While the government relaxes the rules on new-builds in the green-belt, current house-owners are being exposed to large bureaucratic costs due to bat protection requirements.
Everyone I have spoken to recently who has done a house extension has had to have bat survey. And this has created a lucrative new business in bat surveying. For it doesn't come cheap. Another part of the large inflation in construction costs.
My neighbour just around the corner was told by the bat guy, when he turned up, that he could see immediately that he didn't have bats. But unfortunately the bat guy's instinct that he doesn't have bats wasn't enough for the council, and the bat guy had to carry out and report the results of his bat surveys, which cost him £1200. Not an insiginificant proportion of the cost of a house extention just for a bat survey. We live on the edge of an urban area, where it starts to thin out into the countryside, and not so far from the M25. Most of the houses are 50s/60s, some like mine are 30s. Piecemeal, heavily modified, countryside, as it gradually becomes the more continuous countryside of the Chilterns. Little patches of woodland here and there. Fields increasingly given to equestrian usage, as old-fashioned agriculture doesn't pay, especially not in a high wage area.
Someone in my cycling club has a house backing onto Wendover Woods, one of the largest wooded nature reserves in the Chilterns. This is 12 miles or so, in the proper Chilterns. A few scattered houses in the countryside. She had to have a bat survey, despite the very extensive bat habitat on her doorstep. Unsurprisingly there were not. But also they also made her build a bird box into the house. A permanent brick one built into the wall. Had to knock a hole into an existing wall, as the extension itself did not have any suitable orientated walls, by council insistence. Again, you ask, why wouldn't the birds prefer the woods? But apparently birdboxes on houses being modified in more countrified areas is increasingly a standard planning requirement around here these days. But I wonder whether the 500-dwelling estate being built a short distance from my house, whether all of those will have built-in bird-boxes? Or is that a bit too suburban for it?
About 3 houses down from me, a guy is living in a caravan in his front garden while he has a roof extension, similar to the one I did 20 years ago. It took me a year to get planning permission, for ridiculous reasons I won't repeat. But this guy needed three years to get planning permission. And he told me the delay was largely because of bats. The guy said he now knew far more about bats he he ever wished to know. Though I was interested to learn from him that there are a lot of bats just round here. Because I used to regularly see bats flying around my garden, and haven't seen that for over 10 years. I once had a bat crash into my chest when cycling back from the station. Must have been a deaf bat. But he tells me, if I look carefully I should be able to regularly see bats flying along the hedgerow across the road from our houses, in suitable conditions. I never spotted that.
Unfortunately the bat surveyor found bat droppings in his loft. Not recent, the bat surveyor said. But still this resulted in lot of requirements for further surveys at different times and seasons, and a lot of intransigence from the council. In the end, when he finally got planning permission, it was subject to the condition that they had to have a bat surveyor present for when the tile hanging was removed from bits of wall being demolished. There was nothing there.
I appreciate that our bat populations are reducing. But I rather thought this was mainly due to the large reduction of insects in our summer skies, such that getting your car windscreen covered in a splatter of dead insects is much reduced from 30 years ago. And that in turn is mainly due to changes in agricultural practice and, so in effect, bat habitat destruction. I wonder if all this bureaucratic activity of bat surveys, etc, when people do housing modifications, is proportionate.
Our batty planning laws
Re: Our batty planning laws
I take it you’ve heard about the HS2 Bat Tunnel?
Re: Our batty planning laws
I have written about the bat tunnel elsewhere on this forum, observing that the bat tunnel is, in effect, the fault of the same planning authority, Bucks CC, that is placing these batty requirements on house-owners around here. Though that's because they hate HS2, and are pleased to obstruct and pile costs on it in the hope that they can load the straw that breaks the camel's back. My neighbour just around the corner is, ironically, a tunnel engineer. But he doesn't work for any of the companies involved in the bat tunnel construction.
The bat tunnel is at the government's cost, and has drawn to their attention the disproportion of various recent environmental laws and the powers of the bodies that enforce them. And supposedly the government has made some temporary derogations while it sought to adjust the law. Unfortunately the government's proposals to change the law are a patch-up rather than addressing the underlying issues. And the temporary relaxations don't seem to have stopped the batty disproportion in relation small scale housing modifications.