Nature recovery funding gives councils £26m for LNRS delivery

The Government has announced £79 million of new nature recovery funding for England, with £26 million earmarked for the delivery of Local Nature Recovery Strategies across the country.

The money will be shared across the 48 responsible authorities leading England’s Local Nature Recovery Strategies, or LNRSs. DEFRA says that is worth around £185,000 per authority per year, with this year’s funding already handed to authorities that have published their strategy.

For planning, the important point is not that a new application requirement has appeared overnight. It has not. The significance is that a statutory nature-recovery framework which has largely been about preparing maps, priorities and evidence is now being given money to help turn those priorities into delivery.

£26m takes LNRS from mapping towards delivery

The announcement on 30th September 2026 marks a change of emphasis. Local Nature Recovery Strategies were created under the Environment Act 2021 and divide England into 48 strategy areas, with responsible authorities bringing together councils, landowners, businesses, environmental organisations and communities.

Until now, much of the visible work has been preparation: identifying existing areas of importance for biodiversity, agreeing local priorities and mapping locations where habitat creation, restoration or enhancement could make the greatest contribution.

DEFRA now says the £26 million will support delivery. The department points to practical measures including restoring wetlands to help reduce flood risk, tree planting to cool urban areas and increasing vegetation along rivers to improve water quality.

The Guardian reported that the package was announced as Environment Secretary Dame Angela Eagle addressed the Labour conference in Liverpool. Linking the policy to this summer’s drought and heat, Eagle said: “We all deserve access to the benefits that nature can bring.”

DEFRA also says LNRSs are already helping farmers align land-management decisions with schemes such as the Sustainable Farming Incentive and Countryside Stewardship. The new nature recovery funding is also intended to support progress towards the Government’s commitment to conserve and manage at least 30% of land for nature by 2030.

DEFRA describes LNRSs as “community-owned plans which identify local priorities for environmental improvement”. That description matters because the strategies are not development plans and they do not create a new nature designation. Their role is to identify priorities and opportunities, then help public, private and voluntary investment land in places where it can have greater combined effect.

The Guardian also reported Richard Benwell, chief executive of Wildlife and Countryside Link, as saying that investing in nature infrastructure “makes good economic sense and good ecological sense”.

Craig Bennett, chief executive of The Wildlife Trusts, also welcomed the renewed local focus. He told the Guardian that councils had long tried to help nature without enough “power, money or political support”. For planning, that is close to the practical question raised by this funding: whether responsible authorities now have enough capacity to turn LNRS priorities into coordinated delivery.

Why nature recovery funding matters to planning

The timing is particularly relevant because the new National Planning Policy Framework chapter on the natural environment was published on 29th September 2026, one day before the funding announcement. Planning Geek’s NPPF guide covers the wider framework.

Policy N1 says development plans should use Local Nature Recovery Strategies and other relevant evidence to identify environmental safeguards and opportunities. It specifically says areas which could become particularly important for nature should be treated as opportunities to integrate development with environmental restoration, but should not necessarily prevent land being allocated for development.

Policy N2 then moves the issue into development management. Proposals should take suitable opportunities to connect to and strengthen ecological networks beyond the site, drawing on measures proposed by LNRSs where they are present.

That is why the new nature recovery funding could matter increasingly in pre-application work, local-plan evidence and discussions with planning officers and ecologists. A strategy that is backed by an emerging programme of funded habitat projects is potentially more operational than a strategy which exists only as a map and list of aspirations.

But the legal position needs keeping in proportion. The funding announcement does not itself increase the statutory weight of an LNRS, create a new validation requirement or mean that development within a mapped opportunity area should be refused.

Local plans may gain a stronger delivery evidence base

For plan-making, the practical value could be in moving from identifying an opportunity to showing how it might actually be delivered.

For local authorities, the nature recovery funding may help responsible authorities coordinate habitat projects across council boundaries, work with landowners, build partnerships and connect nature recovery to other programmes. Over time, that can give local planning authorities more detailed evidence when they are preparing site allocations, green infrastructure policies and environmental strategies.

