Biodiversity Net Gain Reports for planning applications
3rd of August, 2026
Planning changes on minimum land area requiring a BNG report to accompany a planning application.
Biodiversity Net Gain: Amendments and transitional arrangements published
Laid before parliament regulations which set in motion changes to Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) for projects requiring planning permission under the Town and Country Planning Act.
These are the first batch of changes resulting from our BNG consultation last year, which we announced in our government response published in April 2026, and covered in our recent BNG blog post.
We can now confirm that the following changes will come into effect on Thursday 6 August 2026:
- introduction of the new 0.2 hectare exemption, which means that the smallest developments will not be required to do mandatory BNG (unless onsite priority habitat is negatively impacted)
There are a further 3 changes and all are explained in the Government announcement.