By Gemma Ole's, Deputy Director, Natural England Wildlife Licensing Service
At Natural England we help balance economic growth with nature protection. Wildlife licensing is a vital tool to enable this. Our licences are broad ranging and allow development and other activities to proceed, while safeguarding protected species and their habitats.
Wildlife licensing presents many challenges in balancing the needs of people, protected species and the landscape we share. We are committed to reforming our processes to better support our customers with timely decisions – whilst also minimising impacts on and seeking positive outcomes for nature.
What we do
Wildlife licences support a wide range of activities across the UK - from research projects and species reintroductions to housing developments, infrastructure projects and renewable energy installations.
Improving our service
To meet growing demands for sustainable development, home building and nature recovery, we've streamlined our processes and reduced regulatory burden. Overall on-time delivery improved from 84.9% in 2023 to 91.1% in 2024.
- European Protected Species Mitigation Licensing: improved from 71% to 81.4%
- Class licences: improved from 95.3% to 96.3%
- Science and conservation: improved from 70.5% to 74.2%
- Species Management Licensing: improved from 49.7% to 74.6%
Innovation in action
Our Bat Earned Recognition scheme accredits ecologists before they submit licence applications. This gives them:
- Streamlined licensing routes
- Greater autonomy in their work
- A service four times faster than traditional routes
Since launching, this scheme has saved an estimated 10,000 working days, worth around £1.5 million to our stakeholders.
Early advice service
In 2024, we funded additional teams to provide early advice at the pre-application stage, helping developers build nature-friendly solutions from the start. These teams have supported:
- Development projects for around 30,000 new homes
- Renewable energy projects totalling 4.7GW - enough to power 1.7 million homes
- 500km of electric cabling infrastructure
- Water storage projects for over 330 million cubic metres and 650km of new pipeline
Paving the way for species reintroductions
Alongside these improvements, this year we issued our first licence for the wild release of beavers, to the National Trust's Purbeck Beaver Project in Dorset. The beavers are expected to increase biodiversity, restore wetland habitats and improve protected sites across the Purbeck Heaths National Nature Reserve.
The project was assessed against specific beaver wild release criteria to help ensure all the impacts, positive and negative, are considered as part of the assessment approach. The licensing approach aims to achieve a measured pace of reintroduction across the country.
Background and further details on Natural England’s wildlife licensing statistics 2024
Many wild animals and plants are protected by legislation such as the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 and the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017. As the Government’s nature conservation adviser and regulator, one of Natural England’s roles is to licence certain activities that may disturb or harm wildlife, in line with the legal framework established by Parliament.
Each year, as part of our commitment to transparency, we publish a summary of the wildlife licences we have issued and the data for 2024 are now available here.
In our 2024 summary, the licences fall into four main categories:
- European Protected Species mitigation licences - issued to allow otherwise unlawful activities involving species such as great crested newts, dormouse and bat species. Often associated with development activity, these usually require measures to reduce harm (e.g. new habitat creation) to safeguard local species populations
- Class licences - issued to suitably qualified individuals to carry out otherwise unlawful activities involving protected species under defined circumstances, often on more than one occasion or at more than one location
- Science and conservation - issued to allow otherwise unlawful activities involving protected species for the purposes of conservation and research (for example bird ringing)
- Species management - issued to allow the disturbance, control or habitat removal of certain species such as badgers, birds or water voles, to help manage human-wildlife conflicts
Further information
The full wildlife licencing statistics are available on GOV.UK.
For more information, please contact: enquiries@naturalengland.org.uk
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