BNG condition discharged at chicken farm

Whilst we wouldn't ordinarily post a news item on discharging a planning condition we wanted to point out the complexity and bureaucracy that still blights the planning system.

Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) was a concept brought in a few years ago whereby almost all planning applications (bar a few exceptions such as householder) need to make provision for 10% BNG.  Whilst the principle of this requirement is well intentioned the implementation of the policy has been a headache for landowners and their agents and also for ecological consultants.

This application was for a third chicken shed at a farm and, whilst the previous two were done under permitted development rights and exempt from BNG, this shed needed full planning and was caught by BNG.  This meant our client had to pay for an ecologist to visit the site and in essence ‘score’ the ecological value of the land on a spreadsheet then demonstrate how 10% gain would be achieved.  So more costs for our client.  

This was all done as part of the planning application but after the permission was issued the client had to by law discharge the BNG condition that is automatically applied to applications that need BNG.  Again more time and money.  In this instance there was an element of dispute with the council's ecologist over the level of information required which again resulted in more time and money for our client as our ecologist argued the case with RCC.  

The condition has now been discharged but the process just feels too much of a burden for smaller developments and this is why the government are consulting on raising the bar to allow smaller sites to be exempt from BNG but for now we are stuck with the current system.