Guidance

Provide your Developer contributions data


9 June 2022

This guidance is under development. Help us improve it and give your feedback by email.

Follow this guidance when providing your Developer contributions data.

The Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) regulations require all local planning authorities that issue a CIL liability notice or enter into section 106 planning obligations during a reporting year to publish an infrastructure funding statement (IFS) at least annually. The infrastructure funding statement should, as a minimum, include the information set out in Schedule 2 to the Community Infrastructure Levy regulations 2010 (as inserted by the 2019 regulations).

In addition, it is recommended that local authorities also publish the raw data that informed the infrastructure funding statement. This guidance sets out a data format and approach that you can follow in order to publish data that sits behind the infrastructure statement.

The data format and infrastructure funding statements will give policy makers and communities better insight into how developer contributions are supporting new development and local infrastructure. We have designed the data format to cause as little disruption as possible to existing processes.

Providing planning data means making it available publicly to a standard so that services such as planning.data.gov.uk can find it, understand its quality, and trust it will be sustained. Help design this and other data standards to ensure they your needs.

Providing your Developer contributions data

Take the following steps to provide your Developer contributions data:

  1. Prepare your data
  2. Check your data
  3. Publish your data
  4. Tell us about your data
  5. Keep your data up-to-date

Prepare your data

Start by reviewing any data we may already have about your organisation on planning.data.gov.uk using the check and provide service. This might include:

  • any data you have provided in the past
  • information found on your website
  • open data from other public sources

We treat the data you provide as being more authoritative than data we have collected from you previously, or found elsewhere.

You can download tabular data we have for your organisation as a CSV file from the check and provide service and edit it using a spreadsheet or other CSV editors.

Similarly, you can download geospatial data we have for your organisation as CSV or GeoJSON from planning.data.gov.uk and modify it using QGIS or other GIS tools.

You must provide data containing the mandatory fields identified here where required by law. Otherwise your data does not need to be complete or perfect to start with. For many purposes having some data is better than no data, so start by providing the best Developer contributions information you have, and continue to iterate and improve it over time.

Files

For Developer contributions you may provide the following dataset:

Each dataset needs to be provided in a separate CSV file following the government tabular data standard.

The fields and format of the data you need to prepare are documented below, and formally defined in the technical specifications attached to this page.

Field names

You can use uppercase or lowercase names for your fields, and any punctuation characters are ignored, meaning the following examples are all valid ways of naming the start-date field in your data:

  • StartDate
  • Start Date
  • START_DATE
  • start.date

Reference values

Each dataset has a reference field. Reference values are important to help people find and link to the data. Where you don’t have a reference for an item, you will need to create one that is:

  • unique within your data
  • persistent — it doesn’t change when the data is updated

A good reference is something you already use. Where these aren't unique, you make them unique by appending the year, or even the full date. Great references are short, easy to read, to pronounce and remember.

Date values

All dates must be in the format YYYY-MM-DD, following the guidance for formatting dates and times in data.

Where you don't know the precise date you can enter just the month YYYY-MM or even just the year YYYY. The platform will default a start-date to the first of the month, or the first of January, and an end-date to the last day of the month, or the last day of December. For example:

  • 2025-04-19
  • 2025-04
  • 2025

Developer agreement dataset

Mandatory fields

Your Developer agreement data must contain the following fields:

Your Developer agreement data should also contain the following fields:

Optional fields

Your Developer agreement data may also contain the following fields:

Developer agreement contribution dataset

Mandatory fields

Your Developer agreement contribution data must contain the following fields:

Your Developer agreement contribution data should also contain the following fields:

Optional fields

Your Developer agreement contribution data may also contain the following fields:

Developer agreement transaction dataset

Mandatory fields

Your Developer agreement transaction data must contain the following fields:

Your Developer agreement transaction data should also contain the following fields:

Optional fields

Your Developer agreement transaction data may also contain the following fields:

Check your data

Use the check and provide service to review your data before you publish it. The service will show you how the data will appear on planning.data.gov.uk along with feedback on how you might improve your data.

Publish your data

Publishing your data consists of two parts:

  • An endpoint where the data can be downloaded from
  • A source webpage where the information contained in the data is presented on your website

Endpoint

Make your data available at a public endpoint. An endpoint is a URL from which anyone can download the data. This can be either:

  • a single file hosted on your website
  • a file hosted on another public website including GitHub
  • an Open Geospatial Consortium Web Feature Service (OGC WFS)
  • an open application programming interface (API) such as ArcGIS

Ensure your endpoint URL is documented and linked to from a public webpage to help people easily find and download the data.

The documentation webpage for your endpoint should include a clear statement that the data is provided as open data under the Open Government Licence.

Source webpage

The source webpage is where a user can see the same information that is shown in the data. This is usually one of your existing planning policy pages on your official .gov.uk website.

It is important that the source webpage links to the endpoint documentation webpage to help users trust the authenticity of the data.

Tell us about your data

Once you have published the data, tell us about it so we can index and quickly make it available nationally on planning.data.gov.uk.

Use the check and provide service to tell us where it is.

You will need to provide for each dataset:

  • the source webpage URL where the information in the data is presented on your website
  • the endpoint URL from which the data can be collected

The service also asks for your name and email address as a point of contact in case of any issues.

Keep your data up-to-date

Continue to improve your data, and act on the feedback from the service to ensure your data meets the specification.

You also need to update and republish your data whenever there's a change to your Developer contributions information.

We look for changes to the data at all of the endpoint URLs we know about every night, so we can quickly update planning.data.gov.uk.

It is simpler if you publish your changes to the same endpoint URL. If you create a new endpoint you need to tell us about your data again.

Contact us

If you need any help at any stage of the process, let us know by emailing digitalland@communities.gov.uk and a member of our team will be in touch.

You can participate in improving the design of this data , and help ensure planning data meets your needs at design.planning.data.gov.uk.

Technical specifications