Biodiversity Net Gain - 12 months in

Ben Stansfield: Ok, good afternoon. So, numbers are, people are pouring in, numbers are increasing but I have got some house keeping and bits and bods to do so, thank you for turning up, you get to hear the exciting stuff about recording, questions and timings.

My name is Ben, Ben Stansfield. I am a sustainability lawyer here at Gowling WLG. And my pleasure to welcome you all to today's webinar, Biodiversity Net Gain 12 months in or if you prefer, Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG)'s first birthday party.

As I say we have got a quick house keeping to do, number one recording, today's session will be recorded, we will upload it to our website and we will email it to you as a follow up and you might even find it on LinkedIn as well.

Questions, as the bottom of the screen you will find a Q&A button, please use that throughout, we will be picking them up, we will try and answer as many as questions in today's session as we can. If we do not get to your question live, I am sorry, I probably just did not understand it. But we will get back to you separately, but yes, my top tip on your questions, is if you keep them super short they have got more chance of being picked up by me.

And then finally timing, we have got an hour in the diary, so hopefully you have got your sandwiches or your soup, we will try and finish a little earlier.

I am going to introduce my brilliant panellists in just a moment, but first I am going to take the chair's privilege and take 60 seconds just to set the nature scene and it has been a wild and exciting 12 months for nature and biodiversity.

Obviously, we have had mandatory or statutory BNG come into effect in England, obviously more on that shortly, that is why we are here. The UK Government published a development and nature recovery working paper in December which had some very exciting and revolutionary ideas about delivering strategic mitigation and developer lead funds.

We have had the 16th conference of the parties to the UN convention and biological biodiversity COP16 in Cally in Columbia last October, that ran out of time and purely by coincidence is ongoing today, this week, in Rome and key to that is securing 200m, sorry €200bn per year into nature by 2030 globally.

And then yesterday, hot off the press, the UK Government published its biodiversity strategy which is a response to that biodiversity framework agreed in Montreal in COP15 and in there, BNG is described as powerful, which is a very useful endorsement given some of the uncertainty rumours we might talk about later.

And then finally, in recent weeks and days we have had a lot of discussion in the news and the media around the potential tension between beneath economic development and protection of the natural world and great crested newts once again, taking one for the team and getting blamed for everything.

But look, that is about five webinars worth of material, so we are going to stick with BNG today but you know biodiversity, it is a big issue for all of us now, it is a boredom issue and if you are a developer, a landowner, a manufacturer, an investor or lender or even dare say a law firm, biodiversity is an issue you need to be thinking about. But it is new, it is a new language, new set of regulations, loads of new acronyms, and a new approach we need to learn, but fortunately, we have three superb teachers with us today and I am delighted to be joined by Helen Emmerson, my colleague, partner in our real estate department and the co-chair of our energy practice.

We have Jack Potter, director of Wild Capital, one of the UK's leading habitat banks, providing both biodiversity units and Nutrient Neutrality credits, and we have Nick White, the principal advisor on net gain at Natural England.

We are slide free today, we are going to keep this quite fast paced, free range and chatty. We have got a rough idea of what might come up, but your questions could take us into some unexpected and unusual places, so let us see where we go.

But first of all, I am going to ask each of you to give me a 60 second, look we are 12 months into BNG life, give me 60 second answer on how has it been for you? So let us go Helen, Jack and then Nick please.

Helen Emmerson: Ok then, how has it been for me? We have learnt a lot over the last 12 months I think it is fair to say. For a lot of the part of the early part of the year, we were certainly in the dark I think, as to what local authorities were going to be looking for in terms of the detail of 106 agreements, conservation covenants and that does make life challenging for landowners, developers looking to do deals, the market for off site habitat banks is something that I have definitely seen an increasing interest in. I think as the start of the year the assumption was developers would be delivering their BNG on site, I think that perspective has moved and there is a lot more interest in looking at how an off site solution might be more easily deliverable for projects. But the devil is really in the detail as you might expect a lawyer to say and I think we are definitely seeing some deals take longer this year than they might otherwise have done and given we have got a pretty challenging economic backdrop at the moment, I think it is fair to say that has not, at times, been hugely welcome.

Ben: Perfect, thank you Helen. Jack.

