Hart: Delivering BNG during Local Government Reorganisation

While preparing for Hampshire's structural change through Local Government Reorganisation (LGR), Hart District Council adopted Mycelia in August 2025 to manage Biodiversity Net Gain delivery. Like many councils across England facing reorganisation, Hart confronted a critical question: pause investment in BNG infrastructure until the future is clear, or build systems now that can navigate through merger safely?

Hart chose to act.

The challenge: BNG delivery under uncertainty

Hart's small ecology team validates submissions, tracks biodiversity units, secures legal agreements, and manages monitoring obligations that stretch 30 years into the future. With upwards of 30 BNG consultations arriving each month, and an increasing number of complex major applications, the work had become unsustainable.

BNG evidence sat scattered across spreadsheets, shared drives and email trails. Validation was slow, reports took days to assemble, and officers were spending 15-30 minutes per case just on basic assessment - considerably longer on major developments.

At the same time, LGR adds complexity most councils don't face. Hart will merge with neighbouring councils to form a new unitary authority. The risk: enter reorganisation with dispersed BNG records and no unified system. This would mean inherited mess for the authority taking on Hart's 30-year monitoring commitments, lost institutional knowledge during transitions, and datasets that can't easily merge.

Waiting for LGR clarity meant continuing with unsustainable manual processes and accumulating technical debt that would compound during merger.

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Why Hart acted early

Mycelia provided what Hart needed: a system that delivers operational value today while building infrastructure that transfers cleanly tomorrow.

When a metric arrives, Mycelia instantly validates it, flags errors, and presents data in a format that's quick to assess. The ability to quickly summarise habitats and identify issues saves considerable time - time Hart's small team couldn't afford to lose. Reporting that previously took days now takes hours.

But the real value extends beyond day-to-day efficiency. Mycelia's LGR Bridge approach ensures continuity through reorganisation:

Single source of truth that transfers intact: All BNG records -down to individual habitats, condition assessments, and monitoring events - are maintained with full audit trails. When Hart merges, datasets consolidate into new structures while preserving every record's origin and legal context.

Monitoring continuity: Ongoing BNG monitoring programmes transfer intact. Baselines, schedules, and reporting histories move seamlessly, so successor authorities can pick up exactly where Hart's team leave off.

Spatial intelligence: If reorganisation involves boundary changes or districts being split, Mycelia's spatial data model allocates BNG cases to the correct successor authority based on where obligations actually sit.

What's changed at Hart

Hart now has a live BNG system that works today and positions them well for reorganisation:

• Mycelia saves approximately 15 hours/month on assessment alone, and that’s before taking account of the time-savings for validation, monitoring and reporting, and the mitigation of risks associated with the required checks .

• Automated validation catches errors that manual checks might miss, reducing rework downstream.

• The 30-year monitoring workflow is structured and ready to transfer to the new unitary authority with clean records and established processes.

• BNG records are structured, complete, and portable - Hart's data won't be the problem during reorganisation.

What this means for LPAs facing reorganisation

Hart's approach shows that uncertainty about future structures shouldn't delay investment in BNG infrastructure. Acting early means entering reorganisation with clean datasets, established workflows, and systems built to transfer - rather than accumulating technical debt that compounds during merger.

For councils across England facing LGR, Mycelia's LGR Bridge approach turns what could be a crisis - merging decades of monitoring obligations across multiple authorities - into a manageable operational transition. The operational benefits councils need today are the same foundations that make merger work tomorrow.

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