Planning applications

With the right design and sympathetic location, development can also provide a real lifeline for nature.

Our planning role is as much about promoting positive outcomes as it is about opposing harmful proposals. We're committed to working in partnership with planners, developers, communities and other environmental bodies across Lancashire, Manchester and North Merseyside, as well as offshore, to ensure that development decisions safeguard established wildlife and create much-needed networks of new habitats.

Our 26 local planning authorities and the marine planning authority for the adjacent Irish Sea receive more than 40,000 planning applications a year. Due to the sheer volume of these applications, our five part-time Area Conservation Officers can't cover every case. To make the best use of our charity's resources, we focus on the cases where we feel we can make a real and positive difference for our region's special wildlife and wild places.

We're committed to ensuring that development decisions safeguard established key wildlife sites, populations and networks; and maintain, restore and create much-needed new networks. Our goal is to see 30 per cent of our area managed in some way for wildlife before 2030.

We put a great deal of effort into strategic or forward planning, such as in Greater Manchester and Liverpool City Region’s spatial plans, and our 25 district councils’ and one county council’s respective Local Plans. In each of those regularly revised plans, our local councils propose where new developments would best be located in the future and what environmental policies should be applied when making decisions on individual planning applications in their area. In this way, we to try to reduce the frequency of conflict between development and wildlife protection at an early stage and to ensure that each plan has good, defensible policies on nature. The North West Marine Spatial Plan seeks to do the same in the adjacent Irish Sea.

We're committed to ensuring that development decisions safeguard established wildlife and create much-needed networks of new habitats

We then prioritise responses to those areas of our patch where we have most local knowledge: for example, close to our own nature reserves and through our local projects delivering nature’s recovery off our own land. Applications or plans that would significantly impact sites designated for their wildlife value, such as Marine Conservation Zones (MCZ), Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and Local Wildlife Sites (LWS), will also be given a high priority; as will very large national infrastructure proposals such as new motorways, tidal energy schemes or high-speed railways.

Occasionally, we’ll get involved with applications outside of those areas: for example, if it's possible to secure a hugely positive outcome for nature where it has already been degraded, or if the proposals relate to our own offices and visitor centres.