Jack Potter: Thanks Ben and thanks to Gowlings for having me on today. Yes, I guess for Wild Capital to start with, probably a slow start to be honest. There was probably to be expected, a little bit of a lag between mandatory net gain sort of hitting planning developments and small sites later than that which came through the system quicker. So, there was a little bit of a lag, there was enquires coming through, but they were sort of finding out what the price was going to be, what the impact and developments were and then that has really, really rapidly started ramping up and just seems to be increasing exponentially to be honest, at least over the last six months. Yes, it is really good to see ourselves, Wild Capital getting traction, I think based on some published figures from other habitat providers I think we may be the highest revenue as of a national habitat bank providers in the country and I think the offering that we are offering, the committing nature forever, legally securing that has definitely sort of chiming with some clients and particular infrastructure builders and councils for example and also developers who I guess remember 30 years ago and want to look back in 30 years time and say the nature that we provided has been lasting like their developments are. Yes, it is exciting, it is very busy, and it is just trying to keep up the pace now.

Ben: Perfect, thank you, and then Nick have you been busy?

Nick White: It's been terribly quiet, tumbleweed, no its been a really fascinating year actually because obviously it was busy for us before it went live as well, and then once it went live I was dealing with a lot of queries from a range of different sectors and professions and organisations as people, as Helen and myself are alluding to, trying to understand, trying to get to grips with what is in the policy that was not sometimes set out as clearly at times and trying to fill in some gaps.

And then as Jack said in terms of the actual delivery side of things it being a bit slower but starting to see that starting to really accelerate particularly coming from the autumn onwards as well, and a lot of sites now coming onto the register. A lot of activity happening within development sites as well and a growing level of wider interest of what is going on in England as well. So, getting lots of enquiries from around the world about this.

Ben: Perfect thank you. Well Helen you talked about deals and that is probably the place to start actually, I think that is something that is not often covered on BNG webinars and what have you because you know for a lot of our clients that is where BNG first comes up. So how is it going, how is BNG coming up in land deals and are sellers and their agents are they fully up to speed on the acronyms and the issues?

Helen: So the 30 year commitment aspect of BNG is proving particularly challenging especially in a leasehold context and what I mean by that is for example where you have developers who are taking a 30 year lease for a parcel of land for development we have landlords, perhaps quite understandably, saying at the end of that 30 year lease we would like you to reinstate the site. So far so normal but the expectation is you are reinstating all of that habitat work that you have incorporated as well, were you have delivered your BNG onsite and that, I am not quite sure that is necessarily quite what the policy might have intended and I suspect in due course Nick you will be able to comment on that perhaps.

But there is then a question about well if we are reinstating well how are we going to do that, what is the most appropriate way to do that. Conversely, a similar scenario that the developer who looks to for example you know extend their development, re-power a development, looking for another planning permission. I have got developers saying to me well I have not got to provide any more BNG have I, for this project, even though I have got a new planning permission. I can hand all my BNG land back to the landowner can I not? I do not want to pay rent for that anymore.

So whilst I said right at the start of this that we have all learnt a lot I think there is still a huge education piece needed for all of us around in practice how BNG is being delivered, and BNG is only one part of the natural capital story as well and landowners quite rightly are keen to protect the value of natural capital within their land. But again, there is uncertainty which is unhelpful from a deal perspective because there is then a desire to protect the value of natural capital but I cannot entirely express what that is that I am asking to protect as a landowner but I definitely like to secure the value for the future.

And that is really difficult for a developer to incorporate. And we are seeing actually in the context of BNG overage agreements start to be proposed so you know, land has been sold, BNG units are being created on that land, but a previous landowner is looking to secure additional value should extra BNG units be created on that land in the future.

And then we have ended up in discussions around how do we identify what those extra units are, how are they being managed, are they being managed in a different way to the original units. You know how are we valuing them and in certain situations. I have certainly had deals where it is all potentially started to become a bit more hassle than potentially it is worth. So it is certainly providing a lot of interesting debate possibly a bit of delay actually in transactions as we are all still continuing to grapple with that BNG being incorporated into the deal scenario.

Ben: Perfect and Jack I think we have spoken in the past about, you have been looking at acquiring sites for you habitat banks and does that, as soon as farmers or sellers hear the word habitat bank are they, are they adding an extra zero to the purchase price thinking that, you know you have this new asset class that is going to make gazillions and they want a slice of it?

Jack: Yes some do, I think the trend is when agents get involved that is when the zeros start being added to the value of the land and generally that kills deals because you know we acquire land and the reason for that is because we want to be able to commit it to nature forever which is difficult with a lease scenario, not impossible, we are doing some but it needs the landowner to sign up to it effectively. But yes so when we acquire land and the landowner gets wind that we are doing it for biodiversity net gain everyone has heard about it, they think that is a new revenue stream, there is lots of money in it and they start thinking that their land is special I think is the main thing, which is not strictly correct.

