Land Use Planning

Chair: Rebecca Pullinger, The Wildlife Trusts

Vice Chair: Carl Bunnage, RSPB

Link: Philip Box, Senior Policy Officer

Update from the group:

Link’s Land Use Planning Group (LUPG) continues to champion a planning system that actively supports nature’s recovery, ensuring development and infrastructure are delivered in ways that protect and enhance biodiversity, rather than perpetuate the habitat loss of recent decades.

In 2025, the group played a key role in influencing the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, working with partners to secure vital concessions that helped limit environmental regression. As the Bill moves into implementation, a central priority for the LUPG’s 2026 workplan is to closely monitor delivery and real-world impacts, identifying risks and holding decision-makers to account to ensure outcomes genuinely benefit nature.

Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) remains a major focus of the group’s work. Building on its longstanding advocacy for strong BNG regulations, and its recent reporting on local ambition and progress, the LUPG will work through 2026 to safeguard the integrity of BNG policy, address existing loopholes, and support effective implementation across both town and country planning and nationally significant infrastructure projects.

Alongside this, the group will continue to engage on wider planning reforms, including changes to national planning policy, environmental assessments and the delivery of new towns, to ensure that existing environmental protections are maintained and strengthened. The group will work to promote a positive, evidence-led vision for nature-positive planning that aligns development, climate action and nature recovery.

For further information, contact Philip Box, Link's Senior Policy Officer.

Last updated: 16 Jan 2026