Biodiversity Net Gain is shifting the view that grounds maintenance is just a cost.

For as long as most people in this sector can remember, the client conversation in grounds maintenance has followed a predictable pattern: scope, frequency, price. What can you do, how often, and what will it cost? The ecological and environmental value of what we actually deliver has rarely featured in that conversation.

Biodiversity Net Gain is starting to change that. Not quickly enough, and not everywhere yet. But for the first time, I am having conversations with clients about what their land could become, not just what it needs to look like by Friday afternoon. That is a significant shift, and I think the grounds maintenance sector needs to understand what it means for us, for our clients, and for the long-term value of what we do.

For the first time, I am having conversations with clients about what their land could become, not just what it needs to look like by Friday afternoon. Biodiversity Net Gain is changing what grounds maintenance means.

What BNG actually means for grounds maintenance businesses

Biodiversity Net Gain became mandatory for major developments in England in February 2024. The legislation requires developers to deliver a minimum 10% improvement in biodiversity value as part of any new development — and to maintain that improvement for at least thirty years. From November 2026, the requirement extends to Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects: major roads, railways, and energy networks.

On the surface, this looks like a planning and development issue. And it is. But its implications run much deeper into the grounds maintenance sector than most people have yet recognised.

Every managed estate, every commercial campus, every housing development, every public park sits within a broader biodiversity context. Clients who are subject to BNG obligations,  or who are choosing to pursue BNG voluntarily as part of their ESG commitments, need to understand the baseline ecological value of their land, identify where and how it can be improved, and then manage it to a standard that delivers measurable ecological outcomes over a multi-decade timeframe.

That is grounds maintenance work. It always has been, we have just rarely described it in those terms. Native planting, wildflower management, pollinator corridors, reduced mowing regimes that allow habitat to develop: these are not specialist ecology interventions. They are extensions of what a skilled, ecologically literate grounds team does every day. The difference is that BNG gives them a statutory framework, a measurable standard, and, critically, a commercial value.

The sector is not ready; and that is both a problem and an opportunity

I want to be honest about where the grounds maintenance sector currently sits in relation to BNG. The majority of businesses, including many good, well-run businesses, are not yet equipped to have the ecological conversation that BNG requires. Their teams are skilled at maintenance, at presentation, at delivering to a specification. But ecological literacy — understanding habitat types, biodiversity metrics, the difference between a close-mown amenity grass and a species-rich meadow and why it matters, is not yet widespread across the industry's workforce.

That gap is real, and it matters. Because clients who need to demonstrate BNG compliance cannot rely on a grounds maintenance contractor who doesn't understand what they are being asked to help deliver. The risk is that grounds maintenance gets bypassed in the BNG conversation, that developers and landowners turn to specialist ecology consultancies for their biodiversity planning, and treat their grounds maintenance contractor as an entirely separate, purely operational relationship.

That would be a missed opportunity of significant proportions. The businesses that bridge that gap — that build genuine ecological capability into their teams, that can sit in a BNG planning conversation as an informed partner rather than an absent contractor, will access a new and growing segment of client need. Those that don't will find their services increasingly commoditised as BNG compliance shifts the value conversation towards ecological outcomes.

What genuine ecological capability looks like in practice

At Ground Control, we have been building our ecological capability deliberately and over several years. We have established habitat banks on Natural England's Biodiversity Gain Site Register, including our Wildfell site in Essex and our Cambridgeshire nature-recovery project, together covering nearly 400 acres of habitat creation and restoration.

These generate high-integrity biodiversity units that developers can purchase to meet their statutory BNG obligations. This is not a consultancy offering bolted onto a maintenance business. It is an integrated capability that allows us to be genuinely useful to clients at every stage of the BNG process.

What this looks like at the operational level is worth describing. It means training grounds teams to distinguish between and manage different habitat types, not just cut everything to the same specification. It means understanding that a reduced mowing regime in certain areas is not a failure to deliver the contract, but an active ecological intervention. It means being able to have an informed conversation with a client's ecology team about what a site's baseline assessment shows and what management changes would improve it.

This is a different kind of grounds maintenance from what most of the sector has historically delivered. It is more complex, more skilled, and, when done well,  more valuable to clients. It also requires a different kind of relationship: not a transactional one based on visit frequency and unit cost, but a partnership based on shared ecological objectives and long-term outcomes.

The long-term shift: from maintenance to stewardship

BNG represents the beginning of a more fundamental shift in how the grounds maintenance sector understands its own purpose. For decades, the dominant frame has been maintenance, keeping things tidy, safe, and presentable to a client-defined standard. That work remains essential and always will. But alongside it, a new frame is emerging: stewardship.

Stewardship means taking responsibility for the ecological health of a site over time, not just its appearance on any given visit. It means understanding what the land is capable of, what it needs, and how management decisions today shape its ecological value for the next generation. It means being accountable to measurable outcomes, biodiversity metrics, habitat condition, species diversity, not just to a schedule of operations.

This is a bigger role than the sector has traditionally claimed for itself. It requires more from our people, more from our client relationships, and more from our own understanding of what we are actually doing when we manage green space. But it is also a more defensible, more valuable, and frankly more interesting role. The grounds maintenance businesses that embrace it will be better positioned commercially, better at attracting and retaining talented people, and better able to make the case for why this sector matters.

BNG is not the whole of that story. But it is, right now, the most tangible signal that the story is changing. The sector should pay close attention.