Community Infrastructure Levy or Not?

I knew that we'd be learning lots of new interesting stuff in the course of designing and building our house but I really hadn't anticipated a crash course in Parliamentary processes and "delegated committees". There's a gaping hole, a big "known unknown", in our budget at the moment (one of many to be honest) optimistically labelled as "Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) Exemption ?". It looks as though next week could give us a little more certainty and hopefully some comfort that we will be exempt from the £75/m2 tax.

There's been talk of exemption for "genuine" self-builders from CIL since the Government put plans to amend the CIL out to consultation back in Spring 2013. There's been very little concrete information however and, faced with a potential make or break decision, we decided to find out for ourselves just how long we might have to wait for the 2014 amendments (including exemption for self-build projects) to actually come into force.

Our starting point? A good friend who has in the past actually been responsible for drafting legislation. His searches showed that the 2014 Amendments were "laid" (or "tabled") before the House of Commons on the 9th December 2013 and that, while it sat way down on the House's "Future Business" list (See Item 30 of the very last section - Remaining Orders and Notices - on the 10th December) there was a note that "the Instrument has not yet been considered by the Select Committee on Statutory Instruments" (SCSI)

So we wrote to them to find out when they would be considering them! We made contact with the Acting Clerk of the committee, a guy called Simon Patrick, who has been the most amazingly helpful person and who has been keeping us informed of the progress of the amended CIL regulations as they pass through the mechanisms of parliament.

Here's the process in a nutshell (with translations my me) with key dates shown:

• The original draft CIL amendments were withdrawn on 20th January but "laid" again on the same day as a "paper subject to affirmative resolution" - i.e. one requiring the House's approval. They probably found a mistake and had to alter the draft slightly.

• The new draft regulations were considered by the SCSI on 29th January and the committee "decided not to draw the House's special attention to them". This means that committee decided that there was nothing wrong with the draft regulations from a drafting point of view - it doesn't examine the merits of the draft regulations.

• To save time on the floor of the House, most affirmative instruments (those requiring the House's approval) are debated in a "Delegated Legislation Committee" for up to 1 1/2 hours. The next day (usually) a motion to approve the draft regulations will be moved on the floor of the House, for decision without any further debate. If any Member calls for a vote, this may be deferred till the following Wednesday. When the House has approved the draft, the Government can make the actual regulations.

• We now know that the Delegated Legislation Committee will meet on Monday 10th February at 4.30 pm to consider the draft CIL Regulations.

• So we're expecting a motion to approve the regulations to appear on the House's Order Paper for Tuesday 11th February.

• If the motion is objected to for any reason, there would be a "deferred division (a vote using voting papers)" on Wednesday 12th.

We may be taking a close interest in Parliament TV on Tuesday as this will have a significant impact on our budget.

Landowners but. . . . what lies beneath?

We finally exchanged and completed on 8th January and now own a very expensive key. No more squeezing around the gate or nearly knocking over the neighbour's fence as we can finally drive right into the site. Very useful when we needed to collect soil samples last week and get tools as close as possible.

Soil sample bottled in-situ

A quick catch-up for any new readers - we were concerned that there might be some contamination on the site as it hasn't been used as a residence and garden for a long time (>35 years) but has been used to store old cars and appears to have hosted more than a few bonfires. As you can read in our previous post, we negotiated a retention to cover soil testings and up to £4,000 towards any possible remediation costs. Samples were sent off last Wednesday and we just got the report back this evening.

Sample bottles ready to send to lab

The results are not great and, in some ways, not at all surprising. When I was digging out the samples I had to move loads of broken glass and metal out of the way - all buried under the top couple of cm of bramble roots and grass - and it started to dawn on me just how much cleaning up the site is going to require.

There's lots more like this!

Environment Agency "Soil Guidline Values" (SGV) give a first indication of levels of contamination beneath which there is minimal risk of harm to health and so can be useful in interpreting soil test results. Different values (typically expressed as mg/kg of dry soil) are provided for different land uses and we have focussed on "Residential" and "Allotment" (or "residential with plant uptake") uses to make sure that our land will be safe for food growing and for our kids to play in.

The SGV for Lead (Pb) is given as 450 mg/kg for both residential and allotment land use. One of our three samples came back at 985 mg/kg which is more than double the SGV and higher even than the SGV given for Commercial and Industrial use. Another sample came back at 702 mg/kg. The last sample, which was taken from some clay spoil that had been spread over the site, gave a reading of just 41 mg/kg which puts the others into perspective.

Other metals like Zinc and Copper showed high values too and we're checking those against Environment Agency SGV reports and other guidance.

So now starts the process of getting quotes for soil remediation and holding our breath to see if the £4,000 retention will cover it. Fingers crossed that the Community Infrastructure Levy exemption for self-builders comes through soon - but that's a whole other blog post to follwo very soon.

Nearly Land Owners

When we had our offer accepted back in mid-September I never imagined that we would still be trying, on the first day of the new year, to get Contracts exchanged. "2 to 3 weeks" was our Solicitor's over-optimistic view when we appointed him. That was before we realised that taking an estate agent's recommendation for which solicitor to use was a bit of an error. It's not a difficult site - just a very close old style 400V power line to risk assess and an old aerial image showing lots of old abandoned cars on the plot that prompted a concern about possible contaminated ground.

The Seller assured us that the old cars we could see in the Bing Maps birds-eye views were not there for a long time and that they were not wrecks. We actually got a whole back-story in scrawled handwriting involving the breakdown of relatives and friends' relationships - all to justify the presence of old cars and a strange gazebo. We didn't want to be in the position however where we bought the plot and subsequently discovered hydrocarbon and other contamination that might make the site unsafe for food growing or for our kids to play in the mud. Our (and by that I mean us and not our solicitor) suggestion was to propose a retention - £500 to cover the cost of independent soil testing and a £2,000 fund to put towards potential soil remediation costs.

The seller accepted the idea quickly but then and only then did our solicitor suggest that we included a "right to rescind" clause should the costs of remediation come to more than £2,000. So we had to go back to the seller with yet another demand. If I was in their shoes I would have been annoyed having just agreed to a retention. After correcting our Solicitor's proposed wording of the Contract Rider, we finally got a response back from the Seller - the right to rescind would not be accepted.

Faced with the prospect of exchanging Contracts and then potentially being left with a huge bill for clearing up any contaminated soil, we asked our Solicitor to look into specialist indemnity insurance policies to cover us. With just a few working days before Xmas and a massive workload, he failed to find anything for us.

Our Seller is so confident that no contamination will be found that he has now offered a £4,000 retention. We've taken a view and have decided to go ahead without insurance. I'll be biting my fingernails until the soil test results are in. We're pushing our solicitor to exchange and complete tomorrow or Friday so we could soon be landowners very very soon.

We've already started interviewing potential architects and so plan to hit the ground running. It's going to be a busy and exciting 2014. . . . .