, it doesn’t just delay bricks and mortar. It can delay the affordable homes, the school places, the junction upgrades—everything the community was told would come with the scheme.

The HBF’s verdict: the S106 stage is becoming a major national bottleneck

The Home Builders Federation (HBF) has now put numbers on what developers, councils and residents have long experienced as a slow-motion grind. In a May/June 2025 research release, the HBF said it used Freedom of Information responses from local planning authorities, drawing on data from 2,500+ S106 agreements across 50+ councils. 

Its headline finding is stark: the average time to finalise an S106 has lengthened year after year.

That is 90 days longer in two years—around a 20% increase—for a stage that often has to be completed before the permission can be issued. 

The distribution is worse than the average suggests. The HBF reported:

• a maximum recorded timeline of 2,679 days (over seven years) for a single agreement;

• a shortest reported council average of 192 days;

• 35% of agreements taking longer than 12 months; and

• in 2024/25, 45% of LPAs reporting at least some agreements taking over 1,000 days to complete. 

Read that last line again and look back at Otterpool Park’s 1,001 days. Otterpool is not off the chart. It is approaching the new, grimly familiar category.

Planning is slowing down — and the system is quietly incentivising appeals

This comes alongside another depressing benchmark: Lichfields’ May 2025 research (commissioned by the LPDF and Richborough) into the time taken to secure outline planning permission for housing schemes of 10+ homes.

It found the average local authority determination period rose from 284 days (2014) to 783 days (2024). 

It also noted a remarkable reversal: since the Rosewell Review (2019), it has been around six months quicker on average to get a decision at appeal than to wait for the local authority process to conclude. 

This is the planning system equivalent of people going to A&E because it’s faster than booking a GP appointment: irrational for everyone, but completely rational for the person stuck in the queue.

Why this happens: the boring bits of government that matter most

The temptation is to blame “the planning system” as an abstract beast. But the S106 logjam is usually the result of very human, very fixable problems:

1) Negotiations start too late.
Government guidance is clear that planning obligation discussions should happen as early as possible, and that pre-application work can prevent delays where permissions are granted subject to completion of an agreement. Yet in practice, far too many schemes only treat S106 seriously after committee, when the public “yes” has already happened and the legal work is suddenly urgent.

2) Lack of standardisation turns “routine” into a weekly argument.
The HBF argues that inconsistent drafting and repeated re-negotiation of standard clauses stretches timelines, and urges national templates and clearer good practice expectations. 

Anyone who has watched legal drafting ping-pong back and forth will recognise the problem: not every delay is about big-ticket money. Some of it is about the tenth debate this month over “standard wording” that is apparently standard only in the sense that everyone is standardly furious about it.

3) Resourcing and project management are often the hidden crisis.
The HBF points to capacity constraints and calls for dedicated S106 teams, more staffing and skills investment. Councils will say—often fairly—that they are juggling rising caseloads and complexity. Developers will say—often fairly—that they are willing to pay for faster legal handling but can’t always get traction. Both can be true at once, and both still add up to delay.

4) There’s no easy “tie-break” when talks hit a brick wall.
Here is the maddening part: Parliament already legislated for a dispute-resolution mechanism. Section 158 of the Housing and Planning Act 2016 inserted section 106ZA and Schedule 9A into planning law, setting up a route for resolving disputes about planning obligations. 

But as commentators have repeatedly noted, it has never been brought into force—a policy tool sitting on the shelf, still in its packaging. 

Otterpool Park: the local lesson inside the national statistics

Otterpool Park’s outline permission was politically and strategically huge: a council-backed “garden town” delivery vehicle, a committee resolution to grant, and years of public narrative about housing, infrastructure and growth. 

But the Section 106 requirement means that the committee night was not the finish line. It was the moment the baton was handed to a legal process that, nationally, is now averaging 515 days and in many places is drifting into the 1,000+ day territory.

At 1,001 days and counting, Otterpool Park is uncomfortably well-aligned with the HBF’s warning signals—not because the scheme is simple (it isn’t), but because the system is increasingly normalising “years” as an acceptable unit of time for turning “yes” into “go”. 

And for residents, that creates the worst of all worlds: the place has already been told the development is happening, while the mechanisms that are supposed to secure benefits and infrastructure remain unfinished.

What would actually help (and doesn’t require a Christmas miracle)

The most convincing reform ideas are not glamorous, but they’re practical:

• Earlier S106 engagement, with real discipline. Government guidance already pushes early discussion; the culture needs to follow it. 

• National standard templates for smaller and mid-sized schemes, with limited, clearly justified departures—so time isn’t wasted “reinventing the boilerplate”. 

• Transparent performance reporting—not as a naming-and-shaming sport, but so everyone can see where the bottlenecks truly are and what “good” looks like. 

• Switching on dispute resolution in law, so genuine deadlocks don’t metastasise into multi-year paralysis. 

• Clearer timing expectations, borrowing from the appeal world, where the Planning Inspectorate already publishes detailed good practice advice on planning obligations. 

None of that is anti-development or anti-council. It is pro-functioning-government.

The punchline — with a bit of tinsel

Section 106 was designed to make development acceptable by securing real-world benefits for real places. But when agreements routinely take well over a year, and a project like Otterpool Park can sit at 1,001 days from “resolution to grant” without a completed S106, the system stops looking like orderly public administration and starts looking like a festive queue at the returns desk: everyone is holding paperwork, nobody is quite sure who has the authority to sign, and somebody keeps disappearing “to check with a colleague”. 

If England wants housing delivery to accelerate, the planning system cannot treat the legal completion stage as an optional extra. Because, in planning, an unsigned S106 doesn’t just delay a scheme—it delays the schools, the roads, the affordable homes, and the credibility of the promises made from the committee chamber.

And on that cheerful seasonal note: if Otterpool’s S106 hits 1,360 days before it’s finalised, somebody should at least be required to put a bow on it next Christmas day.

The Shepway Vox Team

The Velvet Voices of Voxatiousness