These resources are provided for local authority officers to use in training and communicating with their colleagues, members and developers. Page last updated 8 February 2024.
This is PAS's first stab at helping to explain how mandatory biodiversity net gain works in a development management context for local planning authority officers via a couple of slide-packs and some videos. We have worked with our biodiversity net gain practitioner network and other friends of PAS to develop these. They are as current as the date on the version shared here and we will update as we learn more, have more examples and understand it all better.
It's intended that you take the the slide-packs and customise them to suit your local circumstances to train your colleagues, planning committee and maybe even local developer forum. We have run through and explained our thinking on the slides in the accompanying videos to help you work out how best to use them. Email us or join our practitioner network if you work for a LPA and would like them as a PowerPoint presentation rather than the PDF.
We also have a Biodiversity net gain essentials for local authorities slide pack and recording available for a general introduction to BNG that you may want to look at before you go into these more detailed presentations.
We've divided the overarching slide pack into chunks to record some videos where Richard and Beccy from PAS talk through what the slides cover and why, plus also some of the bits we don't quite know or understand yet. They're each about half an hour long.
BNG in context: this is more than an introduction - it sets out some really important stuff about how to think about embedding BNG into development management. Our advice is 'don't skip this intro to BNG - it's not like other intros to BNG!'.
Scenarios: in our view, a lot of the confusion about BNG we're seeing stems from thinking that there is "one way" to do BNG and there isn't. So these scenarios are what we see as the bedrock of helping people understand how BNG works in DM.
Hot topics: Video 3 acknowledges some areas which commonly cause confusion and angst so we've reframed them as "hot topics". Our aim is to get some of these things out in the open so we can think about how to address them, including why you probably want to ask for more than the statutory minimum information at planning application stage.
Worked example: Video 4 provides a high level worked example, where we step through the DM process and compare what is the statutory minimum and what is actually required.
On-site BNG: this video focuses specifically on what to do about on-site BNG, including what information you might need to see at planning application stage, when and how to secure BNG. We also tackle the "how should LPAs decide what represents a 'significant' onsite BNG gain?" question.
BNG for planning committees: While some of the detail is still to be worked out, this is our run-through of how we would talk to a planning committee about BNG and the decisions that need to be made about who and how details are worked out post consent.