Cheshire West and Chester LPA BNG

Cheshire West and Chester is a unitary authority that runs from the Dee Estuary and the Welsh border in the west to the Mersey Estuary at Frodsham and Ellesmere Port in the north. Between them the Cheshire Sandstone Ridge rises above the plain at Helsby Hill, the Peckforton Hills and Bickerton Hill, the largest surviving area of lowland heath in Cheshire. Delamere Forest, at 972 hectares the largest woodland in the county, holds the Black Lake quaking bog and Linmer Moss, both SSSIs, and Oak Mere lies nearby. In the Weaver valley, salt subsidence has left the Winsford Flashes, three lakes covering about 200 acres that are also an SSSI, and the Shropshire Union and Trent and Mersey canals and the Weaver Navigation cross the borough.

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Biodiversity Net Gain became a legal requirement for major developments in England on 12 February 2024, and for small sites on 2 April 2024. The council’s local policies are Policy ENV 4 of Local Plan (Part One) and Policy DM 44 of Local Plan (Part Two), supported by an Interim BNG and Ecological Networks Guidance Note issued in March 2024. That note is guidance, not an adopted Supplementary Planning Document, and neither it nor the council’s BNG page sets a local target above the national 10% minimum. It asks applicants to retain habitat on site first, then create or enhance on site, and to treat off-site compensation as a last resort with a justification for why on-site options are exhausted. Habitats inside the council’s mapped ecological networks are given extra weighting in the calculation.

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The council is the responsible authority for the Cheshire and Warrington Local Nature Recovery Strategy 2025-2035, whose named priorities include the Mersey and Dee estuaries, the Cheshire meres and mosses and the Sandstone Ridge. Part of the borough also drains to sites covered by Natural England’s March 2022 nutrient advice, Oak Mere SAC and West Midlands Mosses SAC, so some schemes face a nutrient test as well as BNG. The council has already put S106 biodiversity money into more than 20 hectares of new woodland, species-rich meadow and wetland across rural and urban sites.