Britain's biodiversity market was two years old when someone tried to kill it. Not deliberately — just through the spectacular collision of political timing, an overloaded planning system, and a regulatory bottleneck that hit at the worst possible moment. In this episode, I sit down with three of the people who were there — Emma Toovey of Environment Bank, Fiona Milden of Oxygen Conservation, and Alexa Culver of RSK — the day after the Land Use Framework dropped, for the most honest conversation BNG has ever had on record.
We get into why developers actually championed this policy — and then lost faith in it. Why legal loopholes designed for 25 square metres are somehow being claimed on 48-hectare sites. Why farming families who once slammed the door on habitat banking are now calling to get in. Why the polluter must pay — and why the protector must profit. And why, if we don't fix the exemptions regime soon, we risk hollowing out the very demand that holds this entire market together.
This is BNG unfiltered. The failures, the fixes, the farming families keeping their land for the first time in generations, and what the next chapter of Britain's nature market actually needs to look like. We're still on dial-up. The question is whether we have the nerve to get to broadband.