That does not mean every LNRS proposal will become a local-plan policy or funded project. Government guidance is clear that there is no requirement for every action proposed in a strategy to be carried out.

For developers, the useful question is therefore likely to become more specific: not simply whether a site appears on an LNRS map, but what the responsible authority is actually trying to deliver in that location and whether a development can avoid conflict or contribute sensibly to the same network.

BNG is one of the clearest planning connections

Biodiversity Net Gain already gives LNRSs a direct practical role. Habitat creation or enhancement in locations identified as strategically important for nature recovery can receive greater strategic significance in the statutory biodiversity metric than the same habitat delivered in a less strategic location.

That can influence the design of on-site habitat, the search for off-site units and the economics of habitat banks. It may also encourage developers and ecologists to look beyond the red line earlier, particularly where several developments could contribute to a wider ecological network rather than create isolated pockets of habitat.

The £26 million nature recovery funding does not change the statutory BNG percentage or the gain hierarchy. What it may do is improve the local machinery around delivery, with responsible authorities better able to identify priorities, coordinate projects and bring land managers into the conversation.

Mitigation and green infrastructure could become more coordinated

The same logic applies beyond BNG. LNRS delivery may help councils and project teams identify opportunities for wetland restoration, river-corridor planting, new or strengthened ecological links and other green infrastructure which can serve more than one environmental purpose.

That could be useful when discussing mitigation, landscape design, flood resilience and habitat enhancement. It does not allow an applicant to substitute a convenient LNRS project for mitigation which is legally or ecologically required on a particular scheme.

Where protected sites or species are involved, the usual tests still apply. Where mandatory BNG applies, the statutory regime still applies. An LNRS can help identify strategically useful places and actions, but it does not erase those separate requirements.

This is separate from Environmental Delivery Plans

The £26 million should also be kept separate from Environmental Delivery Plans and the Nature Restoration Fund.

Both approaches point towards more strategic environmental delivery, but they are different mechanisms. Environmental Delivery Plans are designed to address specified environmental effects of development through a statutory framework and developer payments into the Nature Restoration Fund. The LNRS funding announced today is money for responsible authorities to help deliver locally agreed nature-recovery priorities.

There may be sensible connections between the two over time, particularly where the same habitat networks, catchments or restoration opportunities are relevant, but the announcement does not merge the regimes or make an LNRS an Environmental Delivery Plan.

£53m Community Trees Fund completes the package

The larger part of the £79 million nature recovery funding package is a new £53 million Community Trees Fund running from April 2027 to March 2030.

Government says it will support the planting of up to 500,000 trees outside woodlands, including in streets, parks and rural landscapes. The fund will be available to strategic authorities, local authorities and other organisations including environmental charities, farm clusters and National Park Authorities.

DEFRA says the aim is not only biodiversity. It points to urban cooling, reduced surface-water run-off, carbon storage and more resilient neighbourhoods. Those objectives overlap heavily with the planning system’s increasing focus on green infrastructure and nature-based solutions.

Further details of the fund are still to come, so it would be premature to assume which individual schemes or locations will qualify.

What applicants and landowners should watch next

The most useful next step will be to watch what each responsible authority does with the implementation phase.

For planning applications, site promotion and land management, that means checking the current LNRS alongside the development plan and conventional ecological constraints, then looking for evidence that mapped priorities are becoming active projects, funding programmes or partnership opportunities.

For larger schemes, there may be value in bringing the LNRS into discussions with the project ecologist and planning team before the layout is fixed. That is particularly true where BNG, green infrastructure, flood resilience or off-site habitat delivery will be important.

The Government’s full announcement sets out the £79 million package and the allocation between LNRS delivery and the Community Trees Fund. The key planning takeaway is narrower but important: nature recovery funding is beginning to put delivery capacity behind the spatial strategies that national planning policy now expects plans and development proposals to use.