Community Infrastructure Levy Partial Review Examination documents - Disproportionate burden assessments for digital accessibility

Accessibility legislation (on legislation.gov.uk website) states that public sector websites must publish content in an accessible format, unless doing so would impose a disproportionate burden on the organisation. If that is the case, an assessment of the extent to which compliance with the accessibility requirement imposes a disproportionate burden must be carried out.

This is a Disproportionate Burden Assessment for the 40 Community Infrastructure Levy Partial Review Examination documents which are in PDF format:

• Downloads for Community Infrastructure Levy Partial Review Examination
• Downloads for Community Infrastructure Levy Partial Review Examination - CIL.3 - Representation Letters
• Download the Community Infrastructure Levy Partial Review Examination - Letter of Objection to Modifications

The benefits of making accessible versions of these PDFs would be:

• A fully accessible version for all users to access
• An easily searchable and indexable version

CIL examination evidence has been provided by multiple third parties. Most are technical evidence base documents which are not produced by the Council and need to be considered as part of Statutory CIL examination (CIL regulation 21, as amended).

There are 40 documents in total which all differ in length and complexity.

We do not have the capacity to convert these documents into accessible versions and the evidence base must be made publicly available as part of the Council’s statutory duties.

The documents have been produced in this published form by consultants and external consultees in order to comply with the legal requirements to make the reports produced by the examiner available to the public and for a decision to be made for examination. In changing the format of the documents, the Council would not be in compliance with the legal requirements and requests from the examiner to publish the reports as a complete document on the Council’s website for examination.

We are legally required to make the documents available to the public, so the documents must be published on the Council’s website.

Requests for additionally accessible versions have never been received – no residents requested an accessible version of a previous version of the document.

The documents are mostly from third-party sources or organisations.

These are technical documents and representations used for statutory examination purposes and are formal documents produced by the external parties for the purpose of the examination and so should continue to be uploaded as PDFs.

Having considered the estimated effort involved in creating HTML versions or creating new PDFs, along with the specific nature of the documents, we have concluded that the work required is beyond the resources available to us. This represents a disproportionate burden on the organisation.