Biodiversity net gain – are we ready?

Mandatory biodiversity net gain under the Environment Act is just round the corner with Government confirming at the end of September that all the regulations and guidance setting out the details of legal requirements will be out in November and BNG will start for major applications in January 2024, swiftly followed by small sites in April 2024 and NSIPs by November 2025.

PAS started its biodiversity net gain (BNG) project in March 2021 with the aim of helping local planning authorities (LPAs) to be ‘Day 1 ready’ for BNG when it became mandatory. So, two and half years on: Where are we?, How’s it going? and Are we ‘ready’?

What does ‘ready’ mean?

ready

/ˈrɛdi/

adjective

1. in a suitable state for an action or situation; fully prepared.

I ponder this question a lot and am often asked for my thoughts on LPA readiness for BNG. In the context of our project plan agreed with our Defra-led steering group, we said that we’d evaluate the project based on a target of 80% of a sample of LPAs being aware and agreeing that our resources help them do their jobs. We feel we’ve met this brief with 99% of local planning authorities in England having engaged in the project in some way (by coming to an event and/or joining our LPA officer network) and more than 90% of attendees of our events saying they were somewhat or very helpful in polls, plus lots of informal positive feedback coming our way.

We also know that more local authorities are working on BNG over time – at an event we hosted in October 2022, 76% of attendees said that their authority had started working on BNG, this was up to 83% at a similar event in April 2023 and I’m sure would be even higher now. Our practitioner network for local authority officers has grown from around 100 members a year ago to over 600 now.

Is anyone ready?

We are definitely more ready in the sense that we know a lot more about how mandatory BNG is going to work now than we did two and a half years ago. Aside from the Environment Act 2021 receiving Royal Assent in November 2021, we have had a BNG consultation and a response to that consultation from Government, plus Defra BNG guidance and blogs published. Then, at the end of September, the press release that set out a timetable for the implementation of mandatory BNG. Alongside all this information, our knowledge and understanding has grown as LPAs start implementing BNG and testing how the system will work, shown by the depth and number of FAQs we now have answers to and discussions on our practitioners’ network forum.

Local authorities are not alone in being more ready than they were, but maybe not totally ready yet. Developers need to understand the detail of legal requirements before they can have planning applications ready to submit and we will all have only two months to work this out for major applications, and luckily a few more months until April 2024 for small sites. PAS has been working closely with the Future Homes Hub to understand BNG readiness across the board and feed into Government’s plans.

A key thing to bear in mind is the shared positivity across the public and private sector around BNG as a mechanism to improve nature and people’s lives, the keenness to find solutions and recognition of the excellent opportunity BNG gives us to improve the status quo. We need to focus on this as we delve into the detail to stop us getting too bogged down in what might becoming frustrating about the process and the ‘don’t know’s.

Does this mean LPAs are or aren’t ready?

Local planning authorities are not a homogenous bunch and vary considerably in how they work, including in their preparations for BNG, so we can’t say that LPAs are ready or not as a cohort. How about we identify which councils aren’t ready for BNG? Well, that’s tricky too. We can’t base it on who’s engaged with our project, as I know at least two of the LPAs that haven’t engaged have been implementing BNG through Local Plan policies for a couple of years. We also can’t decide readiness according to whether the local authority has a BNG policy in their Local Plan, as that very much depends on the council’s local plan review cycle and where they are with that. Some LPAs are already implementing BNG based on the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) requirement for development to ‘secure measurable net gains for biodiversity’ where appropriate and may have developer advice notes setting out their expectations to meet this, but no Local Plan policy. We have shared examples of these on our webpages.

A recent RTPI survey highlighted issues with preparation for BNG amongst local authority planners and a lack of confidence in practical requirements of BNG, but this wasn’t the case across the board for all those that responded. And it’s important to think about the difference between whether an individual planner is ‘ready’ and whether their local authority as a whole is ‘ready’. We have a hugely informed set of folk making up our LPA BNG practitioner network, ranging from planners to BNG officers to lawyers, with variation in understanding and knowledge of BNG shared across those groups.

Ready for mandatory BNG?

