Sarah Postlethwaite (North Northamptonshire Council)              ESH0087             

Supplementary written evidence submitted by Sarah Postlethwaite (Planning Ecologist, North Northamptonshire Council

My responses to suggested questions that weren’t asked at the 5 February 2025 hearing on Environmental sustainability and housing growth are given below.

Are there any LPA’s where ecological capacity is adequate to meet the demands of the planning system?

1. None of the 11 LPA’s I have provided advice to over the past three years have had sufficient ecological capacity, by a significant margin.
2. I asked contacts at two of the best-resourced LPA ecology teams (that I am aware of), and this is what they told me:

Buckinghamshire Council

-          Covers 5 former LPA’s (4 districts plus County Council)

-          5.6 FTE ecologists

-          1.4 FTE BNG officers

-          0.6 FTE Environment Act Readiness Team Manager, who covers both the BNG & LNRS teams

-          They have a large number of planning consultations to respond to, which works out at 572 cases per ecologist per year.

-          They are at full capacity with no resilience in the teams in case of absence.

Warwickshire County Council (early BNG pioneer)

-          Provide advice to 6 LPA’s (5 districts plus County Council)

-          8 FTE ecologists

-          They are a ‘responsible body’ for governing Conservation Covenants for BNG habitat bank purposes – setting this up has taken 3 FTE ecologists (excluding legal & finance officers). Once up and running it is expected to require 2 FTE ecologists.

-          BNG is expected to add another 2 FTE ecologist roles within 5 years.

-          This will be a total of 12 FTE ecologists in 5 years time, to provide a complete BNG operation as well as regular planning advice.

-          They will not have the financial resource to sustain this level of staffing until BNG monitoring payments come in and expect 5 years of loss before breaking even.

Compare this with the situation at Leicestershire County Council, where I worked for two years prior to this role:

-          Provide advice to 7 LPA’s (6 districts plus County Council)

-          2 FTE ecologists (1 permanent & 2 part time contract consultants)

-          1 team manager (for half of this time)

-          No BNG officer

-          1 LNRS officer

Do LPA planning departments have enough training and understanding of ecological issues?

1. No, not by a long way. It is not an easy gap to fill since in one day of training you can only deliver a high-level overview, not anything like the detail that is needed to really understand the issues, or BNG.
2. One way of addressing this would be to put ecology on the curriculum for university planning courses. At the moment I know from my academic co-authors on the Wild Justice report that it is not a core element of their training. There is a small amount on climate change in the learning objectives, but nothing substantive on biodiversity loss or pollution. This needs to be addressed urgently, because planners and ecologists now work much more closely together, so they need a shared sense not only of ecology within the process, but why it is important more generally.

              February 2025