Everyone knows that there has been a lot of housing development to the North side of Benson in recent years.  Our community has grown substantially.  What you may not know is that these developments come with similarly substantial sums of money.  This is the Community Infrastructure Levy, or CIL money, that the developers pay to the county, district and parish councils to be used on local projects.  The county and district councils may choose to spend their share of this CIL money wherever they wish, but the parish council must spend their share on infrastructure projects in their parish. 

Back in 2022, when it became clear that Benson Parish Council could expect to receive this CIL money, we conducted a survey to get the village’s views on what we should spend our share on.  The response was brilliant, with over 120 suggestions for projects we might undertake.  Some of these suggestions were for things that CIL cannot legally be spent on, but now, having used slightly less than half of the money we expect to receive, it seems a good time to provide an update on our completed and planned CIL projects.

To begin with, we took the opportunity to deal with a threat to close our village’s parish hall, due to its failure to meet modern accessibility standards. We extended the hall, improving the kitchen and toilet facilities, adding a lift to the first floor to meet accessibility requirements, and created a new parish office at the front of the building.  This key project cost £630,000, but is already proving its worth with increased lettings revenue, which helps offset the need for a higher parish precept. 

Next, we responded to suggestions that we should provide the young children of the village with an improved play area, by creating the new Faye Elizabeth play park on Sunnyside.  This project has delivered one of the best and most popular play parks in the local area.  It’s wonderful just to see how much pleasure the children, parents and grandparents have in this facility. The project cost the parish £250,000. 

Smaller sums were spent on refurbishing the parish hall’s overflow car park (£17,000), a contribution to the Mill Stream Centre’s extension of their facilities for the older members of our community (£25,000),and re-laying the popular nature walkway on Millbrook Mead (£27,000).  All of these provide long-term benefits to the village. 

In addition, £50,000 has been spent on making the new Community Hall fit for use. The hall itself was built by Cala as part of their planning application, but significant work was needed to bring it up to standard for letting, including sound-deadening and fire safety.  Now the Community Hall is heavily used and is contributing to the parish funds.

In total, just over £1m has been spent on the above, and now we are planning the next set of projects that we will deliver over 2025 and 2026. 

First, we have the Rivermead project.  This area of grass beside the Waterfront Café belongs to the parish and we plan to create a new paddling pool, seating areas, a pontoon, toilets and safe access to the river.  A working group is already developing designs for this work. 

In Green Close, we have a large area of grass with some play equipment that has certainly seen better days. We’ll shortly be starting a consultation with residents to decide how best to use this space for the community and will then look to deliver on this project in 2026. 

And finally, the old sports pavilion on Sunnyside is now only infrequently used and, as such, has become a largely wasted space.  We plan to consult architects to help us rework this building to create a facility focused primarily on the village’s youth, providing somewhere for clubs and groups to meet, with all the equipment and resources that teens probably feel Benson is currently lacking. 

You can see there’s still a lot of large projects to deliver, and in addition we have a list of smaller works that will offer improvements around the village, including a new footbridge to link the Cala nature meadow to Warwick Spinney.  We’ll provide more updates as the planned works continue in the coming months, but hopefully you can see that (within the limitations around what we’re allowed to spend CIL money on) we’ve already done a lot, and there’s more still to come.