Midsomer Norton Town Council has allocated more than £93,000 of Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) funding towards the Town Hall refurbishment without undertaking any public consultation on how the money should be spent.
Figures published by Midsomer Norton Town Council reveal that £93,191 of CIL funding was allocated to the Town Hall refurbishment during the 2025/26 financial year.
The allocation is almost equivalent to the entire £94,034 of CIL income received by the Town Council during that financial year, with £38,468 of CIL funding remaining unallocated.
The Town Council’s records show that the Town Hall was the only project to receive an allocation of CIL funding, with no allocations recorded against any other local infrastructure projects.
The Community Infrastructure Levy is a charge imposed on certain new developments, with the money intended to help provide infrastructure needed to support development and mitigate its impact on local communities.
B&NES Council collects the levy and passes a proportion to town and parish councils to spend on local priorities.
This proportion is known as Neighbourhood CIL. Midsomer Norton does not have an adopted Neighbourhood Plan, so the town receives just 15% of the relevant CIL collected by B&NES, subject to an annual cap. With an adopted Neighbourhood Plan, the town would receive 25%, without a cap.
Decisions on how the remaining “strategic” portion of CIL is spent are made by B&NES Council.
Neighbourhood CIL funding is subject to specific statutory requirements governing how it can be spent. B&NES guidance for town and parish councils makes clear:
“CIL cannot be used as a replacement for everyday Town or Parish Council expenditure.”
Government regulations specify that Neighbourhood CIL should support the development of the local area by funding:
“The provision, improvement, replacement, operation or maintenance of infrastructure; or anything else that is concerned with addressing the demands that development places on an area.”
B&NES guidance also makes clear that local residents and community organisations should be involved in determining how Neighbourhood CIL funding is spent, with town councils expected to ensure that the process is inclusive and that all sections of the community have an opportunity to contribute.
The guidance suggests that town councils should consider preparing a spending plan to help establish priorities, capture residents’ views and identify opportunities to work with other organisations to make the best use of available funding.
However, Midsomer Norton Town Council did not undertake any public consultation on how Neighbourhood CIL funding should be spent before allocating £93,191 towards the Town Hall refurbishment.
Residents were not invited to suggest alternative projects or identify local infrastructure priorities before the allocation was made.
Midsomer Norton Town Council has no published Neighbourhood CIL spending plan, nor does it have a published CIL policy setting out how funding priorities are identified, assessed and agreed.
Despite this, the Town Council has allocated almost an entire year’s CIL income to a single project without consulting local residents or inviting proposals for alternative infrastructure improvements.
The contrast with B&NES Council’s own approach is striking. For Neighbourhood CIL funding in Bath, B&NES invites applications from community organisations and publicly consults residents on which projects should receive funding.
Yet in Midsomer Norton, residents were given no comparable opportunity to influence how the money was allocated.
The Town Council has yet to provide a public explanation of why the Town Hall received the entire reported CIL allocation for the year, or how the proposed spending would support local development and address the additional demands placed on the town by new housing and other developments.
The refurbishment of an existing public building is not necessarily excluded from CIL funding. Improvements to community facilities can qualify, provided the expenditure meets the statutory requirements.
However, the Town Council has not explained how allocating CIL funding to the Town Hall refurbishment will help address the additional demands placed on local infrastructure and community facilities by new development.
Meanwhile, the Town Hall refurbishment is estimated to be approximately £1.4 million over its original budget and is now more than three years beyond its original completion date.
With the Town Council facing substantial costs on the delayed refurbishment, questions remain about whether the decision to allocate such a significant amount of CIL funding to the Town Hall was driven by the town’s wider infrastructure priorities or the financial pressures facing the project.
Residents are entitled to ask why they were not consulted on how Neighbourhood CIL funding should be spent, why no other projects received any allocation and, crucially, how allocating £93,191 to the Town Hall will help mitigate the impacts of development in the area.
