Soft Market Test for Local Investment in Natural Capital (LINC)

Below are elements to the programme that WMCA requires consultancy support on from a financial, investor and legal perspective:

1, Building the prospectus We understand the need to bring scale forward to fully realise the opportunity for investment in the natural environment. The WMCA area provides the opportunity for building a project pipeline at scale, but there are also challenges to achieving this in a dense urban area. The consultant will therefore need to support an innovative approach to the development of a project pipeline to reflect the unique size, pressure and nature of our baseline natural capital i.e. we can't just plant trees and deliver BNG. There has been some initial work to pull together some of this, but we would like the focus of the prospectus to do this in a more systematic way and so that it is attractive to investors.

2,Building the Fund The aim of this work will enable us to understand the necessary conditions we need to have in place to give investors confidence in the region's ability to develop and deliver natural capital projects and coordinate through a Fund; we will do this by building an investor panel as a point of contact throughout the project - this should be drawn from expertise already in the sector and through the contacts of the consultants and stakeholders supporting the project.

3, Communications and dissemination work

For more information please refer to the PIN Notice https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/014280-2023

Additional information: Further key detail around expressing an interest in this market engagement exercise are listed below: Portal Website: https://wmca.bravosolution.co.uk PIN Title: Soft Market Test for Local Investment in Natural Capital (LINC)

Bravo Solution Project Reference: Project_704

Once registered, please access Project_704 on our e-tendering portal and respond to PQQ_181 - Soft Market Test for Local Investment in Natural Capital (LINC). This is not a formal PQQ or expression of interest in a tender exercise, it is purely to give the market the opportunity to submit responses to an online questionnaire which may assist the WMCA in drafting their tender documentation. Any information submitted by the market will not be formerly evaluated.

Following the soft market testing exercise, feedback will be considered and built into the wider tender opportunity, which is expected to be published around September-November 2023.

Please note, the deadline for PQQ responses is 2pm 9th June 2023.