Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG)

Description

The environment is at the heart of everything we do as a business, so our role in protecting the environment forms part of our company's purpose. In our regions we enjoy some of the most beautiful rivers, coasts and wildlife habitats in the country. We know how important they are for our communities and looking after them is a huge part of what motivates our people to do the essential jobs they do each day. Our environmental ambition is: Together, we are restoring and regenerating our natural environment, creating a better place through our actions. Ensuring we deliver biodiversity net gain (BNG) through our capital investment programme is key part of delivering our ambition. We see BNG as an opportunity to work with others to deliver gains for wildlife in our regions. The provision of Biodiversity Units (BUs) for BNG is the purpose of this tender. We are forecasting that we will require in the order of 700 BUs to enable us to deliver the rest of our capital investment in PR24. The split of investment is approximately 70% in our Northumbrian Water (NW) operating area, and 30% in our Essex & Suffolk Water (ESW) operating area. Our investment is across our operating areas, with the potential to occur in any of the Local Planning Authorities and National Character Areas in which we operate. The NW operating area includes 15 Local Planning Authorities (LPAs), and 15 National Character Areas (NCAs We follow the mitigation hierarchy when designing our capital projects, and aim to minimise negative impacts to the natural world. As such it is expected that most of our impacts will be on lower value area habitats. However, as many of our assets are already in-situ it may be that we do impact higher value area habitats when we need to connect into those assets. Due to the nature of the infrastructure that we will be building we know that we will have impacts on hedgerows, and water courses. We require the ability to mitigate, through purchasing Biodiversity Units, the negative impacts on habitats that our projects will have. We will aim to mitigate those impacts locally where possible but acknowledge that might not be feasible for all projects depending on their location and habitats impacted. We welcome submissions from companies who can only deliver in one specific area or one specific habitat type, as well as from those who are able to deliver a wide range of solutions. We would also welcome submissions from groups of companies. If you are part of a group submission, please indicate who the lead organisation is. We want to deliver our BNG in a way that brings added value to our customers, enhances the natural world in the areas in which we operate and offers flexibility in our approach We need appropriate BNG solutions to enable delivery of our capital programme. For this we will need: • Area habitat units • Hedgerow units • Water course units • BUs available across different LPAs and NCAs within NWL's operating areas We aim to deliver added value to our customers which can come from e.g.: • Using Biodiversity Gain Sites that provide water quality benefits in our catchments • Using Biodiversity Gain Sites that allow some public access • Using Biodiversity Gain Sites that provide employment opportunities in our communities We want flexibility to ensure we can deliver best value for our customers, and alongside the simple purchase of BUs we will consider: • Habitat gain sites built to order • The potential to have option agreements. The intention to to have 2 lots (North + South) and a total of 6 vendors on each framework.

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