I mean we do, we are picky about where we buy we do not buy land in the middle of a dessert with no biodiversity anywhere near because biodiversity would not be able to access our sites if we did that. So, we do want them near nature but quite often we operate in local authorities and national character area geographies and generally most of those have the ability to deliver a number of different sites which far exceed the demand that is coming forwards from development.

So that makes those landowners that are saying that they are special, not so special because there are lots of other options and I think that as soon as landowners understand that, where there is real value is where you have got a landowner that says you know I am in a local nature recovery strategy therefore my land has an uplift. That would be a reasonable approach to say there is an uplift in value because that translates to an uplift in biodiversity unit value which is quantifiable so I think that is the only scenario where we would really entertain it or if there are deals with particular developers where you know there is an acquisition of land back to back with the development deal for example but at times it is not appropriate and there are lots of other options to go to so it tends to kill the deal. I think agents need to start to realise that.

Ben: Perfect and Nick I wonder if it is possible that you could pick up on Helen's point around that reinstatement after 30 years and I am deliberately asking you because I know what Jack is going to say around that, and Jack, I will ask you to come in on it as well. What happens after 30 years, do farmers just get to plough it all up again and we lose it forever.

Nick: so that is the outcome we do not want to see and to an extent it would depend on what has been created in the first place so if you started to create quite high-quality habitats then they themselves have their own protections within planning. What we are trying to point out though is the fact that you can actually potentially extend the 30 year period beyond that so Jack is offering beyond 30 years anyway but what you can do, what a number of landowners are recognising is that actually if you have scope to further advance the quality of the habitat either through its condition or through its distinctiveness you can begin to essentially enter into layered legal agreement as well where you have got a legal agreement that is running. You may meet the habitat outcome that agreement specifies within ten years for example if it’s a grassland if your land has got the right sort of soils etc to potentially further improve that as a habitat you could then end up with a second agreement that is going to be sitting on top of that first one and begin to extend the period of time that you have land under management.

Obviously yes 30 years ahead is still quite a long time but we would still expect there to be other schemes available which are more geared towards helping people to manage and maintain habitats rather than continuing to improve them.

So legally at the end of 30 years you as a landowner have fulfilled your obligation, there is nothing in that that says you have to keep that land unless the habitat is of a particular quality then you begin to get some level of protection but we want to make the point that actually you have opportunities potentially still to acquire further revenue from that land by entering into these kind of layered agreements as well, and that is what we would like to see over time.

Ben: As a lawyer I love the idea of more legal agreements on top of legal agreements that sounds just my thing. Jack you are unusual in the market because you are not doing 30 years.

Jack: Yes and I think if it is one of the driving reasons the setting up of Wild Capital is I sort of came out of Natural England and the Biodiversity Net Gain team and went into consultancy and I think I was slightly frustrated at what the market looked like, how it was generating and yes, the whole 30 year period, I mean I am from farming family and our family have been in environmental stature in one form or another for the last 30 years and I know that our family does not consider that to be permanent enhancements that have been paid for by tax payers because that is an ongoing sort of grant system that pays for benefits.

If those benefits were not there it would probably justify intensifying the land to fill the gap and generate that money. So, I saw as a consultant that that was also the mindset of many other farmers that are entering into lease agreements and the first question I was asked as a consultant that was a farmer looking to go into a lease agreement was can I plough it up again at the end of 30 years.

And I think that the main point picking up from Nick's description which is very valid and correct and hopeful but I think that they key word is could, they could do that and the reality is that most of these schemes that have been generated, we will always strive for excellence and for over achieving on what we promised on the legal agreement and we hope to deliver priority habitats which would be protected under existing legislation like the environmental impact regulations and but the reality is that most of them probably will not. Selling rich grass land, which is not a priority habitat, maybe 30 years more which is quite a big ask. Likewise, scrub is not a priority habitat, it might well support priority species but there are a lot of ifs and buts here which does not have security over that nature and the developments which are justifying paying for that nature are going to be lasting they are going to be performing in one for or another.

So, I think it is right that the nature is secured legally for nature forever and, you know, we may well be the only ones doing that, but we are not doing it because we want to seize the market and tell people we are the only good guys here. There are a lot of good people out there that are doing great things, and I hope that other providers, our competitors effectively, see what we are doing and follow in our footsteps and say yes that is actually the right thing to do despite it being perceived to be above and beyond the statutory requirements at the moment.

Ben: So, Nick.

