Blended Finance Plan

What the plan will contain

When complete, the Blended Finance Plan will set out:

• The total costof delivering the scheme over twenty years — land management activity, monitoring, governance, and administration
• The income sourcesthe scheme will draw on — DEFRA implementation payments, sales of environmental units through nature markets, philanthropy, and landowner contributions
• The timing gap between when costs are incurred (often in the early years, when land-use changes are being made) and when income arrives (often later, once units have been verified and sold)
• The sources of upfront capital the scheme will use to bridge that gap, and the terms on which that capital is repaid
• The risksto the financial picture — inflation, changes in government policy, changes in nature-market prices — and how the consortium plans to manage them

Business model and financial model

A scheme’s business model is the narrative of how its money works: what it costs to run, where the income comes from, and what bridges the gap between the two.

A scheme’s financial model is the quantitative version of that story — a spreadsheet that tracks cashflow year by year, taking inputs (costs, asset values), variables (inflation, credit prices, timing), and producing outputs (net cashflow, funding gap, reserves held).

The Blended Finance Plan describes the business model in words. The financial model sits alongside it as the numerical evidence that the business model stacks up under pressure.

Buyers, sellers, and capital investors

Three groups of people make a blended-finance arrangement work.

Sellers generate environmental benefits by changing how land is used. For Ure Dales, the sellers are the eighteen landowners and Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, acting together as a consortium.

Buyers purchase credits or units. These are typically companies meeting ESG obligations, developers meeting Biodiversity Net Gain obligations under UK planning law, or water companies meeting outcomes-based regulatory targets.

Capital investorsput money in early to bridge the gap between costs incurred now and income arriving later. They are often banks, impact investment funds, or sources of charitable capital. They expect a return on their investment over time — either in the form of interest on a loan or a share of the units produced.

The Blended Finance Plan names the expected mix of buyers and capital investors, what each will contribute, and on what terms.

Units and credits

The scheme produces measurable quantities of environmental benefit — tonnes of carbon sequestered, hectares of peatland restored, cubic metres of water stored, biodiversity uplift. These are environmental units.

Units exist physically whether anyone sells them or not. They become creditsonly when they have been independently verified under a recognised standard — for example the Peatland Code, the Woodland Carbon Code, or the statutory Biodiversity Net Gain metric — and registered for sale.

The Blended Finance Plan sets out which units the scheme expects to verify as credits, under which standards, and on what timeline.

Who contributes to this plan

The Blended Finance Plan is written by the consortium of eighteen landowners and Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, supported by Accelar as finance partner and by Squire Patton Boggs LLP as legal counsel on the contractual and regulatory questions it raises. DEFRA reviews the plan as part of the application for the implementation agreement.

What happens once the plan is complete

Once the consortium has signed off the Blended Finance Plan, it is submitted to DEFRA along with the other five plans as part of the application for the twenty-year implementation agreement. The status banner at the top of this page will flip from “In development” to “Decision reached”, linking to an explainer of what was decided and — once available — a PDF download of the finalised plan.