Beware the bat police

My friend Andrew is angry. He has just had the bat people round to look at his building project in Swanage. There was no evidence of bats that they could find, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. A full survey would be required.

In total the non-existent bats in our village hall cost the parish more than £2,500

I advised him to pay up and not dwell on the madness, but his ire reminded me of my own recent experience with the bat fuzz. From 2018 until this June, I chaired the committee responsible for refurbishing a village hall deep in rural Somerset. As law-abiding and nature-loving people, we followed our surveyor’s stern instruction and did all the bat-friendly things we needed to do before starting the work. It would, he said, be a criminal offence to do otherwise under the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act.

First stop was a firm of ecological consultants in Bath which reported, to our great relief, that the village hall was ‘assessed as having low bat-roosting suitability’. This study cost us more than £400 – about as much as we might earn from a successful local fundraiser.

But it wasn’t really a study at all. The first frisson of rage came on reading page four: ‘Proposals are to demolish the garage and replace it with an annexe that will link on to the dwelling’s northern elevation.’ This bore no resemblance to our project. It was a case of cut and paste.

Had we just shut up and followed this consultant’s recommendation of carrying out another survey, we probably would have saved some money. But the cutting and pasting seemed unforgiveable, so we hired another firm to survey the hall. They quoted £700 for the job.

This is where the story gets complicated. The second consultant came and decided that – following guidelines from the Bat Conservation Trust – they would have to come back and see it again. If ever there was an over-egged pudding, this had to be it. And after all that, the final report sounded no different from the cut and paste one. ‘The building was previously assessed as offering low suitability for roosting bats; however, no evidence of bat roosting was found.’

Hurrah? Not quite: the two surveys ‘confirmed that the building supports summer day roosts for low numbers of common pipistrelle and soprano pipistrelle bats’. The cost of these two surveys was £1,040, almost 50 per cent more than quoted.

It got worse. Our very low level of bat activity required us to apply for a bat mitigation class licence from Natural England. The licence itself cost only £130, but having somebody complete the application form (presumably using the data gathered during the surveys) cost £720. The consultants then demanded another cheque for coming in to supervise our professional building team while they fitted a couple of bat boxes (£208). I asked them to waive this bill and they refused. In total our non-existent bats cost the parish and its donors more than £2,500 – almost 1 per cent of our village hall refurbishment budget.

The community gritted its collective teeth and made (and ate) an awful lot of cottage pies and cakes to pay for it. We really wouldn’t have minded had there been any point to the exercise. There wasn’t. So why did it happen?

Everything seems very confusing when it comes to bats. The Bat Conservation Trust says that bats must be protected for many reasons, including the fact that they are ‘excellent indicators for the wider health of the UK’s wildlife’. The same website notes that UK bat populations have been stable or recovering since 1999. It also mentions last year’s State of Nature report which confirmed a large and accelerating 19 per cent decline in the abundance of UK species since 1970. It’s hard to work out what exactly is going on.

The new Labour government cites planning reform as central to its economic growth strategy, so let’s hope it will be looking at bats. A letter from ministers to environmental NGOs last month notes the drag effect of ‘environmental assessments and case-by-case negotiations of mitigation and compensation measures’ and their lack of effectiveness. These are lovely, sensible words – the sort that only ever get spoken when a government is just starting out. Just wait until they encounter the bat lobby.