People interact with planning processes, and the natural environment, in diverse ways, as residents, homebuyers, volunteers, and more, yet their role in delivering Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) is often overlooked.
Findings from research into how developers and local authorities engage with communities, across the housing development lifecycle, reveal a wealth of tacit knowledge on how public involvement can support BNG outcomes. Still, meaningful engagement requires navigating trade-offs, and investing in long-term strategies for transparency, accountability, and shared stewardship.
In early 2024 the UK government introduced legislation requiring that when housing or infrastructure development occurs in England, habitat for wildlife is left in a measurably better state than before.
This Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) legislation is ambitious for nature and for people. The Institute of Development Studies and Natural England researched opportunities for people’s engagement to support delivery of BNG commitments in the house-building sector. A year on from the start of mandatory BNG, here’s a preview of a report coming soon that will help developers and planning authorities better engage people for BNG. The more the public are involved in designing, planning and implementing biodiverse habitats in the first place, the more likely they are to support long-term delivery.
What have people got to do with it?
The BNG policy requires developers to deliver a net gain in biodiversity of 10% over a minimum thirty-year period. In producing plans for local authority approval, developers must apply the Biodiversity Gain Hierarchy. This means they should enhance or create habitats on-site, fund off-site habitat and biodiversity improvement projects (both of which count as ‘BNG units’) or, as a last resort, buy statutory BNG credits – in that order. Planning authorities are tasked with approving developers’ plans and overseeing their implementation over thirty years.
People engage in planning processes and with nature in multiple ways: as local residents, house-buyers, lovers of the environment, constituents of local authorities and members of local or national voluntary groups. Our research, drawing on case studies and sector expertise, found that developers and local authorities can engage with people and their organisations in each phase of the housing development process:
- Pre-construction phase – by designing and planning with people
- Construction and occupation phase – by encouraging people’s sense of ownership of local biodiversity
- Long-term management and monitoring phase – by working with communities to monitor progress.
Pre-construction phase: designing and planning with people
The backdrop to BNG is Local Plans, which set planning priorities in a local authority area. These balance housing, economic development and the nature recovery needs prioritised in emerging Local Nature Recovery Strategies (LNRSs).
Mandatory public consultation processes around Local Plans and LNRSs are an opportunity for planning authorities to inform and involve communities on BNG and establish local priorities for nature. Going beyond minimal consultation requirements and actively exploring how people currently use open spaces for recreation, active travel and wellbeing, and their aspirations for the places where they live, is a good investment for planning authorities. It can help planners strengthen support for decisions made and get community buy-in to local nature recovery aims, contributing to local authorities’ management and oversight of BNG commitments long-term. Brookleigh development in Mid-Sussex has worked hard at this.
Integrating local views and knowledge about habitats and nature priorities can help developers, too. Community engagement at the design stage could be an early chance for housing developers to explain BNG policy, consider different options and build ownership of the habitats that then get enhanced or created, whether on- or off-site. The first crop of LNRSs now becoming available are a new opportunity for developers to shape their BNG plans in line with local nature recovery priorities.
Construction and occupation phase: encouraging people’s ownership of local biodiversity
While you can’t interest all homebuyers in nature, some will pay a premium to live in it. By integrating BNG plans in their sales strategies, developers could increase the value homeowners attach to biodiversity and shift perceptions of what a well-maintained site looks and feels like. Marketing communications, open days, show homes and welcome packs can all help with this.
Once houses are built and sold, homeowners have a role in ensuring onsite BNG gets delivered, both directly as users of the space and indirectly through site management companies and agents. Developers’ BNG commitments are set out in Habitat Management and Monitoring Plans (HMMPs), available on council planning portals. LPAs sharing these plans online and developers providing accessible versions of them to homebuyers could help residents feel ownership of BNG commitments and steer managing agents towards appropriate landscaping and maintenance.
Partnerships with nature charities are seen by some developers as key to their BNG strategy. These partnerships have generated some great innovations designed to build residents’ positive attitudes towards BNG, through championing nature-friendly landscaping, planting and other features onsite.
We found environmental charities and social businesses with considerable experience in selling BNG units on land they manage or on behalf of landowners keen to support high-value new habitats. This can create valuable public goods: well-maintained offsite habitats, a more nature-aware public and trained volunteers to steward these local nature conservation and recovery projects. Trust for Oxfordshire’s Environment is an example. The growing market for securing offsite and managing onsite BNG expands the opportunities of these non-profit facilitators, who have earned strong public trust through their track record of connecting people with nature. Accountability and transparency to the public around BNG will be well-served through their expertise and knowledge.
Long-term management and monitoring phase: working with communities to monitor progress
Nature stewardship practices common among UK environmental charities include citizen science – people monitoring biodiversity – as well as citizen oversight – people monitoring compliance with laws and policies. Both can help in monitoring BNG, with a look at how existing competences can be built on for this purpose.
Citizen oversight of compliance and performance is part of daily life for housing developers and planning authorities. A watchful public could provide eyes and ears on the ground as to on- and offsite progress. Oversight by residents and local communities equipped with user-friendly versions of HMMPs could help local authorities focus their monitoring and enforcement efforts over the thirty years. User-friendly apps of the ‘Fix my Street’ variety would make it easy to report progress and any perceived breaches.
To be useful, public monitoring is best done by recognisable bodies working within agreed parameters. To be sustained, it needs to generate relatively quick results, to keep the monitors energized. This points to a role for nature charities or resident associations in setting up and supporting it.
There are obvious opportunities to build public engagement synergies between LNRS and BNG. Local Nature Partnerships (LNPs) and others that were integral to LNRS stakeholder engagement, as in the Tees Valley case, stand ready to co-deliver, monitor and review their LNRS. Given the space and resources, LNRS stakeholders like LNPs could serve as a ready community of public monitors for BNG, drawing on the same place-based knowledge, groups and relationships.
Thirty-year management strategies for onsite and offsite BNG need to be built on continuity, consistency and accountability to the public. Co-delivery activities such as community stewardship and oversight are likely to be useful complements to local authority and developer efforts.
A better-informed public is a public more committed to helping deliver on BNG
The idea of BNG is quite simple, but the details can seem very technical. Support for nature among the general public is considerable, with instances of ongoing interfaces between government bodies and sections of the public around specific nature recovery aims, as in Warwickshire’s Natural Capital Assessment Partnership.
One basic pre-condition for conducive public engagement is more and better public information from local sources on how mandatory BNG will work in specific places. Another is public education, to build understandings of what kinds of places are good for biodiversity and nature recovery and how they need to be managed.
Together, these measures and opportunities could contribute to greater personal and public investment in BNG measures, including enhancing, creating and maintaining habitats – and to the success of BNG legislation.
Watch this space for our full report in May 2025.