We are now well into the second year of the mandatory Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) regime. How has is gone in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough? These are my personal thoughts from working with the Wildlife Trust BCN. We are a local nature conservation charity that is both a provider of off-site Biodiversity Units, an advisor to landowners, and an organisation that comments on local plans and some planning applications.
From the perspective of setting up our own habitat banks and creating off-site biodiversity units, the habitat creation has been the easy part. Getting to grips with the new process and the documentation required at different stages has been challenging at times. This has included setting up S106 planning agreements for our habitat bank sites, registering our sites on the National Biodiversity Gain Sites Register and recording biodiversity unit sales. The challenge has also come because both Local Authorities and developers are also having to learn to navigate the new system. However, it is fair to say that our second net gain site was much easier than the first.
This experience has helped us to provide advice to other landowners thinking about establishing their own biodiversity offsetting sites. We are working with eight landowners and supporting and guiding them through the new system. We have been able to share our experiences, help them avoid some of the pitfalls we faced as an early adopter, and we hope that this will lead to a good range of different habitat biodiversity units in a thriving local market.
We have had demand for and a good number of enquiries about our biodiversity units. However, we have also had to help developers understand the new system. We have developed different types of legal contract agreements for our Biodiversity Unit (BU) sales with the complexity depending on the number of BU sold and the value of the contracts. Most early enquiries have been for small numbers or fractions of BU. The small value of these sales contracts has demanded a simpler and less bureaucratic sales process, which we now have in place, after some trial and error.
Establishing a new system will inevitably have some teething troubles and for any market to work there needs to be certainty. Unfortunately, recent government minister pronouncements and the current government consultation on BNG for small and medium developments has undermined this, just as the market was starting to pick up. Landowners are now nervous of taking forward their new habitat bank sites, and no doubt a minority of developers are holding off in the hope that they can avoid the BNG regime.
Viability should not be an issue with BNG as it should be taken account of in the price paid to landowners for land or development options, even for small developments. There are of course still some sites that may have been bought before BNG came in where BNG might prove a challenge. However, it has been clear since 2019, and certainly since the passing of the Environment Act in 2021 that BNG would be required as part of new developments, so there should be fewer and fewer sites where this might be an issue.
There are no doubt improvements that could be made to the small sites metric and how BNG is applied to small sites, however, we should not be throwing the baby out with the bath water. BNG was brought in to provide a level playing field and ensure that most development makes a positive contribution to nature recovery. I remain strongly of the view that BNG must apply to all developments except householder and possibly replacement single dwellings.
I therefore hope that the current government consultation retains the current system in place for the vast majority of developments and only makes small tweaks where there is evidence to justify an improvement to the system. We need the current uncertainty to end as soon as possible so that landowners and developers can make a positive contribution to delivering BNG and supporting nature recovery.
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