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What is BNG?
Unsure what Biodiversity Net Gain might mean for you and your developments? Check out or most commonly asked questions below.
Biodiversity Net Gain is a new legal requirement that most new planning applications in England will have to comply with. It requires developers to use the Government’s new Biodiversity Metric to calculate how many ‘Biodiversity Units’ are on their site and then set out a plan to increase the number of units so that the final score, after development, is 10% higher than what was originally there.
Biodiversity Net Gain is based on a set of principles and rules which our service complies with at all stages.
If you are developing a small site, no. The Government has said that, for small sites, the process can ‘be undertaken by a competent person for the habitats involved (which may be the project managers and architects on many sites)’.
Our service exists to make it easier for people working on a small site to correctly fill in the metric and produce best-in-class BNG documents that you need to secure planning permission.
The Government has defined a small site as one of the following:
- A residential development where the number of dwellings to be provided is between one and nine inclusive on a site having an area of less than one hectare (and where the number of dwellings to be provided is not known, there is a site area of less than 0.5 hectares).
- For all other development types where the site area is less than 0.5 hectares or 5000 square metres.
There must be no priority habitat within the development area (excluding hedgerows and arable margins). Our service can help you correctly identify whether or not such habitat is on your site.
We have detailed information on how to conduct a site survey here.
This is a new tool that has been developed by the Government to assess how much biodiversity is lost by a development. A summary of the calculations are set out here.
This is a document that you need to produce in order to secure planning permission. Its requirements are set out in law. The Local Planning Authority can only grant you planning permission if you have produced a BGP that meets the statutory requirements. Our service will help you to produce a best-in-class BGP which meets the requirements of the Environment Act 2021 and Town and Country Planning Act 1990.
This is a reduced form of the Biodiversity Gain Plan (BGP) which you will need to submit with your outline application. It will need to include the following information (all of which can be generated on this site):
- the pre-development biodiversity value
- the proposed approach to enhancing biodiversity on-site
- any proposed off-site biodiversity enhancements (including the use of statutory credits) that have been planned or arranged for the development
Our service gives you the tools to easily and effectively comply with the new BNG requirements and to produce best-in-class reports. While we will give you all the information that you need to fill in a report, we can’t guarantee that the LPA will accept your assessment, or that it won’t have other requirements.
If an LPA rejects your BGP or your metric assessment, you can log back on and make any changes that they request for free.
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