England’s biodiversity net gain (BNG) rules have just become simpler, but developers still need to check three things before assuming they are exempt from the rules. Read our simple guide to help you plan effectively.

Minor development can now choose off-site BNG units in the first instance. This is helpful if the features of your site make it difficult to create units and it avoids a long term challenge with on-site BNG.

BNG for developers should be more than a planning requirement, it should be something worth recognising. In fact, we think it’s worth celebrating. That’s why we’ve awarded our Nature Positive Development certificate to Kruidberg Capital for their Old Rockley Dene Nursing Home project.

A few months after we launched, we asked users of the platform how they were estimating off-site BNG unit costs before they found the tool. The answers were telling.

For property developers managing a pipeline of sites, biodiversity net gain (BNG) costs are unpredictable, and getting hold of the costs is complicated.‍ Just how can you easily budget for your BNG obligation?

We want to champion the great people doing the hard work in BNG - the habitat banks. Because they're not all the same - and some are showing exactly how it's done properly. Cheshire Wildlife Trust at Greenbooth is one of those.

We've made another senior hire - and are pleased to welcome Liz Everett to Biodiversity Units UK as Partnerships Director.

The July 2026 edition is the most comprehensive we've produced to date - drawing on pricing data from 254 habitat banks, equivalent to 95% of the registered market. For the first time we combine that pricing data with Natural England's allocation data to give a genuinely joined-up picture of what's being bought, where, and for how much.

The setting was inspirational. The meeting very productive. And the Great British summertime? Entirely predictable. The skies opened and the team got thoroughly soaked!

If you're working on a project that needs BNG off-site, your client will want a budget number - and getting that number credibly, quickly, without spending hours on research, isn't always easy.

That’s where our BNG Price Calculator comes in.

We're moving to 48 LNRS zones - Local Nature Recovery Strategies. Think Berkshire. Think the Yorkshire Dales. Bigger, more intuitive than the current system. On the face of it, that sounds like good news for habitat banks - a larger catchment area to trade in, and in some ways it is. But there's a more nuanced picture underneath.

We headed to UKREiiF - and came back energised. The event felt bigger and busier than ever. Inside or outside the venue, the atmosphere was excellent, and from a BNG perspective, two things stood out…

The DEFRA metric - the Excel file your ecologist provides showing your unit requirements - is the standard tool for understanding what biodiversity net gain you need. But it wasn't built for speed, clarity, or cost. That gap is what we set out to fix.

A functioning market iterates and improves over time, and a lot of what's been put forward by the government is good common sense.

Here's what's changing...

We visited Nattergal, one of the UK's most ecologically ambitious habitat banks. It was a day that reinforced exactly why we believe the biodiversity net gain market is heading somewhere genuinely significant…

Key members of the Biodiversity Units UK team will be in Leeds on Wednesday 20 May. We're there to talk units, pricing, supply, and the practicalities of getting BNG sorted without it becoming a blocker on your project.

Following last week’s Government announcements on Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG), we wanted to take a moment to digest the detail and share a perspective focused on what this means for the market - particularly for developers and habitat banks.

We've launched the Planners for BNG Directory - England's first public directory of planning consultants who have successfully navigated BNG projects.

On March 25th we hosted our first monthly Lunch & Learn: "How to Buy BNG at the Right Price". Over 120 attendees and the best part was the questions - which were incisive and wide ranging.

We recently helped a client reduce their Biodiversity Net Gain expected costs from £6 million to £4 million. Not by cutting corners or reducing their biodiversity obligations - but by questioning the assumptions in their ecological report and finding more practical solutions within the BNG framework.