The first Environmental Delivery Plan has landed — and it is a flat £2,675 a home

19 September 2026

Quick answer: On 17 September 2026 Natural England and Defra opened consultation on the draft Norfolk Environmental Delivery Plan — the first EDP of its kind under the Nature Restoration Fund. It addresses nutrient pollution affecting the Broads SAC (Yare and Bure), Broadland Ramsar and the River Wensum SAC, across three catchments. Instead of a calculated nutrient budget, the draft proposes a flat levy of £2,675 per house or flat, indexed to the RICS CIL Index and before VAT. Natural England models capacity for up to 15,780 homes. Participation would be voluntary. The plan is not in force — it is a draft, the Secretary of State has not decided it, and its start and end dates are still blank. The consultation closes at 9.29am on 27 October 2026. Until a made EDP is operative, every site in every nutrient catchment still needs the existing route: calculate the budget, secure the mitigation, evidence it.

Why this one matters even if you never work in Norfolk

We have written about the Nature Restoration Fund three times this year — the regulations being laid, the levy rulebook and Parliament’s approval — and each time the honest answer was the same: the framework exists, but nothing you can actually use exists yet.

That has now changed in one place. The Norfolk EDP is the first working example of what an EDP looks like on paper, and the structure it sets will almost certainly be the template for the other fifteen nutrient EDPs Natural England notified the Secretary of State about in December 2025. If you want to know what nutrient mitigation is going to look like in the Stour, the Solent, the Tees or the Avon in eighteen months’ time, this document is the best available preview.

Defra’s own framing, in a blog post published alongside the consultation, is that this is “the first opportunity to test, in a real place”, an approach meant to replace project-by-project mitigation with pooled, coordinated delivery. Two design choices stand out, and both are departures from how nutrient neutrality works today.

Departure one: a flat charge, not a calculated budget

Nutrient neutrality as practised since 2022 is a calculation. You work out the additional nitrogen or phosphorus load your development produces — occupancy, wastewater treatment works discharge concentration, water consumption, surface water, land use change — and then you buy or build mitigation equal to that load plus a precautionary buffer.

The draft Norfolk EDP does not do that. It proposes £2,675 for each house or flat, full stop. Annual indexation is linked to the RICS Community Infrastructure Levy Index. The draft developer-process supplement states that levy amounts exclude VAT, charged at 20%, though that appears in illustrative draft paperwork rather than a settled charging schedule.

Ten homes would therefore be a base levy of £26,750 before indexation and VAT. (The charging, eligibility and drainage detail summarised in this article comes from the draft EDP and its supplements; Planning Geek’s breakdown of the same documents is a useful cross-check. Anyone budgeting against these figures should read the final charging documentation rather than the draft.)

For anyone who has spent the last three years assembling credit purchases and agreeing nutrient budgets with a case officer, a flat per-unit charge is a significant simplification. It also means the levy is indifferent to how efficient your scheme is. A dwelling designed to 105 litres per person per day pays exactly what a dwelling designed to 125 l/p/d pays. Under a calculated budget, water efficiency reduces your nitrogen and phosphorus load and therefore your mitigation cost; under the EDP levy, it does not.

That is worth knowing before anyone in a design team argues that the EDP removes the reason to push water efficiency. It removes the nutrient reason. It does not touch Part G, the optional 110 l/p/d technical standard where a local plan applies it, Defra’s proposed move to a 105 l/p/d baseline, or any local plan policy on water neutrality. Those obligations are unchanged.

Departure two: an improvement test, not equivalence

The second departure is conceptual. Buying nutrient credits means buying a quantified reduction that offsets your quantified load. The EDP works differently: Natural England proposes a strategic programme of conservation measures and the statutory test is whether, by the plan’s end date, the positive effects of those measures materially outweigh the negative effects of the maximum development the plan covers — assessed for each identified environmental feature.

The draft programme includes wetland creation and restoration, land management change, fen management and river restoration. Specific commitments in the draft include around 109 hectares of fen-type wetland creation or restoration across the Bure and Yare, removal or modification of a river structure alongside roughly one kilometre of River Wensum restoration, deer management, and habitat creation for Desmoulin’s whorl snail. The draft proposes securing conservation measures for at least 100 years, with maintenance, monitoring and back-up measures where they underperform.

Natural England considers its draft meets the overall improvement test. That assessment is precisely the thing consultees are being invited to scrutinise.

