Revenue from the Community Infrastructure Levy, 2010 to 2025 (Gibson, 2026)

Summary

Miles Gibson's Revenue from the Community Infrastructure Levy, 2010 to 2025 (Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge, 22 September 2026) assembles the first complete national series of receipts from England's Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL), the per-square-metre charge that local authorities and the Mayor of London levy on new development. He reports £6,563 million collected between 2010 and March 2025 (£7,720 million in Q1 2025 prices), with annual receipts that have plateaued at roughly £765 million since 2019–20.[1] The report also compares CIL with the earlier British taxes on development value and concludes that it captures less than the most successful of them.[1][2]

Method and Data

The author sent a Freedom of Information request to every CIL-charging authority except the Mayor of London, whose figures come from Greater London Authority data. Every authority responded, giving 3,163 data points, 96% of the theoretical maximum of 3,296.[1, pp. 3, 37] Two series were requested: amounts demanded and net cash collected. The headline totals are therefore the author's estimates, built on authorities' own accounts, with some discrepancies and gaps remaining. Where the report reproduces official statistics (Office for National Statistics, National Audit Office, Home Builders Federation), those figures are attributed to their sources below.[1]

Findings

Totals and trend. Receipts rose each year to £764 million in 2019–20, fell 16% in the first pandemic year, and peaked at £844 million in 2022–23. They then fell to £827 million and, in 2024–25, to £697 million. The mean for the "mature phase" (2019–20 to 2024–25) is £765 million a year, with a coefficient of variation of 9.6%.[1, pp. 4, 45] A provisional estimate puts 2025–26 at £620 million, which would be the lowest since 2018–19; authority-level data for that year did not yet exist.[1, p. 4] The author also estimates £328 million claimed in administration costs, leaving about £6.2 billion for infrastructure.[1, p. 5]

Who charges, and London's share. In 2024–25, 161 of 309 English planning authorities charged CIL, alongside the Mayor of London.[1, pp. 3, 12] London boroughs and the London Legacy Development Corporation collected £2,276 million (35%); adding the Mayoral CIL takes London to £3,796 million, or 58% of the total. Across the whole period the Mayor collected 40.0% of London's CIL and the boroughs 60.0%.[1, pp. 4, 60] By contrast, the North East (three charging authorities) has collected £16 million (0.2%) and the North West £146 million (2.2%).[1, p. 4]

Official data understate the total. The ONS National Accounts record £3,169 million of CIL, about 48% of the author's total. He attributes the gap to weak local-authority returns to central government.[1, p. 5] The official figure is reproduced as published; the shortfall is the author's calculation.

Unspent balances. The Home Builders Federation, working from freedom-of-information samples, estimated £2.2 billion unspent (excluding Mayoral CIL). Gibson, who rates the federation's method as lacking transparency, combines that figure with his own collection total to arrive provisionally at 47% of all CIL ever collected, equivalent to a spending delay of around four years.[1, pp. 5, 76]

Section 106. Drawing on Lord and colleagues' 2020 survey, the report notes £384 million of planning obligations collected in cash in 2018–19 against £488 million of CIL, and concludes that CIL had by then overtaken obligations as the main source of developers' cash contributions.[1, p. 79]

Historic betterment taxes. Using his earlier reconstruction, Gibson puts the peak annual revenue of the 1967–70 Betterment Levy at £1,770 million in 2024 prices on an assessed basis and £1,140 million on a collected basis; the Development Land Tax peaked at £519 million.[1, pp. 24, 76][2] CIL's peak of £844 million is 75% of the collected-basis Betterment Levy figure.[1, p. 77] Regionally, 43% of the Betterment Levy came from the North and Midlands, against about 9% of CIL.[1, pp. 5, 78] His verdict: "Even in its mature state, CIL is worse at capturing development value than the most successful of Britain's previous national development taxes."[1, p. 5]

Relation to the Georgist Case

CIL is a fixed tariff on additional floorspace granted permission, set by each charging authority under Part 11 of the Planning Act 2008 and the 2010 Regulations.[3] It is not a tax on land value, nor a levy on betterment as such, so its receipts should not be read as "land value capture achieved". McAllister: Developer Contributions explains why developer payments are not all the same economic transaction. Gibson's own comparison treats CIL as a weaker successor to the Betterment Levy, which was charged on the development gain itself.

The scale is informative. On the author's collected-basis comparison, CIL's best year reached three quarters of what the Betterment Levy would likely have raised in its final year, in real terms. Set against the assessed-basis figure of £1,770 million, the same peak would be under half, a comparison the report does not itself draw. Either way, a national instrument that draws on land value capture in name raises modest sums. The regional skew implies that, outside London and the South East, CIL captures very little: those two regions together account for 75% (£4.9 billion) of everything collected, against 4.2% for the two Midlands regions and 4.6% for the three northern regions.[1, p. 54] Crossrail and the Mayoral CIL shows the London Mayor's levy at work on one project. For the wider national setting, see United Kingdom.

Nuances and Limits

• The report is an institutional research paper, not peer-reviewed. The front matter states that the opinions are the author's and not the University's.[1, p. 2]
• Official returns are incomplete, so the series rests on freedom-of-information responses and authorities' own accounts; the author reports remaining discrepancies and missing data, and a demand-notice gap of about £147 million was estimated but not added in.[1]
• The unspent share (47%) rests on an extrapolated industry survey whose sample composition the author calls opaque.[1, pp. 5, 76]
• The author discloses that he "was involved as a civil servant in the original design" of CIL, and that curiosity about the outcome drove the study.[1, p. 10]
• The 2025–26 figure of £620 million is provisional.[1, p. 4]
• The betterment comparisons rest on the author's earlier reconstruction of the historic taxes, with the basis (assessed or collected) mattering to the result. The regional comparison carries a caveat that Land Commission regional boundaries cannot be located.[1, p. 78][2]
• Exemptions, reliefs, payments in kind and spending were outside the scope; the author lists them as sources of uncertainty about the true yield.[1]

See Also

• Betterment Levy
• Land Value Capture
• McAllister: Developer Contributions
• Crossrail and the Mayoral CIL
• London
• United Kingdom

Sources

1. Miles Gibson, Revenue from the Community Infrastructure Levy, 2010 to 2025, Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge, research paper, 22 September 2026. Full report (PDF); news summary — used for the revenue series, regional and London shares, unspent balance, Section 106 and betterment-tax comparisons, method and disclosures (B-claim for the estimates, A-claim for reproduced official figures; institutional research paper, not peer-reviewed; read in full). Page locators are the report's printed page numbers.
2. Miles Gibson (2025), British Development Taxes since 1945, Cambridge Land Economy. PDF — used for the historic betterment-tax comparisons as the 2026 report relays them (B-claim; not independently re-read for this page).
3. Planning Act 2008, Part 11, and the Community Infrastructure Levy Regulations 2010 (SI 2010/948), on legislation.gov.uk — used for the legal basis of the levy (A-claim; statute).