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.