On Tuesday we held our latest ward forum on the Borough and Bankside Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) neighbourhood funding.

CIL is collected from building developers to mitigate the impact of construction. We were joined by Council officers from the Regeneration team, who explained more about the funding and how it could be invested in our area on infrastructure and facilities to benefit our communities. You can view their presentation here:

Liberal Democrat councillors have been pressing the Council to release the money to fund much-needed community facilities for over a year, and for this money to be spent in the same neighbourhoods that have endured the disruption from living next to these building sites. But each time we challenged the Council to get on with investing these funds, they kicked the can down the road.

In Borough and Bankside we have £4,135,000 to spend on local projects. We want to hear your ideas and priorities for how it should be spent.

On Tuesday we also set out our priorities as the local councillors:

• To maximise the impact of CIL for residents currently living in the ward.
• To deliver on the Southwark 2030 priorities, parrticularly projects which have a positive and long term environmental impact.
• To support charitable and resident-focussed organisations in the ward.
• There should be a clear focus on deliverability, preferably with a timeline to see improvements by Q1 2027.
• Bids should ideally be over £50,000 and below £1,000,000.

Please get in touch if you’d like to disucss an idea for how to use CIL in Borough and Bankside.