Nick White, Principal Adviser - Net Gain from Natural England provided an update on the latest on Biodiversity Net Gain to an audience of over 500 on 18 April 2023. A recording of the event and slides are available on this page.
Slides from this event are available through Slideshare and to download as a PDF below, along with the event recording on YouTube.
Nick covered what we know and what we are yet to find out about mandatory biodiversity net gain (BNG). He talked about why BNG is being made mandatory and what the Environment Act says about BNG, as well as what forthcoming secondary legislation will cover. He outlined what we know from the Government's BNG consultation response and guidance that is to be published by Defra.
He also ran through the Biodiversity Metric and differences between version 3.1 and the recently published version 4.0. He talked about what else is coming and what the expected timelines are and what local authorities can start doing now to prepare for mandatory BNG, plus Natural England's role in BNG.
He summed up by highlighting that BNG is a journey and November 2023 is just the start. It is important that we all continue to learn from each other and work together. Development with BNG is a lot better than development without even if it isn't perfect to start with. He also talked about how planning application triage will be important to manage workloads of specialists and ecologists.