9th October 2024
We recently caught up with Sarah Boyd, ecologist at Eastleigh Borough Council, who shared how they’ve calculated their monitoring fees to cover all the costs of properly assuring Biodiversity Net Gain delivery – including the cost of using Verna’s Mycelia software.
Sarah and her team have been using Mycelia for almost a year, with great results. She told us that “Mycelia does exactly what we need it to do, and allows us to validate and assess BNG applications phenomenally quickly and easily”. As cases move into monitoring, Sarah has “no doubt that Mycelia’s monitoring and reporting functionality will prove just as good as assessment”. The team at Eastleigh also find Verna’s general support helpful: “It gives us confidence that we know you’re there for us, as a fountain of knowledge on BNG.”
Eastleigh has created an approach to BNG monitoring fees which is designed to fully cover all of their costs, including making Mycelia “totally cost free” on an ongoing basis.
Mycelia does exactly what we need it to do
Sarah Boyd, Ecologist, Eastleigh Borough Council
The calculations to do this were “really simple” using Verna’s free monitoring fee calculator, which “did all the hard work for us”. They set up different calculations for different sizes of development, so that the fees could be adjusted proportionately in line with estimated time required from council staff. To cover fixed costs, including Mycelia, they used the ‘additional cost’ cell in the calculator; this allowed them to add an amount based on dividing the overall cost by the minimum expected number of monitoring cases.
This means that Eastleigh will exclusively use ring-fenced BNG funding to pay for Mycelia, without relying on any other sources. Prior to BNG starting, they used Defra BNG burdens funding to cover the cost; this Defra funding is still available for the current financial year (24/25).
How to take the same approach as Eastleigh
If you would like to use monitoring fees to cover the cost of Mycelia, we’ve produced a step-by-step guide to how to do this.
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.