PAS has been commissioned by Defra to support councils in their efforts to get ready for mandatory Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG). To kick this new project off, we are running three participative workshops to get input from local planners and help us decide how to focus this support and what the priorities should be.

We will start the event by giving an overview of what's happening with the Environment Bill and the timeline for mandatory BNG. Then we want to throw the session open and discuss what you want, what you need to know and what you feel are most important issues for BNG and the Environment Bill.

The events are aimed at those from LPAs that need to understand BNG enough to validate a planning application, make a recommendation, train a committee or write a policy, but are not ecological experts.

We want to make sure we get participation from as many councils as possible and we tend to find that there is a high drop-out rate when multiple people from the same local authority are registered for our events. So we are limiting the number of attendees per local authority to two individuals.

We are running a separate event for Councillors on Weds 16 June - see the PAS events page for a link.

Please do join the waiting list if the events are sold out, as places are likely to become available nearer the time and it helps us gauge whether we need to run further events.

Please use your work or .gov address when signing up.