Nick: Just to come in on that, it was quite an active decision taken early on when thinking about the kind of original kind of primary legislation in terms if you look internationally off-setting and is secured in perpetuity, but recognising that in England, we live on a small crowed island and there is a lot of competing demands on land and you know the recent framework hopefully will help in that regard but critically for this to work we did not landowners on board and the view was that although there are landowners out there like Jack and others who are happy to kind of enter into quite long term potentially perpetuity agreements. They are the exception and so 30 years was arrived at and to this would get enough interest from the landowner community to make this a viable proposition and with the hope as well though that for many landowners the idea of kind of essentially farming for nature is new to them as well and hopefully through their experience of this it will become less alien and something they can see actually there is a value to the, there is a value to the wider society and continuing to do this as well.

Ben: OK. That's a grand start. Let's move on to Nick, you are a firmed lover of Linked In and you di an amazing Nick White's BNG Advent calendar countdown where you talked about a different misconception around BNG every day. What has frustrated you the most? What have we not got our heads around that you are just sort of banging your head on the wall about?

Nick: I think probably the biggest so a sort of catch all on and the calendar eluded to this to an extent as well because this went across a number of different areas, touches across of different professions is variability of advice so people interpret, everyone is looking at the same pieces of legislation, the same pieces of published guidance that have come out from Government yet the way that then gets interpreted by people can be quite different and sometimes you can point to well potentially the guidance itself is not as clear as it perhaps could have been and there have been instances where guidance has been clarified, but other times it is just somewhat bemusing. For me, an example would be a really frustrating one is instances and I know this happens because I hear it first hand where developers are told by a planning authority well if you are not going to deliver your gains if you can't do it onsite, offsite within this planning authority we are going to refuse you planning permission which is legally wrong at least two counts so it is just like it's that inconsistency equally we heard instances where it is a Gowling legal company, other lawyers working for local Government. We are saying to their clients the Council oh you can't enter into a section 106 agreement with a landowner. That's not legally possible and then having to have a conversation with the Local Authority to say you may want to have different legal advice which is obvious as well because it is possible for you to do so it is things like that. I mean it is beginning to ease through as people I think have got to grips and I think to be fair to people BNG is a real disruptor. It is a shift, it is causing people to have to think quite differently in a lot of different ways and that can take time as well so that I think has been the biggest frustration if you like that variability of advice that has been coming through from different planning authorities, different ecologists, different lawyers etc. etc.

Ben: Yeah, and you touched on section 106s obviously there are three ways to secure BNG into this planning conditions as non-significant onsite and then you have got your 106 or a conservation covenant and for a start for a while they were all 106s because that was the only way we could do it and it was tricky, there was a resource issue I think with LPA's but it seems to me we are moving towards conservation covenants as being that's the future. Is that your view because obviously you are seeing the register you know what is going on predominantly concovs.

Nick: I mean certainly in terms of the offsite element there is more and more con covs coming through and clearly, they were coming from a kind of literally a standing start as well because when BNG was first announced one of the issues was that con cofs have only just started to become a available as well but no we are seeing more offside lands coming through that is legally secured through to conservation covenants but on-sites it is still very much section 106s planning conditions and we were interested as well as to how much the legal profession engaged with con covs because obviously a lot of them are 106s much less so with con covs as well so that has been interesting as well to see the level of engagement people have kind of had with con covs and I think to some extent that has been driven by issues about actually get a 106 there has been a bit of a lottery around whether that has been possible for you which has potentially helped drive people towards con covs and also there is more providers of con covs now as well so it is greater, greater availability, lower prices.

Ben: Yeah, of and as an aside when we were drafting our first conservation covenant which we spoke to our colleague in Ontario in Canada because have a similar thing and we go some template documents which had lots of references to guns, hunting and bears. We had to tailor them a little bit for the local market. This is perhaps a bit of an unfair question Nick because it is more a DEFRA issue in terms of designating responsible bodies but do you think we have got enough RBs or are we going to get a load more, more competition obviously we have got local authorities doing it but they are saying just in my patch.

Nick: So, I know there is a bit of a lag at the moment so it is a separate team within DEFRA that has been dealing with conservation covenants and obviously you have to get section state approval for it I am aware of entities that have been applying or have applied to become responsible bodies and it has taken a while for that process to kind of run through and I think some planning authorities in particular have been a bit frustrated by that particularly whether they are also responsible authorities for local nature recovery strategy etc. but more and more are coming through so I think we are expecting numbers to continue to go up in that regard as well so I think you will get a greater clarity if responsible bodies in the near future as well and ones focusing particularly on certain areas I think as well.

Ben: Jack, when Helen and I are advising clients and they go off and get some offsite units and they got to two or three different providers and they are saying what do you think, you look at the terms and we do that and one of frustration, not frustration that is very strong, one of the curiosities they have is how come this much money and yet a different provider is wanting to charge us a substantial percentage more and biodiversity is biodiversity any right so why is there such a deferential in price. You know what makes a good unit?

