Not a wishlist — what the IDP actually does
Drive out along the A1 corridor south of Grantham and the signs of new development are hard to miss — road widening, temporary traffic signals, a scaffold-ringed primary school extension squeezed between fields and a freshly tarmacked estate. Most residents will have assumed those things appeared because the houses did. The truth runs the other way round.
South Kesteven District Council published its Infrastructure Delivery Plan (IDP) and companion Project Schedule in July 2025, alongside the Regulation 18 Draft Local Plan consultation. It is not a vision statement. The IDP functions as a formal evidence base: officers and committee members cite it directly when deciding planning applications, and it sets the basis on which developer contributions are allocated. Individual site allocations in the July 2025 draft plan are explicit on the point — development must be 'phased in accordance with the Infrastructure Delivery Plan' so that infrastructure arrives alongside, not after, new homes.
The current Local Plan, adopted in January 2020 and covering 2011 to 2036, still holds legal force while the new plan to 2043 is prepared. So the 2025 IDP sits in an active, forward-looking role — shaping what gets approved now, not just recording ambitions for later.
Three questions follow naturally from that: who actually makes these decisions, how is the infrastructure paid for, and what do those numbers mean for people living in the district?
Who sits at the table
'The council' is not one thing — and understanding who holds which lever matters when decisions about roads, schools, and housing land get made.
At the apex sits South Kesteven's Cabinet. In February 2025 it formally approved the 2025–2028 Local Development Scheme: the timetable and process for producing the new Local Plan to 2043. That is a political decision about when and how growth is planned, taken by elected members with cross-party visibility.
Individual planning applications are a different matter. Those go to the Planning Committee, but by the time an application arrives, the IDP has already shaped which infrastructure conditions officers can realistically impose. The document constrains professional discretion before a single application lands on the committee table.
A parallel track runs through Lincoln rather than Grantham. Lincolnshire County Council holds statutory responsibility for education and strategic highways, and it applies its own standardised cost schedules when calculating developer contributions — the education levy rates, for instance, are set by LCC regardless of what South Kesteven negotiates site by site. Some of the most consequential infrastructure decisions affecting residents here are made 25 miles away.
Democratic oversight has a formal home: the Environment Overview and Scrutiny Committee, which reviewed the 2024/25 Infrastructure Funding Statement in December 2025 before publication. That review is the closest thing to a public audit of how developer money has actually been spent.
The result is a structure spread across elected members, professional officers, and a county-level authority. That distribution is not a failure of design — it reflects how English local government works. But it does mean accountability is dispersed enough that tracing a specific decision back to a specific body takes some effort.
Infrastructure as the map, not the legend
Most planning systems, in public perception at least, work like this: land is identified, housing is planned, and infrastructure follows to serve the new population. The 2025 IDP describes something closer to the reverse.
Chapter 13 of the Regulation 18 Draft Local Plan states that the capacity of existing infrastructure — assessed with and without potential expansion — was 'a fundamental part' of formulating the spatial strategy and the distribution of development across the district. Before a site allocation landed on a map, planners were asking whether surrounding systems could absorb it: school rolls, road junctions, GP surgery lists, sewage treatment headroom.
The IDP's definition of infrastructure is deliberately broad. Transport covers all modes — road, bus, cycle, rail, pedestrian, parking, waterway. Education spans nursery to further education. Health, leisure, green space, utilities, and telecoms all carry their own capacity thresholds and expansion costs.
The legal mechanism that locks this into individual sites is phasing. The July 2025 Regulation 18 housing allocations explicitly require development to be 'phased in accordance with the Infrastructure Delivery Plan'. A developer cannot build all 300 homes at once if the IDP determines that local school capacity can only absorb the first phase. The document is not advising the timetable — it is setting it.
The practical implication runs in both directions. Settlements near genuine pinch-points — a primary school already at capacity, a junction already stressed — carry a built-in argument against dense new allocations, one lodged in methodology rather than left to local objectors to assemble at the committee stage. Well-served corridors face greater exposure to growth. That trade-off is rarely stated in those terms at planning committee, but it is embedded in how the IDP frames its evidence.
