CIL appeals don’t come along very often, but this was a really excellent result for our client.
Working on behalf of our client Easternrose Limited and working alongside Msquare Architects, we were instructed to make an appeal under CIL Regulation 114 to the Valuation Office Agency against the decision of Rutland County Council to charge CIL on a development of 98 storage containers on a site in Oakham.
We successfully argued that the storage containers did not constitute ‘buildings’ based on well established principles in the Cardiff Rating case, which established 3 tests for whether a structure constitutes a building. The Inspector agreed with our case that as the containers would not be physically attached to the ground and could easily be moved around the site that they were not ‘buildings’. Secondly, we demonstrated that the Council’s CIL Charging Schedule did not apply to Storage related uses, but only to Distribution uses within the B8 use class (not the whole B8 use class as the Council had argued).
As a consequence the Inspector confirmed that no CIL should be charged on the development and our client will not proceed on this basis
