Bright Green: Best Emerging Environmental Consultancy – UK

Bright Green Environmental Consultancy Ltd. Provides environmental consultancy services in the fields of Ecology, Arboricultural, Sustainability, Environmental Planning and EIA, Sustainable Grant Sourcing. We invited Tony Hargreaves to talk us through the firm and how it aims to achieve excellence in every service it provides.

Here at Bright Green we work with a wide variety of clients including private individuals, businesses, agricultural, developers, architects, planning consultants to help them meet their environmental requirements, whether it be a legal or regulatory requirement for a planning application or a duty of care, or an environmental ‘green’ aim.

The firm offers a wide range of services to these clients in order to meet their individual needs and provide a single port of call for environmental services. Within the ecological sector we provide European protected species (EPS) surveys and licensing, conservation advice and management plans, CfSH and BREEAM Assessments. We also provide arboricultural surveys to determine tree safety, protection plans, property damage reports, tree surveys for planning.

Our work in environmental planning sees the firm working with clients to secure planning permission for residential, commercial, agricultural, waste and renewable energy developments.

We also provide landscape and visual, noise, odour, ecology, transport impact assessments.

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) are also offered by the firm, and we provide advice and assessments to clients that may or may not require an EIA. This ranges from agricultural clients wishing to bring uncultivated land back into production to the development of commercial scale food waste anaerobic digestion plants generating renewable electricity.

In addition, we aim to identify potential grant funding sources for client’s projects, usually with a sustainability aspect such as green tourism, energy or resource efficiency, conservation benefits.

We pride ourselves on providing high quality, pragmatic and professional advice and solutions on environmental matters to our clients. One key component of our service that we advise clients on is the need for proportionality of works in relation to their projects.

Whilst of course it is necessary to fully understand the potential environmental impacts that a project may have, the key is to put in sufficient effort in order to achieve this, this can have significant cost savings to clients.

We like to work closely with our clients and try to ensure they consider the environmental elements at the outset of their project to reduce the risk of unexpected delays or costs further down the line, and in many cases make positive environmental impacts to the projects.

The environmental sector as a whole continues to grow at around 2% annually and the general understanding and relevance of environmental issues within the general public and industry continues to improve. An interesting current issue is the EU referendum, as most of the UK’s wildlife and environmental legislation is based on EU Directives. There is currently uncertainty as to how these would be replaced if the UK were to leave the EU. A renegotiated relationship with the EU is also uncertain as it is not known what the implications will be for environmental legislation.

Changes to the legislation under which the environmental profession works will have potentially profound and serious implications for the sector, and it will be interesting to see how this develops moving forward.

Since our establishment in 2014 we have had significant success and built up a good client base that continues to grow. This success has given us the confidence to further our growth and look to take on more staff, and we have made the conscious decision that this should be a graduate or new entrant into the sector, as I recall when I set out in my career in this field the disillusionment I felt in not being able to get work without any experience. I am now able to help someone else in their career into an exciting and evolving industry and look forward to an exciting future for both myself and the firm.