Durrants’ Jasmine Philpott, Senior Planner and Development Surveyor, comments on BNG introduced in 2024 and how it has created major challenges for small developers due to unclear guidance, costly rules and limited support – prompting calls for a simpler and fairer system.
When Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) was introduced in May 2024, it was done so with little guidance or training on how to apply it, and apparently little consideration for the practicalities of delivering it. BNG requires all planning applications to demonstrate a 10% improvement in biodiversity post-development compared to pre-development. It currently applies to almost all planning applications of more than 5m x 5m in area, and requires an on-site ecology survey, the completion of a government-issued metric, and a plan for how the 10% will be achieved.
The biggest issue with BNG that we have encountered is the restrictive rules around on-site versus off-site gain. Current regulations do not allow the 10% gain to be provided within residential garden land, so any owner of a prospective residential development has to either provide off-site solutions on land they own in the area, or purchase credits. An added complication is that off-site solutions require a Section 106 agreement, which take months to agree and hundreds or thousands of pounds in legal fees.
The second issue is that there are not enough consultants, or capacity at local authorities, to process all of this additional work. The entire industry appears to be muddling along and doing everything they can to justify an exemption to avoid BNG altogether. As usual with these types of well-intended but poorly considered schemes, BNG favours large scale developers and big landowners, who have the space to provide on-site BNG outside of gardens, or own spare land and have the in-house expertise and funding to push through the S106 process. This inequity should also be considered in the context of the huge decline in the number of small and medium size developers (SMEs) in the industry – from SMEs obtaining 21% of all planning permissions in 2010-11 to just 9.3% last year.
The government appears to recognise this problem, and it was very welcome news to hear that the government are consulting on a radical overhaul of the BNG regulations to lift the burden on SMEs. I have read and commented on the consultation and thought that almost all of the suggestions were very sensible.
They include a complete exemption from BNG for ‘very small sites’ and a streamlined BNG process for ‘small sites’ (less than 9 homes) and ‘medium sites’ (10 to 49 homes). There is discussion on introducing a standard S106 agreement to avoid inconsistences between law firms and local authorities, and introducing a simplified metric that does not require input from an ecologist.
I was particularly pleased to see mention of stricter validation requirements and measures, as well as plans to reduce the number of planning applications determined by planning committee – something I have advocated for in previous columns (clearly Angela Rayner reads the Diss Express and my articles on the Durrants website).
I appreciate that nature lovers among us (and I consider myself one) may consider this to be a backwards step – the Wildlife Trust are certainly not happy to see BNG being ‘watered down’ so soon after it was launched. However, there is a balance to be struck when it comes to nature and development. If nature protection and enhancement becomes too onerous, it turns developers and the public against it and can lead to attempts to sabotage and destroy habitats to make the process easier. I have always felt, and many of my ecology consultant contacts agree, that small pockets of BNG land scattered across the country are far less effective than large-scale areas set aside for nature. I would therefore like to see governments and business setting up more BNG sites, with smaller developers simply making a financial contribution to these schemes. It does appear that this is the direction that BNG will take in the future, and I think this is a good thing.
This article was first published in the Diss Express.
