What Local Government Reorganisation means for your BNG obligations

Local Government Reorganisation is moving fast. On 5 February 2026, the Government launched consultations on 52 proposals across 14 county areas — from Kent to Lancashire, Oxfordshire to Derbyshire. Decisions are expected later this year, with new unitary authorities likely vesting from April 2028.

Much has been written about what LGR means for planning systems, procurement, and staffing. But there's a dimension that nobody is talking about yet: what happens to your Biodiversity Net Gain obligations?

BNG is new territory for reorganisation

Previous rounds of local government reorganisation didn't have to contend with BNG — it simply didn't exist yet. Planning data migration was already one of the hardest parts of those transitions, but authorities weren't managing 30-year habitat monitoring programmes, legally secured baselines, or decades of ecological reporting obligations.

This time is different. By the time new unitaries vest, most authorities in reorganising areas will have been running mandatory BNG for four years. They'll hold growing portfolios of BNG obligations, each with its own baseline data, condition targets, monitoring schedule, and legal agreements — all of which must continue unbroken through the transition.

The legal side is handled. The operational side isn't.

The good news: the legal framework for LGR already provides for continuity. S106 agreements run with the land. The 2008 Structural Changes Regulations transfer enforcement rights to successor authorities. Conservation covenants have their own statutory fallback — if a responsible body ceases to exist, the Secretary of State steps in as custodian.

So the legal obligations won't fall into a void. But legal continuity and operational continuity are different things. A successor authority inherits the right to enforce a 30-year BNG monitoring programme — but it also needs to inherit the ability to do so. That means:

• Baseline data and condition targets for every BNG obligation, linked to the correct development and legal agreement
• Monitoring histories — what's been checked, when, by whom, and what was found
• Upcoming monitoring schedules — so nothing gets missed during the transition
• Habitat management and monitoring plans (HMMPs) tied to specific sites and conditions

This isn't a one-off data migration. It's the handover of live, multi-decade programmes that must continue without gaps.

Why Mycelia is built for this

This is exactly the kind of challenge Mycelia is designed to solve. It provides a single, shared source of truth for BNG data — down to individual habitats, condition assessments, and monitoring events — maintained over the decades that BNG obligations require. That foundation makes LGR transitions a manageable operational task rather than a crisis.

Not all reorganisations are clean mergers, either. Some proposals involve splitting districts, with parts moving to different successor authorities. When BNG obligations need to be divided along new boundaries, a spatially aware platform can allocate cases to the right successor based on where they actually sit on the ground — something Mycelia's spatial data model is built to handle.

LGR Bridge: how we're preparing Mycelia

We've been thinking about this since LGR was first announced — and it's why we're building LGR Bridge into Mycelia.

LGR Bridge is our approach to ensuring BNG data continuity through reorganisation. It's designed around the specific challenges LGR creates for BNG:

• Authority-aware data model. Datasets from predecessor authorities can be consolidated into new structures — or split across successor authorities — while preserving every record's origin, audit trail, and legal context.
• Monitoring continuity. Ongoing BNG monitoring programmes transfer intact — baselines, schedules, and reporting histories — so successor authorities pick up exactly where predecessor teams left off.
• Spatial intelligence for boundary changes. Where districts are split or boundaries redrawn, LGR Bridge uses Mycelia's spatial data to assign obligations to the correct successor authority automatically.
• No disruption to live operations. Planning teams keep working throughout the transition. LGR Bridge handles the structural reorganisation of data around them.

We're actively shaping this work and we'd welcome input from authorities preparing for reorganisation. If you're thinking about how your BNG data will transition, we'd like to hear from you — your experience will directly inform what we build.

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