Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG)

The environment is at the heart of everything we do as a business, so our role in

protecting the environment forms part of our company's purpose.

In our regions we enjoy some of the most beautiful rivers, coasts and wildlife habitats in

the country. We know how important they are for our communities and looking after them

is a huge part of what motivates our people to do the essential jobs they do each day.

Our environmental ambition is: Together, we are restoring and regenerating our natural

environment, creating a better place through our actions.

Ensuring we deliver biodiversity net gain (BNG) through our capital investment

programme is key part of delivering our ambition. We see BNG as an opportunity to work

with others to deliver gains for wildlife in our regions.

The provision of Biodiversity Units (BUs) for BNG is the purpose of this tender. We are

forecasting that we will require in the order of 700 BUs to enable us to deliver the rest of

our capital investment in PR24. The split of investment is approximately 70% in our

Northumbrian Water (NW) operating area, and 30% in our Essex & Suffolk Water (ESW)

operating area.

Our investment is across our operating areas, with the potential to occur in any of the

Local Planning Authorities and National Character Areas in which we operate.

The NW operating area includes 15 Local Planning Authorities (LPAs), and 15 National

Character Areas (NCAs

We follow the mitigation hierarchy when designing our capital projects, and aim to

minimise negative impacts to the natural world. As such it is expected that most of our

impacts will be on lower value area habitats. However, as many of our assets are already

in-situ it may be that we do impact higher value area habitats when we need to connect

into those assets. Due to the nature of the infrastructure that we will be building we know

that we will have impacts on hedgerows, and water courses.

We require the ability to mitigate, through purchasing Biodiversity Units, the negative

impacts on habitats that our projects will have.

We will aim to mitigate those impacts locally where possible but acknowledge that might

not be feasible for all projects depending on their location and habitats impacted.

We welcome submissions from companies who can only deliver in one specific area or

one specific habitat type, as well as from those who are able to deliver a wide range of

solutions. We would also welcome submissions from groups of companies. If you are part

of a group submission, please indicate who the lead organisation is.

We want to deliver our BNG in a way that brings added value to our customers, enhances

the natural world in the areas in which we operate and offers flexibility in our approach

We need appropriate BNG solutions to enable delivery of our capital programme. For this

we will need:

• Area habitat units
• Hedgerow units
• Water course units
• BUs available across different LPAs and NCAs within NWL's operating areas

We aim to deliver added value to our customers which can come from e.g.:

• Using Biodiversity Gain Sites that provide water quality benefits in our catchments
• Using Biodiversity Gain Sites that allow some public access
• Using Biodiversity Gain Sites that provide employment opportunities in our communities

We want flexibility to ensure we can deliver best value for our customers, and alongside

the simple purchase of BUs we will consider:

• Habitat gain sites built to order
• The potential to have option agreements.

The intention to to have 2 lots (North + South) and a total of 6 vendors on each

framework.