We have four key workstreams on planning and the environment: Biodiversity Net Gain, Nutrient Neutrality, Nature Recovery and Protected Sites Strategies. We are also looking at how to help councils join this all together to plan for a better environment.
Planning reform, the Environment Act the Environmental Improvement Plan, and the Government’s broader consideration of land use in England, provide significant opportunities for planning to play a key role in meeting Government’s aspiration to create a better environment for future generations.
And yet we know from our work with Local Planning Authorities (LPAs), that this is a complex agenda requiring integrated, coordinated approaches to achieve multifunctional benefits from the use of land.
As we await further regulations and guidance from Government, we think it is important that LPAs can learn from each other and share their experience of what ‘planning for a better environment’ looks like. Whilst it is still early days, there is a lot of good practice out there. We have pulled together our work to make connections between our various environmental planning work programmes, draw together and share insights and experience from a range of LPAs, and provide a range of tools and products on our Planning for a Better Environment webpages.
PAS has been commissioned by Defra, MHCLG and Natural England to support councils on four key work areas relating to planning and the environment:
- Biodiversity Net Gain: supporting local authorities with the implementation of mandatory net gain.
- Nature Recovery: helping local authorities with their delivery of the Nature Recovery Network including sharing best practice.
- Nutrient Neutrality: supporting local planning authorities in water catchments affected by this issue.
- Protected Sites Strategies: engaging local authorities, in the PSS development process as the next tool for nature recovery.
In addition to the above, PAS did some work in 2022 on Environmental Outcome Reports (EOR) and you can read more about that here.
PAS Practitioner Networks
We have practitioner networks for local authority officers interested in:
- BNG, which meets every 6-8 weeks and for which we host an online discussion forum. Please fill out this Microsoft Form if you would like to join.
- Nature Network for LPAs - for everything else nature not BNG! Please fill out this Microsoft form if you would like to join.
You can also check out the Planning for a Better Environment section of the PAS KHub forum and sign up to the PAS newsletter.