Homes for Nature: Expanding Biodiversity in New UK Homes

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The Future Homes Hub has extended its pioneering ‘Homes for Nature’ initiative to include apartment developments, updating its guidance to ensure urban wildlife gains aren’t limited to ground‑level housing. The enhancement introduces tailored measures for multi‑story buildings, encouraging features such as universal non‑combustible nest bricks, hedgehog highways, pollinator planting and nature‑led sustainable drainage systems, ensuring high‑rise housing also supports biodiversity in meaningful ways. The guidance, released in mid‑July 2025, aims to enable developers to design spaces that balance human needs with the requirements of urban wildlife. 28 homebuilders  collectively delivering over 100,000 new homes per year have already signed up to the voluntary ‘Homes for Nature’ commitment launched in September 2024. This level of participation is projected to result in at least 300,000 nesting bricks and boxes installed over the programme’s lifetime, making a measurable impact for species like swifts and hedgehogs.

Launched in response to growing recognition that biodiversity must be integrated across housing types, this enhanced guidance reinforces the initiative’s alignment with national planning policy guidance on the natural environment. National design standards now encourage developers to incorporate features such as swift bricks, bat boxes and hedgehog highways across all new developments.

Meanwhile, the Future Homes Hub continues to support the wider delivery of Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) through the newly launched BNG Good Practice Guide, introduced in June 2025. The guide provides an accessible, step‑by‑step checklist and narrative insights from professionals across the development chain local authority ecologists, developers, legal advisors, landscape designers and maintenance contractors bringing practical context to implementing BNG on-site. Designed to simplify application of the statutory BNG metric introduced in February and April 2024, the guide helps streamline delivery and avoid delays, making it especially beneficial for small and medium-sized enterprises.

To further support effective policy delivery, the Future Homes Hub has established a Biodiversity Net Gain Implementation Board in early 2025. Co-chaired by Defra and industry leadership, the board brings together policymakers, homebuilders and key stakeholders to tackle delivery challenges such as guidance clarity and alignment with other nature recovery policies. Its quarterly updates for instance, from April 23rd, 2025 highlight the board’s focus on integrating BNG smoothly into broader national planning frameworks and addressing sector-wide barriers to success.

What This Means:

The expansion of ‘Homes for Nature’ into apartment developments marks a crucial shift biodiversity features will no longer be confined to low‑rise housing. The involvement of major homebuilders and alignment with planning policy suggest momentum toward mainstreaming habitat‑enhancing measures in residential projects. The updated BNG Good Practice Guide and the Implementation Board provide much‑needed clarity and support for developers navigating BNG requirements, reducing risks, and unlocking smoother project progression. Collectively, these developments strengthen the integration of biodiversity into housing delivery, promising healthier, wildlife‑rich communities.

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