2nd October 2024
Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) across the country are becoming increasingly aware of the time and resource that the 30-year monitoring activities, required by BNG legislation, will require from their teams. To address this, LPAs can charge monitoring fees to cover the costs for the monitoring activities associated with any development that BNG applies to.
Through discussions with other LPAs, Tim Burkinshaw at North Yorkshire Council realised that “this is a time of great opportunity” for planning teams. We caught up with Tim to chat about how producing an approach to monitoring fees has enabled the council to justify a larger permanent ecology team.
“This is a time of great opportunity” – Tim Burkinshaw, Principal Ecologist, North Yorkshire Council
The process
To develop this approach, Tim and his colleagues created a calculator, based on a template shared by Buckinghamshire Council, so they had a defensible rationale for the fees that they would be charging applicants. Tim explained that they “inputted variables such as how long it would take an ecologist to read a monitoring report, the technical difficulty of the site, the size of the site and the number of site visits”, to produce a matrix of nine potential fees. They also used index-linking over the 30-year monitoring period.
(Verna has produced a similar Monitoring Fee Calculator Tool, which you can use as a starting point. Many LPAs are also including Mycelia costs as part of the fee calculation, which means monitoring fees can fund the ongoing use of Mycelia.)
The benefits
Projected revenue from monitoring fees has supported North Yorkshire’s case for hiring additional council ecologists, which will be essential as BNG ramps up. This is based on the number of applications multiplied by the fees implied by the calculator. Having a figure of projected revenue made it “much easier to commit to the additional positions, as there was confidence that funds would be available”.
The advice
Tim’s advice for other LPAs is to invest time in setting up a requirement for monitoring fees, as this will enable councils to resource their statutory BNG duties over the long term.
Find out more
For another example of an LPA setting up monitoring fees, you can read about how Eastleigh Borough Council is using monitoring fees to fully cover the cost of Mycelia.
If you would like to talk about monitoring fees, Mycelia, or any other aspect of BNG, please feel free to reach out to us on mycelia@verna.earth.