BNG Online: Bringing the sector together to deliver Biodiversity Net Gain

Biodiversity Net Gain today (April 2) becomes mandatory for small site developments. As RichardPritchard asked back in February: ‘Are we Ready’? There’s a lot to learn and quickly for developers working with and submitting planning applications, and for local planning authorities (LPAs) receiving and considering them. Two of the big challenges for all of us are:

• Where to start? There is an impressive body of work out there – how do I navigate the plethora of guidance, regulations, case studies, toolkits?
  
• Understanding what happens before and after ‘my part’ of the process. LPA planners need to understand the sorts of things developers are grappling with, developers need to know what support the LPA can provide, and what information is required and when.

BNG Online – getting acquainted quickly with BNG
I recently moved across programmes at PAS to begin work on BNG. In at the deep end, lots to learn and enormous shoes to fill. My colleagues Beccy Moberly and Richard Crawley have steered the PAS BNG ship expertly, creating a wealth of pragmatic BNG advice and establishing a network of over 1,000 members.

In my new pair of enormous shoes, and standing on the shoulders of giants, I’ve been working on what (somewhat serendipitously) is the perfect foil for accelerating my understanding. It’s called ‘BNG Online’, it launches today and is a collaboration between Future Homes Hub & PAS.

‘BNG Online’ is a new digital resource that brings together in one place, insight, guidance, and tools for delivering BNG. It is designed to help developers and local planning authorities to work together and factor in BNG at the key stages of the planning process. It is organised around 4 key development ‘stages’:

• Sites – how are they selected and allocated?
• Application – what advice is available, what information is required, what do I need to do?
• Delivery – delivering and maintaining habitats, on & off-site.
• Monitoring – how do we know what’s happening and who is responsible?

This is just a start
Some elements of BNG Online are more developed than others (e.g. what does (can?) anyone really know about monitoring until BNG is a little more established?). The planning application stages (the ‘PAS bit’) include a summary of each stage, key considerations for LPAs and links to regulations, guidance and resources that will assist in preparing and processing a planning application. It is not exhaustive, still being developed (Beta they call it) and will grow and be updated regularly as we learn more from the experiences of planners and applicants using it.

The sector working together
This is a great example of the sector coming together. As well as collaborating with Future Homes Hub, BNG Online has been developed with the input of Natural England, Defra, DLUHC, Joe’s Blooms, Verna.Earth and development industry bodies representing both large and SME developers.

Why this is important
If I have learned one thing over the last month, it is that it is a mistake (despite how the system for planning approval has been designed) to think of BNG as a post-permission matter. Successful strategies for the delivery of biodiversity gain have to be considered early, and throughout the planning process. BNG is new for everyone and the more information that LPAs and applicants can share, the more we can all learn about what makes the process efficient and what works best. BNG Online is designed to facilitate this.

We will update and improve BNG Online as we learn more. This is where planners and developers using it can help – tell me what you think here or email me (martin.hutchings@local.gov.uk) and let me know how it can be improved.

Biodiversity net gain – looking for perfection in an imperfect world?

I thought I’d write a blog to celebrate the 18th anniversary of when I started working in planning for the natural environment with English Nature in Kent. Looking back on my career, I feel we’re in a more positive place than we have ever been in terms of environmental planning, but we are also much more aware of the huge challenges we face – Monday’s IPCC report and its ‘code red for humanity’ bringing these into sharp focus. My feeling is we’ll only deal with these challenges if we take action now and learn as we go, not expecting any solution to be perfect, but taking small steps to move us forward all the time.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been running workshops for local authority officers and Councillors to inform our PAS project helping LPAs get ready for mandatory biodiversity net gain. These have generated a huge amount of useful information and input both for our project, but also to pass on to Defra and Natural England as they develop details of how the scheme will work. 

There is a lot of positivity out there about this new initiative, but also significant concern about how it’s going to work. How can overwhelmed planning departments with no ecological expertise make decisions on whether an application is compliant? How do we avoid developers gaming the system? How do we make sure this actually delivers gains? Won’t biodiversity net gain make schemes unviable?

In the meantime, there have been some articles in the press criticising biodiversity net gain, seeing it as a spreadsheet exercise or numbers game and implying that it will lead to more habitat loss and environmental destruction, plus that it is incompatible with ‘re-wilding’.

At the moment, we don’t have all the details of how mandatory biodiversity net gain will work, as the Environment Bill provisions will be accompanied by secondary legislation and guidance. However, we do know that a number of key safeguards mean it should be a significant improvement on what happens now. An important point is that biodiversity net gain does not replace any of the existing protections for sites, habitats and species in place now, nor does it replace the ‘mitigation hierarchy’ of avoid impacts first, then mitigate them and only compensate as a last resort. We also know that net gain provisions will not apply to certain irreplaceable habitats (as yet to be confirmed, but undoubtedly to include ancient woodland) and that councils will receive ‘new burdens’ funding to implement the new requirements.

Undeniably there are issues with biodiversity net gain and it won’t (and doesn’t yet) work perfectly, but we need to compare it to the currently very imperfect system where the majority of unprotected habitats (outside designated sites, like SSSIs) are lost through development and not replaced in any way, even to achieve no net loss. 

The Biodiversity Metric provides a way of calculating habitat losses and gains to enable us to try and achieve a net gain. Yes, it’s not perfect and it does simplify things, but the new Biodiversity Metric 3.0 is a huge improvement on the previous 2.0 version (despite recent media reports, which almost exclusively related to issues with the old v.2.0). 

We need a system that is workable and given the complexities of nature and ecosystems, that will always have to simplify and cannot possibly take everything into account. Also, the metric is not the be-all-and-end-all, the system around it really matters. We need strategic planning for nature and the right resources and expertise to make good policy and decisions (on biodiversity net gain, but also existing nature-related planning provisions). This Natural England blog and Tony Juniper’s introduction to the metric on YouTube (about 4 mins in) explain this eloquently. 

Thinking back to 2003 when even trying to protect an internationally designated site for nature was a battle, I no longer feel like I’m waving from the sidelines. Biodiversity net gain, along with a number of other tools and initiatives, offer us a huge opportunity to address the crises we face and create better places for people and nature. 

Yes, we need to be aware of the issues with new approaches and try to resolve them, but we also need to start giving this a go and try it out – in the end biodiversity net gain is going to be mandatory in a couple of years’ time and we’ll have no choice but to get on and do it. That way, we’ll also be able to test and improve as we go (as has happened with the metric). 

I don’t think we’ll ever have a perfect solution – nature doesn’t follow rules – but BNG is a lot better than what we have now, where the majority of development leads to outright biodiversity loss, not even no net loss. So that’s what I plan to do with this project – help LPAs get started and give biodiversity net gain a go, sharing existing good practice and showing how it can work and move us another (quite big) step forward.