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.

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’.