Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment she has made of the potential implications for her policies of long-term lags between developers-funding and achievement of full habitat development under biodiversity offsetting.

The biodiversity net gain metric includes a temporal risk multiplier which takes into account the average time lag between the start of habitat works and the target outcome. This ‘time to target’ multiplier recognises and takes account of the time it takes to create different habitats and factors those into metric calculations.