200 Days of BNG: What have we learned?

30th August 2024

On 12 February 2024, Biodiversity Net-Gain (BNG) became mandatory. In order to gain planning permission, applications are now required by law to guarantee a minimum of 10% net-gain in biodiversity, with newly created or enhanced habitats secured for at least 30 years.

The new law represented a powerful step forward in bringing developers, local authorities and landowners together to provide the best outcomes for nature and people. But 200 days on from this landmark legislation, what has BNG done for nature? Here we talk to four members of the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust and Wild Solutions team to get their unique perspective on what we have learned so far.

The Wild Solution: Phillipa Chappell, Deputy Director of Innovation and Enterprise

Since becoming mandatory, this legislation has been great news for wildlife and communities and has given us the opportunity to leverage our experts to support this new approach, while remaining true to our charitable status and strategic goals.

Backed by the Trust’s specialist local knowledge and rewilding expertise, our in-house ecological consultancy and ecosystem service provider, Wild Solutions is the only BNG provider that is focused on making more space for nature rather than maximising the number of BNG units for sale per hectare.

Whilst we were preparing for this landmark legislation for years in advance, the processes needed for developers and providers to implement it weren’t all in place at the beginning. We have worked closely with Wildlife Trusts across the UK, Natural England, DEFRA and Green Finance providers such as Triodos, to set up the robust processes needed to support this legislation going forward and create high-integrity solutions that can be used nationally.

Like all nature-based solutions, it must be done right to have the intended impact and that is where the passion and skills within the Trust have been essential. While some BNG providers are offering units for sale from land that already exists for people and nature, through a process called habitat banking, we are creating new spaces for wildlife to recover and people to enjoy, with high quality and resilient habitats, delivered in the best place for nature, before the loss occurs.

One of our key principles is to ensure these new spaces are accessible for the public to enjoy whilst simultaneously providing additional ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration, flood risk management and water quality improvements. 

The sites will be managed in perpetuity for nature, under the stewardship of Derbyshire’s leading conservation charity and all the profits generated through the Wild Solutions consultancy will be reinvested to secure the best outcomes for nature’s recovery and have a greater impact for wildlife. 

Owned by Derbyshire Wildlife Trust and managed by Wild Solutions, 60 acres of land located 5km north of Chesterfield City Centre, was the first habitat bank in Derbyshire to be secured with a Section 106 agreement with the local planning authority (LPA), Chesterfield Borough Council.   Others have now followed, and we are on track to achieve our ambition of having a BNG site in every LPA (Local Planning Authority).

I won’t lie though, despite the benefits and positive changes we have seen in the last 200 days, we have also witnessed the challenges BNG has raised for developers, landowners, LPAs and other stakeholders as we all grapple with the new processes and costs. However, what has been rewarding to see is that, from the very beginning, we have been well placed to support them with the affordable, zero risk, high-integrity solutions they need, whilst making more space for nature and helping its recovery.

The Ecology: Ady Cox, Nature Recovery Advice Lead

Honestly, not that much has changed within the team here that delivers ecosystem services and nature-based solutions. Managing land for nature’s recovery is what we do, it’s what we’re great at and it's what we have always done as a Trust for the past 60 years. However, what this legislation does is  it gives us more opportunity to deliver nature recovery more widely and sustainably because the funding is there in a way that it wasn’t before.

BNG was ultimately designed to stop the loss of biodiversity value within planning applications and provides a technical framework for quantifying the biodiversity value of habitats. A new government directive, but its business as usual for us.

Once an ecological baseline is established at a BNG site, a detailed habitat monitoring and management plan (HMMP) is drawn up which demonstrates what the ecological uplift will be from our change in management. This is needed to  secure a Section 106, which is the legal agreement that is needed in order for us to be able to sell the proposed BNG units we are creating, allowing us to recoup the cost of purchasing the land in the first place. The developers’ legal requirements are fulfilled and more, bigger, better and joined up areas of land are given back to nature. Everybody wins!

At our BNG sites our team monitors many different elements of the ecosystem to establish the ecological baseline and understand the current state of the site, including which habitats and species are already present.

Over the years that we own these sites we will continue to monitor their biodiversity value through survey work. This will tell us how the biodiversity value and habitats are changing and we can then use this information to adjust how we manage and improve the habitat.

In the weeks and months since BNG became mandatory, I will say that the majority of landowners we speak to have taken a positive approach to the legislation change.

Our hope is for this to continue and grow and for more developers to consider BNG at the beginning of their planning journey – biodiversity first, site aesthetics second, because you can have both.

The Evidence: Tom Cole, Wilder Evidence Manager

My role is dedicated to the measuring, monitoring and reporting of the impact of BNG. With our technology we can use evidence-based modelling to demonstrate with confidence how our management can change sites over time and how we are improving our land for nature.

This is a vital part of BNG and essential to the success of this legislation going forward, without it, without providers diligently carrying out monitoring, the power of this legislation could be massively diminished.

Following the Government’s initial announcement, there has been a shift in thinking towards nature-based solutions to meet environmental and climate emergencies.

The Trust recognised this catalyst for change early on and knew that with support from the University of Derby to transform our working practices, we could protect land for nature, as we always have done, whilst providing the ecosystem services needed by landowners and developers.

Working with the University of Derby and embedding further expertise into the organisation has helped us maximise this significant opportunity and establish ourselves as a leading provider of ecosystem services in the county and beyond.

One of the most important influences to where we expand our network of BNG sites are our Nature Recovery Networks (NRN). We recognise that the most effective way to support natures recovery is by ensuring the creation of a bigger, better more joined up landscape, our NRN’s, which are spatial models analysing the connectivity of habitats across the county, highlight the best places for habitat creation to connect and expand the current network of priority habitats and protected areas in Derbyshire.

The advisor: Libby Duggan-Jones, Biodiversity Planning Officer

As a planning officer, my role is to provide ecological advice on planning applications to Local Authorities through service level agreements. For much of this there is a formula -checking the necessary surveys have been carried out and guidance has been followed.

Until this year when BNG became mandatory, there was no legal requirement for biodiversity net gain, but there was a recommendation for gains in the national planning policy framework. Because of this, for many years our advice has been for developments to secure net gains to support their application and we were seeing some developers adopt this strategy.

What has been disappointing with the new legislation is that this original, nonmandatory guidance, has now, ironically, been watered down at the application stage. Previously, applications required full calculations or baseline metrics as a minimum from the start, but now we are often presented with less information than we had before making it harder to assess and causing more delays.

What we would like to see is a fully completed metric at the start, just as Tom has suggests, so we can see the impacts, we know mitigation is secured, and we can say with confidence it will achieve 10% net gain.

Working with Wild Solutions

We have already reached out to over 300 BNG clients in and around Derbyshire, producing 45 bespoke BNG packages for commercial developers, housing developers, large corporations, utility companies, SME’s and homeowners.

We look forward to working with more likeminded organisations to ensure the BNG legislation is doing what it was designed to do – ensuring natural spaces for wildlife and people are left in a measurably better state than they were before the development.

Find out more about BNG legislation and Wild Solutions or how to source BNG units immediately here, or get in touch by emailing wildsolutions@derbyshirewt.co.uk.