Local nature recovery strategies in applications

A local nature recovery strategy is not a development plan document, so it carries no section 38(6) status. It is still the document that decides whether your habitat creation attracts the high strategic significance category in the statutory biodiversity metric, and it is the document a public authority is now required to have regard to when exercising its functions. For local nature recovery strategy planning purposes, that combination makes it more useful than its status suggests.

Practitioners who read the strategy before designing the landscape scheme get better metric outputs for the same money. Those who read it afterwards redraw.

What a local nature recovery strategy is and who prepares it

Local nature recovery strategies were created by Part 6 of the Environment Act 2021. England is divided into strategy areas, each with a responsible authority designated by the Secretary of State, typically a county council, a combined authority, a unitary or the Greater London Authority, working with partner authorities and local records centres.

Each strategy has two statutory components. A statement of biodiversity priorities, which sets out what the area is trying to achieve and the measures that would contribute. And a local habitat map, which shows those priorities spatially.

Publication has been staggered across the country, so the first thing to check is whether the strategy covering your site has actually been published, whether it is in draft, and what the responsible authority has said about the status of the draft. A draft can be a material consideration. It cannot be treated as the final article.

The mapped areas it identifies

The local habitat map distinguishes two categories that matter for an application. Areas of particular importance for biodiversity, which include national conservation sites and other locally identified areas. And areas that could become of particular importance, which is where the strategy proposes habitat creation or improvement.

That second category is the interesting one. It is forward looking, and it is the layer that tells you where creating a species-rich grassland or a new woodland belt would be doing something the area actually wants, rather than something that merely scores in a spreadsheet.

Read the measures as well as the map. Strategies express priorities as specific actions, for example restoring a named river corridor, reconnecting fragmented woodland, or creating wetland in a particular catchment, and a scheme that delivers one of those named measures has an argument that a scheme delivering generic amenity planting does not.

How strategic significance affects net gain calculations

The statutory biodiversity metric applies a strategic significance multiplier to habitat units, with low, medium and high categories. Habitat in a location formally identified in a local strategy attracts the highest category. A location that is ecologically desirable but not identified in a strategy sits in the middle. Everywhere else sits at the bottom.

Take the actual multiplier values from the current published version of the statutory metric rather than from a secondary source, because the metric is revised and the values are the sort of detail that gets reported out of date.

The effect is not trivial. The same hectare of created habitat, in the same condition, generates more units inside a mapped area than outside it. For a scheme with a tight net gain position this is the cheapest uplift available, because it is a question of where you put the habitat rather than how much you spend on it.

A Biodiversity Net Gain Assessment has to be completed by a competent person under the Environment Act 2021 regime, with the biodiversity gain plan approved by the local planning authority, so the metric work is not a drafting exercise. Our drafts are a starting point for that professional, not a substitute for them.

Weight in decision making and in plan making

Three distinct routes give a strategy weight.

Section 40 of the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006, as amended by the Environment Act 2021, requires public authorities to consider what action they can take to further the general biodiversity objective and to have regard to any relevant local nature recovery strategy. That duty applies to the local planning authority determining your application.

National policy expects plan-making to take account of the strategies, so adopted local plans will increasingly carry policies that reference the mapping directly. Where that has happened, the mapping has acquired development plan weight through the policy rather than in its own right.

And as a material consideration, the strategy supports or undermines the ecological case for a scheme in the ordinary way. Note that it cuts both ways. A proposal that would remove habitat the strategy identifies as a priority for restoration is in a worse position than it would have been before the strategy existed.

Checking the published strategy for your area

Work out the responsible authority for the site, then take the documents from that authority rather than from a summary. You want three things: the statement of biodiversity priorities, the local habitat map in a form you can overlay on the site, and the date and status of publication.

Where the mapping is available as a dataset, get it into the drawing rather than working from a screenshot. Boundaries drawn at strategy scale do not resolve well at site scale, and a site that appears to sit inside a mapped area at 1:50,000 may sit outside it at 1:1,250. Say in the report which you have relied on, and at what scale.

Ask the responsible authority where the mapping is uncertain. These are new documents, produced at pace, and the people who made them are usually willing to clarify what a polygon was intended to capture.

Aligning on-site habitat creation with the mapping

The design moves that follow are straightforward once the strategy is open on the desk.

• Put created habitat in the part of the site that falls within, or adjoins, a mapped area.
• Choose habitat types the strategy names, rather than the type that happens to score well in the metric.
• Connect to the mapped network across the boundary, with hedgerow, scrub or grassland links rather than isolated parcels.
• Buffer existing features the strategy identifies, at a width an ecologist will defend.
• Phase the works so that habitat creation is not left to the last plot.

A Preliminary Ecological Appraisal by a suitably qualified ecologist should pick all of this up at the baseline stage, and the design response belongs in the Landscape Strategy and, on larger schemes, in a Green Infrastructure Plan.

Evidence that demonstrates the alignment

Officers are reading a lot of applications that claim alignment. Make yours checkable.

The most effective format is a short table with one row per relevant priority or measure from the strategy, the design response, the drawing it appears on and the metric consequence. Add a plan showing the site against the local habitat map, with the scale and the data source stated, and a note of the strategic significance category claimed for each created habitat parcel and why.

Then be honest about what the scheme does not do. A development that cannot deliver a priority measure because of its size or location is better off saying so and explaining what it does deliver, rather than stretching a wildflower verge into a contribution to landscape-scale connectivity. Officers read both kinds of document, and they can tell them apart.

For specialist technical reports, qualified professional input may be required. This is general guidance rather than legal advice, so check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it.

Enter your postcode on PlanScope to see which reports a scheme in a mapped nature recovery area is likely to need. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.