Biodiversity bombshell: how new law is holding back housing
By Simon Hacker | 30th January 2025
The boss of one of Gloucestershire's leading chartered surveyors and planning consultancies has given a stark warning that the government is cruising for certain failure in its homebuiding ambitions unless it can rethink a "bone-headed" regulation which came into effect last February.
Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) became law in England in an update to the Environment Act in 2024 and planning expert David Jones, the managing director of Cheltenham-based Evans Jones, says that consequences of the new statute are spiralling into negative outcomes which will sabotage the new Labour government on its road to declared housing and food production goals.
In a special interview for Punchline TV, Mr Jones told Punchline-Gloucester.com editor Mark Owen that the new law requires developers to provide a 10% gain in biodiversity (the variability of life on a site in terms of species and ecosystem diversity) on a proposed site.
But that stipulation, he warned was already delivering unintended consequences across Gloucestershire and nationally.
Given the mandatory new rules ensuring habitats for wildlife are left in a 10% better state than they were before any development takes place, Mr Jones said he was supportive of the principle, but added: "It needs to be dealt with in a completely different way."
He urged business leaders in Gloucestershire to lobby their MPs on the impact of the existing rules, so as to urge them to address "the very real problems this is having upon the SME market".
Exploring the result of the new law in practice, Mr Jones told Punchline TV: "It affects all new development sites, greenfield, brownfield or factory."

As an example, he said, a client with a 17-acre site, which had been left fallow and consequently pre-assessed for biodiversity value, was advised that six acres need to be set aside to meet the 10% BNG gain, with only 17 of the 23 acres therefore being able to be developed.
He added: "So the developer decided to purchase an additional six acres offsite [to be set aside for nature]. So instead of a 17-acre site, we now have 23 being used to deliver the same number of dwellings and that is some of the crazy results we are seeing."
Furthermore, because developers are buying land off-site to offset the BNG impact of their projects, the law had created "a whole new business of BNG credit brokers who are selling credits where they have bought land offsite and are creating BNG - and then are selling back to the developer individual credits to offset the loss of BNG on individual sites."
The emerging regime, he added, was similar to what we saw in agricutlure where farmers were able to buy and sell their quotas for production, such as in milk quotas.
He said: "So we now have land quotas of BNG credits being sold on the open market to compensate for that which is lost on site. The SME market is being particularly hard hit by this; I looked at a city centre site, a concreted-over yard, where the developer wanted to create just one home. A self-seeded tree had grown, so the developer had to present a 10% uplift to the site - it was not therefore viable in cost."
Any temptation for developers to obviate the rules would also, he said, be ill-advised, with compliance being ensured with aerial and older photos, often reviewed by AI, to prevent anyone gaming the system. If planners feel a site is being deliberately despoiled ahead of permission, records can be checked back to 2020 to ensure accurate site comparison. He added: "Don't go preparing a site by chopping things down!"

The challenges developers may meet in Gloucestershire can be offset by relatively high land and property value, he added. But, he said: "Be mindful that land and property prices remain quite high in Gloucestershire and if I am still seeing sites not viable here because of the financial load placed on development."
Elsewhere, where values are lower, he said BNG rules would ensure "things just won't go ahead".
"The government want to build 370,000 per annum. In practise, it is not going to happen. We are blocking it at source."
The new regulations ensured more need than ever for solid planning advice, he added. "Sites need to be reassessed for their ecology baseline, prior to purchasing, so at least a developer will know what they are into. There are sites where the impact can't be mitigated."
Failing to be well aware of the risk of overpaying for land could lead to businesses being severely caught out in 2025, he said. "It's a triple whammy: decreasing the number of houses that can be built, using more land, and reducing the available farming land.
"As much as I am supportive of BNG, as a country which can't feed itself off its own natural resources, it seems a little bit bone-headed to use even more of that land for BNG."
● According to Ecology by Design, a market-leading BNG consultancy, the new rules were set to impact 100,000 planning applications annually and were "considered one of the most significant changes to planning in over 30 years".
Related Articles
Copyright 2025 Moose Partnership Ltd. All rights reserved. Reproduction of any content is strictly forbidden without prior permission.