Purpose

To ensure that the Council has adequate revenue to monitor BNG, there is, therefore, a requirement to update the fee outlined in the ‘Gedling Borough Council Biodiversity Net Gain Guidance (April 2024)’ to better reflect costs that are likely to be incurred.
To this end, reproduced in appendix 3, is a BNG monitoring fee calculator. It is based on other similar calculators used in the country and identifies costs based on the size of the site, maximum technical difficulty of the habitats to be enhanced/created and the frequency of monitoring instances set out in the approved Habitat Management and Monitoring Plan for the site. The costs will be based on an Ecology Officer rate of £238 per day, with inflation at 5% and corporate overheads set at 27%. This is required to ensure that costs for monitoring BNG are appropriately covered. It is also intended to receive the payment ‘upfront’ given the difficulty in receiving staggered payments and risks associated with that approach e.g. firms may cease trading over such a long period, which could leave a shortfall in revenue that would need to be covered by the Council. A word summary of the likely costs would be uploaded to the Council’s web-page and is reproduced in appendix 2.

Decision

For the avoidance of doubt, the means by which to secure the financial contributions would remain the same and would be through a section 106 legal agreement.

Reasons for the decision

To ensure that the Council has adequate revenue to monitor BNG to better reflect costs that are likely to be incurred.

Alternative options considered

The alternative option is for Gedling Borough Council to continue with the payment identified in the Gedling Borough Council Biodiversity Net Gain Guidance (April 2024); however, this would likely result in significant shortfall in funding to monitor the BNG.