LESS than a quarter of the money pledged by housebuilders to fund crucial infrastructure is actually paid, the Telegraph & Argus can reveal.

Under the current system, developers are asked to offset the impact of their new homes on an area by making payments towards infrastructure, in contracts called Section 106 agreements.

The money raised contributes towards school expansions, road improvements, green spaces and more.

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This system is due to be partially replaced by the new Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL), although some elements of Section 106 will remain.

But figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that while developers agreed to pay £34.2m over the past four-and-a-half years, only £7m (22 per cent) has actually been paid.

Council officers insisted developers were not shirking their commitments and that there were good reasons for the difference between the amount pledged and the amount paid.

Michala Bartle, planning obligations monitoring officer, said the payments were only due when the building process hit certain points, and in some cases, developers may not have got to that stage yet.

In other cases, developers went back to planning committees asking for the size of the payment to be reduced because it made the project unviable, assistant director for planning Julian Jackson said.

He said: “We may have accepted reduced contributions to enable that development to start.”

Developers could go bankrupt before building commenced, or could simply choose not to build homes on a certain site despite having planning permission.

And some financial commitments could be ‘double-counted’, for example if there were two planning applications for the same site, as only one could be built.

Councillor Simon Cooke, leader of the opposition Conservatives, said the figures underlined the case that housebuilding would never fund all the major infrastructure projects the district needed.

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