Jack: I think it is probably two things mainly one is the habitat type so some habitats I guess yield more than other habitats on whatever the baseline is. If it has a low yield and delivers per hectare then it becomes more expensive and if it has a high yield then you can get more units per hectare, the land value is quite a large proportion of the credit value, so I guess that is one element that is worth probably considering. For those that are listening but aren't so familiar with the trading rules of the metric. There are trading rules, they are slightly different for the areas habitats, hedgerows and rivers and streams but generally the more value the habitat the higher the distinctiveness the more strict the trading rules are and also if you deliver a high distinctiveness habitat it has got flexibility to mitigate for a whole range of different habitats sort of that lie underneath it so there could be difference in prices that is offering to mitigate for the same habitat based on that but I guess the other thing the special risk multiplier so that has an impact and there seems to be a little bit of confusion around I guess what people need to buy more in the special risk multiplier is applied. We take the approach that if someone needs some units and it says in their metric but you need a number of units to meet their trading rules and they get a requirement that we all vote for that number of units even if the special risk multiplier is applied, we will quote for that number of units and that is the promise. Some local authorities and some developers seem to think that when the special risk multiplier applies that they need to buy 33% more units or two times the number of units that it says in their metric and I think that confusion has partly come about because the sort of impact of special risk multiplier has been taken out of the taps where all the calculations are done and it has been put into the headlines results which then actually shows them that they need double the units partway through the calculation so I think that is where the confusion has slightly arisen from but the result is effectively that when the special risk multiplier applies to our site, we still deliver the units that they need but it just takes double the amount of land or 33% more land to deliver the same number of units and that is actually what gets shown on the biodiversity register so when the local authority are cross referencing their biodiversity gameplan which they need to discharge their pre-commencement condition they will be able to see what has been allocated to them, they will go on the register and they will see that number of units has been allocated to them and that will be a post special multiplier so that encompasses the spatial risk multiplier.

Jack: Integrity as well Ben…before this call so yeah talking about higher integrity systems and I guess our offering of having sort of independently ring fenced finance which is independently managed and we do not have access to that so we are sort of setting aside that money and we do not have access to it, it isa high integrity system as well as proposing it for perpetuity. We are finding that actually even though we are doing those things, we are not actually more expensive. You don't have to pay more to have a better quality product, 99% of the time I'm saying.

Ben: Perfect. Thank you so I will just encourage people we are halfway through. We have had a few questions come through which we can sort of we’ll pick up as we go but please don't forget it is very easy just to absorb all the information you are getting in the webinar but please do ask a few questions as well. I was going to ask a bit about monitoring because that is often something from the developer side you buy a unit and then, you are buying a compliance product right. You can show that to the local authority, you can start digging on site and you do not eve really need to think about what is happening at the habitat bank again, in realty a lot of clients do because they care so what does monitoring involve because you know you have got 30 years of monitoring, is that someone going round with the clipboard counting bumble bees, is it putting drones up using A1 to work out what is going on and I guess Nick how much do you care as Natural England? What is going on once you have got a decent con cov and a good habitat monitoring plan. Are you looking at the monitoring plan?

Nick: So we do not directly ourselves but we do have a real interest in this because what we want to see at the end of the day is good quality outcomes being delivered and kind of managed and maintained as well so there variety of different ways that monitoring can take place so first thing to say is that you should have set out in the habitat management and monitoring, the clue's in the title plan in terms of how you are going to as a landowner can provide this information to either the responsible body if it is secured through a con cov or the planning authority if it is a section 106 it is securing the land and that legal agreement should set that out as well as it is quite clear to all parties involved what the expectation is.

In practice, we know that there is always going to be resource pressures in terms of who is available to be able to do this and a lot of it should be fairly routine as well so we think there is actually a real role for technology to come into play here as well I know a number of kind of products are now becoming available in the market place where they can give you using a combination of ariel drone imagery. They can have ana analysis in terms of does this site look like it is performing as you would expect it to do and I think that is helpful because I think what that then enables is the actual human effort to be much more targeted towards those sites where it does not appear that progress is being made that it is being suggested and we are talking about 30 years here so there should be plenty of time to address if things have gone wrong as well and again the agreement should set out what the expectations are and the parties so there is time for landowners to address this so I think it is going to be a combination of different types both remote as well as on the ground kind of monitoring. It will depend going to an extent of what Jack was also saying on the habitats involved somewhere inherently riskier and more likely to failure and you may want to focus more effort on those than others but and at the end of the day if necessary because obviously there would be course for enforcement but no effort to deliver the outcomes required. No one wants to get to that point, so we want better opportunities to address things and making use of the kind of resourcing available and the technologies coming through to kind of help support that process as well.

