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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment he has made of the (a) personnel and (b) skills required by local authorities to (i) develop and (ii) implement Local Nature Recovery Strategies; and how many local authorities have access to those resources as of 10 December 2021.

We will shortly be appointing responsible authorities to lead the preparation of Local Nature Recovery Strategies. We envisage around fifty LNRS areas at roughly county scale, covering England with no gaps or overlaps.

Our five LNRS pilots in Northumberland, Cumbria, Greater Manchester, Buckinghamshire and Cornwall gave us considerable insight into capacity needs which we have published in a lessons learned report. One of the central lessons was that capacity and skills needs will be different between responsible authorities depending on local circumstances like geography or administrative set up.

Following the completion of our business planning process we will bring forward proposals on how we intend to support responsible authorities to prepare LNRSs.

Local Nature Recovery Strategies are intended to inform a number of policy areas and will therefore be delivered through a variety of mechanisms operating in a complementary way. These could include mandatory biodiversity net gain, environmental land management schemes, the strengthened NERC duty on public bodies; and use by local planning authorities, for example in informing the preparation of local plans.