What the plan actually covers — and what it carves out

This is not a county-wide scheme, and “my site is in Norfolk” is not eligibility.

Ant Broads and Marshes, Trinity Broads, and Upper Thurne Broads and Marshes are expressly left out of this draft, on the basis of limited development coming forward in those catchments.

The draft identifies affected areas within South Norfolk, Broadland, Norwich, Breckland, North Norfolk, King’s Lynn and West Norfolk, and the Broads Authority — but the proportion of each authority’s area covered varies a great deal. The development-area map in the draft, not the council name, is the starting point.

Three practical traps are worth flagging now:

• The 50-metre buffer is a site test, not a drainage setback. The draft excludes the protected-site land itself and a 50-metre buffer around the Bure and Yare Broads and Marshes sites and the River Wensum SAC. A development site falling wholly or partly within that buffer cannot use the plan at all. That is a different and stricter thing from keeping an outfall 50 metres clear.
• Wastewater catchments extend past surface-water catchments. Where your foul sewage ends up can bring a site into the mapped area even where surface water drains elsewhere. Both drainage routes need reading against the map together.
• Non-mains foul drainage carries a site-level condition. The draft proposes that, before occupation, a package treatment plant must be installed and operating at discharge concentrations no higher than 5 mg/l total phosphorus and 27 mg/l total nitrogen, maintained for the lifetime of the development. That is a demanding specification, and it is a condition the developer carries — the levy does not discharge it.

The process, and where the risk sits

Participation would be voluntary. For an eligible proposal the intended sequence is:

1. Confirm the final EDP is in force and covers the development, its location and the relevant environmental effects.
2. Obtain an indicative levy quote and request to use the scheme.
3. Receive a commitment certificate if Natural England accepts the request and has capacity.
4. Submit that certificate with the planning application.
5. After permission, assume liability and receive the liability notice.
6. Pay the levy in full, or the first instalment, before starting development.

The distinction that matters commercially: a quote does not reserve capacity — acceptance of the request does. The commitment also expires after six months if it is not followed by a planning application. Instalments are provided for in the regulations, but the Norfolk supplement’s example is expressly illustrative and still contains an unspecified qualifying threshold and an additional charge to be confirmed. It is not a settled offer.

A valid commitment under an applicable EDP allows the specified environmental effects to be disregarded for the relevant Habitats Regulations assessment. Payment is then secured separately through a statutory condition preventing commencement until the levy, or its first instalment, is paid. Commitment and payment are two different gates.

Does it really unlock 15,780 homes?

15,780 is a modelled maximum capacity, not a pipeline. The figure is built from catchment housing need, an assumed 75% delivery rate and an assumed 80% take-up of the Nature Restoration Fund route. It is not a schedule of permissions and not a forecast of completions.

The plan is proposed to run for ten years, but new requests to pay the levy would close at the end of year six, giving Natural England time to deliver conservation measures before the plan ends. The actual start and end dates are blank in the draft, pending the Secretary of State’s decision.

And because participation is voluntary, 15,780 is not a ceiling on development in the area either. Other acceptable mitigation routes remain available.

What is law today, and what is still a proposal

One tidy-up worth noting: some references in the consultation pack and in earlier government guidance still point at the draft levy regulations. SI 2026/1020 is now the operative instrument. That does not make the Norfolk EDP a live plan.

What to do this month

If you have a stalled site in one of the three catchments, this is a reason to review options — not a reason to release an existing mitigation solution or promise a client a start date.

1. Check eligibility properly. Mapped boundary, the 50-metre exclusion, and both foul and surface-water drainage routes. A council name is not an answer.
2. Compare like with like. Levy plus indexation plus potential VAT plus payment timing, against the cost and programme of the mitigation you can secure today. A flat charge is not automatically cheaper than a calculated budget on an efficient scheme.
3. List what the EDP would leave unresolved — other environmental effects, the non-mains drainage condition, BNG, Part G, local plan water policies.
4. Respond to the consultation if site-specific eligibility, drainage, charging or delivery concerns apply to you. The questionnaire and full draft documents are on Defra’s consultation hub, and responses after 9.29am on 27 October will not be counted.
5. Keep working the existing route in the meantime. Nothing about nutrient neutrality obligations has changed today.

For everyone outside Norfolk, the useful action is simpler: read this draft as the shape of the thing coming to your catchment, and note the two structural changes — a flat charge per dwelling, and an improvement test in place of equivalence.