Ben: Right so we'll have a question then and I'm going to come to you Helen first but I think probably everyone is going to probably have a view on this but the question is if you are acting for a small house builder, isn't it just a lot easier for the to pay a financial contribution under a 106 rather than having to deal with all this BNG malarkey doing lots of postage stamps around the country. Is that what small developers are going to want Helen?

Helen: So, I think the answer is undoubtedly making that one easy payment and you get your piece of paper as you alluded to earlier Ben. It certainly is very attractive both from the perspective of the small house builder is very competent and specialised in what they do and habitat monitoring is not their specialist subject so it is not core business for them and that is a very real consideration and I am certainly aware of clients who are having to go through that analysis of do we want to pivot our business to include delivery of BNG as something that we do in-house or actually do we just pay the money to the Jacker Potter's of this world and get the piece of paper.

The other consideration as well as do we want to do this ourselves is also around it is a project, a development that is going to be sold in the future, you are potentially going to have to go through a diligence process on that, how are you going to demonstrate to an incoming buyer, an incoming funder that you have complied with and are still and indeed will for the remainder of the 30 years be compliant with those obligations going forwards and I think that is a relevant factor in considering whether an offsite provision is an easier solution or not for a particular developer. That is not to say though that we don't have a lot of clients who are really keen to commit to biodiversity across their portfolio and it is something they genuinely want to incorporate as part of their business.

Ben: Nick, is there anything you would like to add to that Nick?

Nick: Yeah, I mean just kind of building what Helen was saying at the end particularly there as I agree with there, there will be instances where actually its easier to try and deal with this offsite. Obviously, there is the biodiversity gain hierarchy within the kind of practice guidance that you need to be able to evidence to that extent they tried to achieve gains on site but there will always be circumstances where actually that is not possible or ecologically that is not sensible because I think people are recognising that this biodiversity net gain is about nature but actually we know nature can provide our brains with other benefits to us as people in terms of health and wellbeing but also the resilience of places, the liveability, wider kind of placemaking if you like as well so I think there is often a wider story at play here as well where developers are keen to include sometimes other features within the scheme sometimes it is things like suds or other things which can all count towards your biodiversity net gain and which depending on what the value of what you were developing on in the first place may go some way to actually fully meeting that net gain requirement or not so I think it will be quite variable it depend on the type of site being developed and the smaller the site, the more challenging potentially BNG can be to do onsite albeit if it is a very urban site, it may still be quite easy because it may have a very low base line so there is multiple kind of variables as to what may be the best solution. There is also products coming through as well which also will make some of this easier for particularly smaller developers where there is tools available that they can plug their metrics into which will help them make a decision as to what's best or most appropriate for their scheme as well.

Ben: Jack have you…

Jack: I think the whole you know Nick talking about offsite or onsite but for me I think the missing part of this is not really being spoken about at the moment is all about sort of being proportional to the population and the use of the site they had wider planning content isn't being spoken about enough in the nature context and you know I am all for having people having access to nature and that is obviously a really important thing but when I have seen developers proposing local meadow on road verges which just isn't achievable or the only green space that is available for a community where they are living is being turned into scrub which is then paid for my a service charge to manage and maintain and monitor which they didn't have access to, their children can't pay football on and they can't let their dog run around. So I think there are lots of things about whether the habitat is proposed and actually appropriate for that community that is living there or the use of the site and also if that is the case and there is going to be a conflict there is a very robust system, that going to be lasting for 30 years when there are different needs and pressures that are going to be applied to it which are actually the ones that pay for it. So there is that side of things which I think needs to be talked about more and just regarding small sites I think it is a challenge for small sites because it is new I think this is probably more of a shock to small sites that it is for larger developers and well I think the overriding thing that I think is really important is just sustainability you know it is happening to the environment as a pillar of sustainability following mitigation hierarchy and actually having a cost which is precaution of the impact on the environment. I think as soon as you start talking about contributions that are just standard across the board it loses the meaning of what an impact to the environment is but should be factored into viability and whether a site should be brought forwards or not.

Ben: ….OK a quick one and Nick this is probably a quick one for you so Anders on here is the founder of one of the largest if not the largest and most prestigious ecological consultancy in Sweden has asked a question on the basis you know you are talking to the BNG being looked at internationally and I know Ecogain I have been looking at BNG for Scandinavia and he said will there be an official national evaluation of the first 12 months of BNG you know sort of a lessons learned document from Natural England or are we going to be relying on webinars like these to pick up the answers.