And what does ‘ready’ really mean? In the end, being ‘ready’ probably means prepared for when BNG becomes mandatory. For local authorities, they will have to be able to receive and determine planning applications with BNG, i.e. assessing whether they meet the mandatory BNG requirements, and ready to assess and approve BNG Plans prior to development commencement. Even the most advanced local authority probably wouldn’t say they are yet at that stage, as we look forward to the publication of the secondary legislation and associated guidance that will set out the detail in November, and will enable final preparations to be made in planning departments for applications arriving from January 2024.

Expectations of ‘readiness’ also differ across different audiences and some of the feedback from developers and others around a lack of local authority readiness may stem from higher expectations of what they should be doing beyond the legal requirements, for example, engaging in the off-site BNG market, providing mechanisms (S106) to secure habitat bank sites, etc. Many local authorities are doing some excellent work in this space, including Buckinghamshire Council, Plymouth City Council and Greater Manchester Combined Authority, but many others are not yet engaged in this level of detail or have decided not to take on this role. 

How ‘ready’ is ‘ready’?

The PAS BNG readiness checklist, based on existing experience amongst local authorities, pulls out what we think LPAs need to do to meet the mandatory requirements, but also identifies activities beyond those that will enable BNG to be a success locally. These include establishing a strategic approach to BNG locally and setting up monitoring, enforcement and reporting arrangements. A LPA’s role in the latter is nicely covered by this article for the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management (CIEEM), which highlights the key solutions to LPA readiness – working together, innovating and sharing best practice – across the public and private sector.

PAS has a range of good practice Local Plan policies and SPDs, as well as S106 and planning conditions for BNG on our webpages that have been shared with us by local authorities. For example, Doncaster BNG Supplementary Planning Document sets out further information for applicants on applying the relevant local plan policy on BNG. GMCA Biodiversity Net Gain Guidance for Greater Manchester has been prepared to enable developers and potential offset providers to run biodiversity assessments in a consistent way across Greater Manchester. The document also enables the consistent verification of biodiversity assessments by local planning authorities. Buckinghamshire Council Strategic Significance and Spatial Risk Guidance sets out how the council will assess these two elements of the Biodiversity Metric to help support local nature recovery before the LNRS is in place. We have also shared case studies of early preparation for mandatory BNG by Cornwall Council, Bath and Northeast Somerset Council, Tunbridge Wells Borough Council and the London Borough of Sutton.

For me, readiness is not a binary state, but signals readiness to start the journey and some of that will only come through skills and experience gained as we test out BNG in practice. So, as I blogged over two years ago (!) BNG won’t be perfect to start with, but we can give it a go and get better (and more ‘ready’) as we go. In the meantime, the key areas I would focus on if I was a local authority officer would be:

• Getting familiar with what we know already about how BNG works – look at the PAS BNG webpages and past events, including on the Biodiversity Metric, and join our practitioner network to help you get started.
• Reviewing how the Local Plan – vision, policies – and any SPDs fit with BNG, including how existing policy compares to the legislative BNG requirements, to be clear on what are policy requirements and what are legal requirements.
• Determining what skills and specialist resource, including ecology, the council is likely to need and how to procure it to make sure you can cover when specialist advice is needed on planning applications. See the PAS BNG resourcing guide for some ideas.
• Getting some dates in the diary in December/early January, once the BNG regulations and guidance are published, to train development management planners, validation officers and Planning Committee members on the detail of what they need to do. See our BNG essentials slide-pack as a starter for ten on this.
• Understanding and planning for how the council will update its local validation requirements to encompass BNG.
• Integrating BNG into the LPA’s internal consultation triage process, i.e. when planners consult ecologists and other specialists, and considering whether to put in place any other procedures to help manage specialist input, like BNG casework meetings or having a BNG specialist planner identified.

In the end, we just need to give it a go, be as prepared as we can be, use all the support and guidance out there and work together to make it work as well as we possibly can, learning as we go along. Despite all of the angst about how ready everyone is, one thing is absolutely clear which is that the purpose of BNG – planning to deliver a better outcome for nature – is 100% supported by planners and their stakeholders.