Ecological Design and Biodiversity Net Gain – A Case for Better Collaboration 

Ensuring new developments retain and protect important wildlife, as well as delivering net gains for biodiversity, can be a tricky business. There’s a long list of things that planning policy states a development must deliver, and pretty much every one of these influences biodiversity.   

Ecology is complex, too. It can be quite different depending on whether you’re in central London or rural Lincolnshire. Add to this the proven need to provide opportunities to get people close to nature, and you’ve very often got a complex web to untangle if good outcomes are to be delivered.  

Ecology consultants play a key role. It’s not an easy job. To be effective, we need to be savvy about planning and be responsible for understanding what influences development design.   

Tyler Grange has been providing advice and support for developers for 15 years. Over that time we’ve learned a great deal in terms of what works and what doesn’t. But, as this blog explains, to give the best advice we really can’t do this in isolation.  

We need to be part of the design team for our advice to be most effective. That way, ecology strategies can be baked into design concepts early on. Doing this avoids late changes and ultimately delivers a more coherent design with good outcomes for biodiversity and the development as a whole.  Sadly, we’re often brought in too late, or even not included at all.  

 We’ve always advocated for and recognised the importance of, collaboration with the local planning authorities (LPAs) and regulators. We’ve found this has been the best way to deliver the good outcomes for our clients, their developments and the environment.   

 The importance of collaborative working is recognised in British Standard Ecology guidance and the ecologists’ professional institute’s (CIEEM) competency framework. Expertise can be tapped into through pre-application service. We ecologists need to recommend when this is appropriate (it won’t be for every site). That way the scope of issues where most effort should be expended can be agreed. And for trickier issues, we get consensus on what is feasible and likely to work.   

 Working closely with the LPA helps to build trust and – dare we say it – actually can make a project (and future projects in the same area) more enjoyable.  

Ecology used to be just above ‘AOB’ on the agenda at client meetings. It is now right up there, thanks to biodiversity net gain (BNG). This is good news for us in some ways, because we’re more often part of the conversation early on. But, treating BNG in isolation, which has often been the case, does not usually lead to a good development design. Nor does it deliver good outcomes for biodiversity within the development.   

 Thankfully this is changing as we’re all learning together and getting used to how BNG should be applied as a tool, rather than defining a development. But the financial sums are in some cases – eye-watering. Together with the welcome need for monitoring to check things are working out as planned, it has increased the pressure on ecologists to deliver.   

We suspect not.   

 The “art” of collaboration – or even sometimes communication – does seem to have been in decline of late, based on experience and seeing what others are doing.  

 To test this theory, we sent a short questionnaire to local authority ecologists. We were delighted when 35 people took time out of their very busy schedules to respond – it clearly struck a chord with them.   

 This is what they said:   

• 84% of responders thought that there wasn’t enough collaboration happening between local authorities and ecologists.     

• 75% saw no evidence that collaboration was happening between design teams and ecologists.   

• Roughly the same number felt that biodiversity net gain made pre-planning collaboration more important. Worryingly, 59% thought that there had been no change in working relationships since the introduction of mandatory biodiversity net gain.   

Benefits of collaboration included:  

• Time saving  

• Better placemaking for residents and occupiers  

• Really importantly, reduced likelihood of objections, and reduced costs  

• Better outcomes for biodiversity and better integration of biodiversity within the development  

• Interestingly, they felt collaboration leads to less pressure  

• 78% cited that sharing information and ideas about what has worked and not worked in the past would be valuable to future applications. (They had some ideas for how that could be achieved, which we’re coming on to).  

We think there are a few reasons:  

• Connectivity. Ecology consultants may not be being proactive enough in defining the project brief with their clients, to include collaboration with the design team and the LPA.  

• Cost. Pre-application advice can be expensive, especially for large sites. Finding the budget to pay for this can be challenging.    

• Capacity. Even if you do pay for this, capacity issues within an LPA can cause long wait times for them to be processed.   

Be more proactive. As consultants, we can be more proactive, requesting that we attend design meetings where appropriate, and seeking pre-application meetings or advice from regulators where trickier issues exist, or novel approaches are necessary.   

Funding. Despite being a key part of Labour’s plan, our government needs to invest more in planning and planning departments and make sure that there are enough experts in post at local authority level to make sure things keep moving. You’d imagine pretty much every local authority ecologist would say the same – more resources are needed.   

 Training. We need better understanding of what each party is trying to achieve by attending and also providing training. For example, we’re not designers, but we need to work with design teams and understand how they operate. Similarly, with architects or engineers – there’s a group of people that we need to work with to ensure that the advice we provide is relevant and helpful.  

Learning together  

It’s great to share good practice. However, there are precious few ways of sharing good practice and reports that are relevant to a development, such as through BCT’s Roost website. LPAs felt this is something that CIEEM and possibly the Planning Advisory Service (PAS) could work together on.  

One thing we have to remember is: it doesn’t always work.   

We all know you learn most from the mistakes you’ve made or the things that haven’t gone well. Today it can be termed as ‘black box thinking’, a phrase coined by renowned author and speaker, Matthew Syed. Essentially, it’s a case of reviewing what went wrong and sharing it, because we don’t want someone to fall over the log that we tripped over!  

Clearly, there are risks involved with talking about the things that have gone wrong, although at the end of the day, there are almost always ways in which we can improve. What’s important is what you do about that and how you deal with it, because normally things are salvageable.  

Close collaboration with the LPA’s ecology team and the design team proved fundamental for this high profile, resi-lead 190 hectare development in Warwickshire.  You can learn how opportunities to deliver good outcomes for biodiversity and how the design principles were fully embedded in the green infrastructure design here.   

The project has proved to be a huge hit for wildlife and the new residents alike. It won the CIRIA large scale habitat creation award in 2023, and, commended in CIEEM’s Best Practice Award Large-Scale Project Mitigation, Compensation and Enhancement.  

 Through close collaboration and a desire to understand the viewpoints of different disciplines and stakeholders on a project, we have seen great results. When you open the forums of discussion, you encourage real, human interaction, rather than siloed, transactional relationships.   

 As we’re all learning with the changing face of ecology and development through new metrics such as biodiversity net gain, we can meet challenges together, understand what motivates decisions and find workable solutions. As we have discovered, more collaboration is something we all see the need for in our industry. It’s only through making the effort to do it that we reap the benefits, build trust between partners and pave the way for more successful future projects.   

 You can find out more about biodiversity net gain and how it impacts development, as well as a host of other shared ideas and information in other blogs and articles we’ve shared. Get in touch with us to start collaboration today!