What each new home costs the system
Every new home in South Kesteven carries an implicit bill — not a tax, but a set of negotiated legal obligations that follow the planning permission. Because the district has not adopted a Community Infrastructure Levy, there is no pooled fund drawing a standard charge from every development. Instead, each site generates its own Section 106 agreement: a legal contract between the developer and the council, tailored to what that specific scheme is judged to require.
The 2024/25 Infrastructure Funding Statement puts some numbers to the aggregate. Over £7 million in new S106 obligations was secured across the year; over £3.7 million was spent. The largest single spend line was Transport and Travel at £260,508, with smaller allocations — roughly £27,000 on play equipment and around £18,000 on healthcare schemes — accounting for much of the remainder. An unspent balance of £6.67 million sat in accounts at the close of the financial year, reflecting the lag between money secured and projects ready to receive it.
Education costs follow a different logic. Lincolnshire County Council sets standard rates regardless of what South Kesteven negotiates: £21,990 per new-build primary school place, or £18,367 per place delivered through expanding an existing school. A 150-home development generating around 30 primary-age pupils would, on those figures, carry an education contribution in the region of £660,000 — though yield calculations vary by site and household mix, so this is illustrative rather than fixed.
What communities cannot secure through S106 is as important as what they can. Obligations must satisfy three statutory tests: they must be necessary to make the development acceptable; directly related to that development; and proportionate in scale. A new estate cannot, through S106, fund a leisure centre the town has long wanted but which has no direct connection to the site. The system has an internal logic — it is designed to mitigate impact, not to redistribute growth benefits more broadly.
The £6.67 million sitting in accounts
That £6.67 million figure deserves a second look — not as evidence of failure, but as a structural symptom worth understanding.
S106 funds are ring-fenced from the moment they are received. Every pound is tied to a specific agreement, a specific purpose, and in many cases a specific trigger: a school-place threshold that must be crossed before money can be released to the county, a traffic scheme that cannot proceed until a development reaches a certain phase. The money does not sit idle through inertia; it sits idle because the conditions that unlock it have not yet been met. Developer build-out speed is the key variable — and that is something the IDP's phasing conditions can shape but cannot compel.
A Community Infrastructure Levy would work differently. Under CIL, contributions pool into a fund the council can deploy more flexibly across the district, without waiting for site-specific triggers to fire. South Kesteven has no CIL, which means no such pool exists. Every infrastructure pound is hostage to the pace and sequencing of the development that generated it.
The practical consequence falls on residents. A school extension or a crossing improvement may be fully funded on paper — the obligation is secured, the money is held — yet unbuilt for years while build-out lags. Between the planning permission and the finished classroom, people live.
What residents can realistically expect
There is more on the public record than most residents realise — the difficulty is that it was written for planners, not for them.
The Infrastructure Funding Statement, published each year by 31 December and reviewed by the Environment Overview and Scrutiny Committee before release (most recently in December 2025), sets out what S106 money was secured, what was spent, and what remains. The IDP Project Schedule lists the infrastructure projects expected to accompany growth, with phasing conditions attached. Lincolnshire County Council's education cost rates are published and fixed. These are real documents with real numbers — the closest the system comes to a public reckoning.
The structural limits are equally real. Without a Community Infrastructure Levy, there is no pooled fund residents can point to across sites. Each development's obligations are settled on their own terms, capped by what the statutory tests permit at that application. Communities near one site cannot leverage what is secured from another.
The next major democratic opening is the Local Plan to 2043 — Regulation 19 and adoption still lie ahead. The Regulation 18 consultation in 2025 was the first formal stage; responses fed into an evidence base that accumulates through each subsequent round.
Effective engagement, in practice, means reading planning committee agendas and checking obligation registers rather than attending a public meeting. The transparency the system offers is genuine, but it is technical in form — and navigating it takes time and patience the process does not go out of its way to supply.