Background
Foxley Green Farm comprises agricultural land, an equestrian livery, stabling and polo pitches. The application site comprised neutral and modified grassland in grazing paddocks. Native hedgerows bounded the fields, with the wider landscape consisting of ponds, arable crop and modified grasslands interlinked with native hedgerows.
Application proposal
In 2023, our client submitted plans to develop part of the site. The client proposed converting agricultural land to equestrian (a polo pitch) to supplement facilities at the adjacent Les Lions Polo Club. Planning permission was later granted.
SES’s involvement
Southern Ecological Solutions (SES) completed a preliminary ecological appraisal and a biodiversity net gain (BNG) assessment and eDNA surveys, which confirmed great crested newts (GCN) locally. In the local area, a NatureSpace GCN district level licence (DLL) was available as an alternative licensing approach to the traditional standard European Protected Species (EPS) mitigation licences available from Natural England (NE).
GCN DLL are split into zones dependent on the likely abundance and distribution of GCN and applications do not require survey data. The level of on-site mitigation required is influenced by the zone the site falls under. Initially, the GCN DLL route was progressed for several reasons, primarily because
- only partial data was held (eDNA rather than full population survey classification)
- the application’s time did not permit population size class (PSC) survey data to be compiled
- there was a desire to avoid the costs associated with potential delays to planning to obtain a full data set and design on-site mitigation.
To enter a GCN DLL, applicants must enquire into the scheme. At this stage, conservation fees are outlined and, if approved, a formal application can then be made. During this formal process, costs are paid in full to provide strategic mitigation to benefit the local GCN population. However, in this instance, the conservation fees outweighed the viability of the scheme; therefore, no formal application could be progressed. Instead, a standard mitigation approach was reviewed.
In usual circumstances, standard licence applications for Natural England require full and recent survey data. For the GCN, this usually requires PSC surveys, which consist of multiple survey visits in a specific seasonal window. At the time of application, this could not be achieved. Additional costs and severe delays to the project would occur if standard surveys were to be undertaken in 2024 to inform such a licence and were considered disproportionate to the additional certainty that they would bring to associated impacts from proposals.
The impacts from the development could be confidently predicted with sufficient certainty and the mitigation/compensation within the standard licence would ensure that the linked activities did not detrimentally affect the conservation status of the metapopulation. Given that eDNA surveys confirmed presence in one pond and the scale of impacts was low, undertaking full PSC surveys was not expected to change this mitigation strategy. As such, Licencing Policy 4 was considered to meet this situation and thus, a case was made that no further surveys would be required to apply for a standard licence.
SES applied for a standard GCN EPS mitigation licence for the proposals, avoiding costs associated with delays to the application and undertaking unnecessary surveys. The bespoke licence approach and mitigation, through sensitive design of the proposals, also ensured the protection afforded to GCN was upheld and the ‘Favourable Conservation Status’ of the population was maintained through on-site mitigation work.
The initial ecological assessments informed the masterplan, with habitats of ecological value being retained and/or compensated. Impacts upon protected species and species of conservation concern were mitigated through sensitive design of the scheme following input from SES. This resulted in a successful outcome for the local GCN population and the client. The financial viability of the scheme was maintained and work progressed to the initial timescale.