17th September 2024
We recently caught up with Des Hobson, Swindon’s ecologist, to chat about how he uses Mycelia to make pre-application meetings as efficient as possible.
During pre-application meetings, Local Planning Authorities can provide advice to planning applicants, with the aim of speeding up the planning process by identifying potential issues at an early stage. Whilst councils have always been able to charge a fee for this service, they can now raise the fee to reflect the additional and more thorough input from ecology teams that is required as a result of BNG. Some councils are going further than this, and charging a separate fee for pre-application biodiversity advice. Therefore, these benefits of speeding up the planning process are achieved at no extra cost to the council.
When an applicant provides Biodiversity Net Gain information at the pre-application stage, Des uses Mycelia to instantaneously identify potential issues. These issues can be discussed immediately and next steps for addressing them can be agreed upon. This is all possible by simply dragging and dropping the Biodiversity Metric into Mycelia, and sharing the screen to show the applicant the outcome.
“Mycelia does a lot of the hard work for you, and helps to avoid time-consuming emails back and forth with an applicant when subsequently assessing applications” – Des Hobson, Ecologist, Swindon Borough Council
If you would like further information about how to use Mycelia to support pre-application meetings, feel free to reach out to us on mycelia@verna.earth.