Nick: So the good news here is that there is a monitoring and evaluation framework and piece of work underway and had been for a bit now on biodiversity net gain because we and the Government want to understand what is the policy delivering as expected or not or is there a need for some tweaks to be made so yes there will be the first report of that should be due out in the spring sometime since a piece of work that is being contracted out a company called Eunomia operated are doing this on behalf of Natural England and we anticipate this being a repeat exercise going forward as well so that we have that sort of macro view of what is happening in terms overall of BNG both in terms of the nature outcomes also that kind of people side of things and process as well, is it helping to kind of smooth planning processes or not. What we don't get is getting involved in the site specific individual project level but certainly at that macro level yes there will be that evaluation available.

Ben: Perfect and then there is a question about, well I alluded to this at the start about this. Sometimes there is tension between oh we've got to have growth, we've got to have economic growth and stuff and then there is the nature but someone has asked about is the BNG market, has that correlated a lot of economic growth you know are the new, obviously you are keeping lawyers very busy which is great documents on documents but is there is an understanding how big is the market you know. Is this been a success story that we can explore?

Jack: Absolutely and I think this is the bit that often sometimes gets missed as well but this is a growth area in its own right if you like as well so we have currently got I think my last count was 46 sites now registered, about 1,500 hectares. There are more sites being onboarded every week as well so that figure is going up all the time. It is really interesting and we are seeing new entrants coming forward so there entities like Jack's coming on to the market but there are some non-usual suspects coming forward as well so people you wouldn't necessarily think of as being interested in managing nature on their site but they have got skills that are accessible to them to be ale to do that but it has also led to a whole of kind of injection of venture capital into the kind of nature tech space as well so there are companies and products coming through which are providing kind of tools and services , banners like we talked earlier about monitoring and AI and things like that. Other kind of electronic digital marketplaces and some of that work is now starting to get exported internationally as well so UK plc is benefiting if you like from BNG because at the moment, we are seeing very much in the forefront of the kind of nature tech and kind of field as well so yeah kind of exciting in that regard.

Ben: Perfect. Thank you. I wanted to ask about local authorities right so you've got as mandatory at least 10% and some local authorities saying actually we need to do 20% maybe 25%. You have got some London Borough saying maybe we need to go to 30% which is probably an indication of how terrible biodiversity baselines are in Tower Hamlets or whatever. Is that something that Natural England is going to welcome because obviously you know presumably great for Wild Capital banks all those sort of more units to sell right but are you happy local authorities doing their own thing?

Jack: So we were really supportive and pushed hard for when the legislation was first being drafted that the 10% be a minimum 10% but we also recognise though that going beyond that there needs to be a degree of caution being exercised by planning authorities here as well and so we also understood why they kind of wording on BNG actually got kind of strengthened slightly in this regard so legally 10% you can't challenge that. That is the law. Beyond that, that is challengeable so our advice to planning authorities is think it through, make sure you have got good local evidence as to whether you feel that you can go above yeah 10% and an example of in a London Borough for example where you may have most if not all of your sites quite low value and obviously the 10% relates to the base line so above can be quite easy to achieve, but also what are you expectations? If you have also got a local requirement or local planning requirement say you want local delivery well are their sites available locally for people to live I as well so set out very clearly is our advice in your local plan as to what your expectations are on a development and have a robust evidence base because someone will probably take you to, some will probably legally challenge you on this so expect to have to be able to defend it.

Ben: Yeah. It is obviously BNG's first birthday party. If we come back to BNG's second birthday party, BNG will be a toddler. It will be running round walking, fully wind having tantrums, but I'm going to come to all of you on this, but Jack, I'll come to you first. What are we going to be talking about, what is the agenda for next year's webinar? What will the good stuff have been and what will we be dealing with? A ridiculous question I know but I'm just trying to set my agenda for next year's webinar.

Jack: Well, I mean I would say that a lot of the stuff that is maybe being talked about now as being an issue will be a non-issue like education and local authorities, education amongst developers but also the number available offsites opportunities for people. I think there will be a load of stuff that is maybe currently an issue or maybe take a bit of time to come through with new policy and legislation that won't be in a year's time so I think it just needs a little bit of time to bed in but I think what may be the conversation we will move to is actually this is although BNG is 10years in evolution to get to the point when it was mandatory which is a long time to test and talk to the market with i. It is still not perfect. You know, I think everyone even people are the biggest fans will say it is not perfect so I think hopefully the conversation will maybe start moving to where the teething issues? Are rivers and streams too onerous to be able to actually be in the implemented in practice is there too much risk associated with them? Do we need to change the approach there or you know is strategic significance enough of a driver to make sure the nature is put in the right place whether on development sites or whether offsites is those sorts of conversation but hopefully it will start moving to these teething issues will become a non-issue.

