The Home Builders Federation have published a new report stating that SME builders are not equipped to implement environmental requirements
The report, titled Biodiversity Net Gain: One year on, lays out challenges faced by SME builders in the face of the Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) legislation.
Further highlighted are local authority planning departments having a lack of capacity and causing BNG-related delays.
Biodiversity Net Gain challenges most SMEs
The report surveyed SME builders, and found that 98% of both small- and medium-sized enterprise builders are finding the implementation of Biodiversity Net Gain requirements a challenge.
The number one challenge is with a lack of capacity in local authorities causing delays.
BNG was originally introduced in 2019 and was intended as a means to bring harmony between new developments and their local wildlife. This would help to meet housing targets as well as tackle environmental issues. The law requires that developers must achieve a net gain of 10% in biodiversity in every development.
The issue of local authority planning departments being under-capacity has been in discussion for a long time, causing delays to planning application processing and work starts. The added issue of BNG has caused further delays to housebuilding.
This is reflected in the report’s survey, with 94% of respondents having experienced delays in processing planning applications due to BNG, and 90% having experienced delays due to insufficient BNG expertise or resources in local authorities.
Furthermore, a FOI request by the HBF found that:
- Nearly 40% of local authorities lack access to in-house ecological expertise.
- A quarter of councils have seen ecologists leave their role in the past year.
- One in three councils have not expanded their ecology teams since BNG was introduced.
- Around a quarter of staff recruited to support BNG requirements are temporary.
The HBF is calling on the government to staff local authorities appropriately
Local authorities come under further scrutiny in the report, as it was found that they rely more and more on external consultants, and an average of £23,000 per year is spent on BNG-related consulting fees.
This accounts for the majority of the DEFRA BNG funding allocated to local authorities, even before hiring or training new staff is taken into account.
The HBF attributes this as a symptom of an increasingly complex planning system causing a drop in SME builders that has been a trend for the last few decades, and calls on the government to staff and fund local planning authorities sufficiently to prevent delays to already struggling firms.
Neil Jefferson, chief executive at the Home Builders Federation, says: “The home building industry has embraced BNG and is committed to both increasing housing supply and protecting and enhancing our natural environment.
“However, if we are to increase supply alongside these new requirements it is vital to address emerging barriers to implementation, such as the insufficient resourcing of local authorities, shortage of ecologists, and inadequate national guidance. Government must provide clarity, funding, and support to planning departments so that they can deal with applications effectively and remove this barrier to getting new homes built.”
The HBF report can be read in full here.
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