Wigan’s BNG level is set at 10%.

The NPPF states: "applicants are encouraged to consider biodiversity net gain early in the development process and factor it into site selection and design. Where appropriate, they should discuss the biodiversity net gain requirements for their development upfront with the relevant local planning authority utilising any pre-application advice services offered by them. This could help establish whether development proposals would be subject to biodiversity net gain and, if they are, enable feedback on the proposed strategy for achieving the biodiversity gain objective and consideration of the Biodiversity Gain Hierarchy to inform the design of the proposals"

Please note, If you work for the LPA and wish to add additional information, please inform the Joe's Blooms team here.

Wigan’s pre-application advice service can be found here.

Wigan is part of the Greater Manchester Local Nature Recovery Strategy. Information can be found here.

Specific BNG Requirements are set out in the BNG Guidance (adopted February 2024).

Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) is a process to development which leaves biodiversity in a measurably better state than before. Using habitats as a proxy for biodiversity and a metric to calculate biodiversity losses and gains, it ensures a more consistent approach to accounting for biodiversity within development. The now mandatory legislation associated with the Environment Act (2021) will apply to the majority of medium and large developments in the UK, requiring them to measurably increase the biodiversity of a site by 10%. This builds upon the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF, 2023) and local policy within Greater Manchester (GM) to strengthen opportunities for nature recovery through the Town and Country Planning System (TCPA).

A new Local Plan is currently being developed. See also the BNG Page.

Specific Strategic Significance Requirements are set out in the BNG Guidance (adopted February 2024).

The Local Nature Recovery Strategy (see Page 16) will be used to determine the strategic significance in conjunction with the Statutory Metric User Guide. Individual LPA Districts also have Wildlife Corridor policies within their Local Plan which may be used to give greater local granularity to Strategic Significance, and therefore should also be considered. Where these are identified as overlapping with a habitat parcel, the name of the overlapping feature should be provided within the User Comments cell of the metric.