Tewkesbury CIL surcharges for two alleged failures have been quashed on appeal after the council failed to establish that a liability notice had been correctly served. Ken McEntee allowed the appeal against Tewkesbury Borough Council on 15th October 2026. The decision concerns the way the notice was served, rather than whether the development itself attracts the levy.
The disputed penalties related to failing to assume liability and failing to submit a commencement notice before work started. A liability notice identifies the levy liability, while a commencement notice tells the collecting authority when the chargeable development is due to begin. The published decision redacts the appellants’ names, the permission details and the surcharge amounts.
I would keep the outcome tightly in focus. The appellants have succeeded in removing these surcharges, but McEntee expressly said he could not decide whether the approved development qualified for CIL liability or self-build exemption. Anyone facing a similar demand needs to separate those questions before drawing comfort from this result.
Why the Tewkesbury CIL appeal succeeded
The appeal was brought under regulation 117(1)(b) of the Community Infrastructure Levy Regulations 2010, on the ground that the council had failed to serve a liability notice. CIL is a charge that can apply to development to help fund infrastructure. This appeal was about additional penalties, rather than a valuation of the underlying charge.
The Tewkesbury CIL decision records that planning permission was granted on 18th June 2020, a liability notice was issued on 19th June 2021 and a demand notice followed on 2nd September 2025. Those are separate stages in the chronology. Issuing a document and establishing that it was served as required are also separate matters.
The council produced a tracking signature showing receipt of a registered-post item on 23rd June 2021 by the appellants’ agent. The appellants said their agent had not passed documents on to them. McEntee explained that this assertion did not determine whether the notice had been correctly served. The decisive issue was who needed to receive it under the regulations.
Regulation 65(3), as considered in the decision, required service on the relevant person, the person who had assumed liability and each person known to the council to own the land. In this case the appellants were both the planning applicants and the landowners. Posting the notice to their agent did not, on the evidence before McEntee, satisfy the required direct service on them.
The email evidence did not resolve the problem
The council also said a copy of the notice had been emailed to the agent, but did not produce that email. It did produce an email dated 13th August 2024 which attached the notice and asked the agent to remind the appellants to submit a commencement notice before starting development.
That left another evidential question. McEntee referred to regulation 126(1)(e), concerning electronic service where an address for that purpose has been provided. He found no email address for either the appellants or their agent on the planning application form, and no council evidence establishing permission to serve documents electronically.
The Tewkesbury CIL appeal therefore turned on more than whether somebody connected with the project knew about the paperwork. The decision examined the statutory recipients and the evidence supporting the chosen service method. A later email attaching a document did not fill the gaps identified in this case.
McEntee concluded: “a LN was not correctly served”. He allowed the appeal and quashed both surcharges. The full official decision, reference APP/G1630/L/25/3373921, contains the reasoning and formal disposal. It does not publish a financial total for the relief obtained.
What remains outside this decision
The Tewkesbury CIL result should not be read as a finding that the development was exempt from the levy. McEntee expressly limited his authority to the surcharges before him. Neither the existence of underlying liability nor entitlement to self-build exemption was determined by this appeal.
That distinction matters to a landowner considering what to do after a successful challenge. The formal decision removes the identified surcharges; it is not a substitute for checking the status of any separate liability, exemption application or other demand. The published document supplies no basis for saying that all possible CIL obligations disappeared.
There is no separate costs ruling in the published Tewkesbury CIL document, and this report makes no claim about recovery of professional fees. Its formal outcome is the cancellation of the two surcharges identified in the appeal. That is the result the evidence establishes.
For a comparable file, I would put the permission, liability notice, service evidence, assumption-of-liability documents and commencement correspondence into date order. Then check the recipients and any electronic-service arrangements against the actual statutory requirements. An agent’s involvement is relevant evidence, but it does not answer every service question by itself.
The practical lesson from the Tewkesbury CIL appeal is to test the evidence behind the demand as carefully as the amount claimed. Our CIL surcharge guidance explains the wider subject. For this case, the controlling source is the complete Planning Inspectorate decision, whose narrow outcome should remain clear when it is used as an example.
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