Ben: Perfect thank you Helen what do you think we are going to be talking about in 12 months?

Helen: I think in 12 months we will be reflecting on the changes that are coming up in November this year when in respect of infrastructure projects. What we are going to find is that DCOs that are granted for those Nsip projects are going to be subject to BNG from November and is that going to create a huge demand for more units as a result and then I suppose the question then is well will we see a CPO for land required for BNG. That feels tricky I have to say because obviously there is an alternative to CPO in in land which is to buy units so I think you should have an agenda item for next year's webinar around that kind of Nsip kind of conundrum Ben.

Ben: Nick what does the next 12 months, what will you be untangling?

Nick: Agreed with Helen with talking about Nsops something else we have touched on and I think we will have more to go on next time around is this question around what does kind of good management and maintenance, what is realistic? What does that look like as well because there has been a lot in the commentary around the one year anniversary, around BNG hasn't actually delivered very much. Well it won't have yet because it is literally only a year old and if you understand the planning system and understand how BNG sits within it, it is going to take a while before schemes actually need to do stuff on site or get to the point of needing to purchase units from companies like Jack's so beginning to think and see actually how is it beginning to deliver and have a better sense of that because it is too early to be able to talk about the ecology aspects of it really at the moment and then what we can talk about is the re-enforcing of the mitigation hierarchy that I believe is happening with people avoiding clearing sites where previously and may have done in seeking to retain habitat so pivoting on to that OK what does delivery of it actually look like and hopefully more kind of case studies and sharing of good practice and that side of things.

Ben: We have got a few more minutes left so we are going to try and do, just had some questions in one of which I think I'm going to put to you Jack and hopefully you will find finance director is not listening but are prices going up or down?

Jack: I think it is back where it is to be honest. You know some areas is very geographically constrained and sometimes it is not so you know also competition as well will drive the price down so I think invariably the prices have gone down but I think there was quite a rush I think initially when biodiversity net gain became mandatory where there were lots of people coming into the space, lots of people on the market saying I've got you this to sell here including actually my own family farm but I think it became realised after a bit of consultancy and getting a base line and a proposal. The actual obligations on offset you know provision and the admin that's involved to actually process those and can comply with legal agreements. I think a lot of them fall away including my family farm because it is a full time job to be ale to administer and understand the intricacies of it so I think there has been a sort of rush at the start which may be sort of drove the price down probably quite rapidly at the start and then it sort of levelled off because it didn't go back up again because there was a perception of competition actually I think a lot of the competition was competitors in the offsetting space had probably fallen away now actually and then there will be more that fall away when it comes to reality.

Ben: Yeah. OK. Thank you. Nick one for you and I've eluded to this sort of working paper, the planning reform working paper on development and nature recovery, and someone says is the Government's suggestion that they are going to change BNG to a central fund that developers simply pay into rather than doing their own BNG commitments. Is that actually going to come in and impact BNG?

Nick: No so that was not a suggestion for BNG. It was a suggestion that there is this nature restoration fund that you as a developer can pay into to help deliver the mitigation measures for potential species or impact some protected sites but that can work with BNG so those habitat based outcomes they absolutely can also count towards your BNG if they are on the register and legally secured etc. so we are keen to make sure that BNG and NRF can and do plug into one another and are as interested as anyone else is in terms of what actually hits Parliament by way of legislation and its passage through the house as well.

Ben: Perfect. Thank you. I am scrolling through the questions and struggling to pick my way though, we are not going to be able to get through them all, there is another 20 or so that we have not responded to but we will download those and I suspect I will have the first go at putting some bullet points together and I will see Nick, Jack and Helen could be persuaded to mark my work and get that because there is some really important stuff out there but I think we will probably call it a day there. We will circulate that note afterwards but it doesn't sound like BNG is dead which is terrific news. Long live BNG. We have covered a huge amount of ground, so I want to thank everybody for joining us and posing some great questions. I'm sorry we could not do them all. I want to thank my panellists so thank you Jack, thank you Nick, thank you Helen for sharing your insights and a huge thank you to Rosie who you've not seen. She's behind the scenes and she has been the brains putting this together so thank you so much Rosie. Really appreciate it. We will send you a copy of the recording. Please feel free to share that with your colleagues who couldn't make it and you will be able to say look I saw this live. It was amazing and you have to watch it. Yeah and if you have any unanswered BNG questions please do send them through and we would love to hear from you so thank you all very much for listening.