To think bat surveys are a racket?

[cakehoover123]

The council says we need a bat survey before we can replace the roof of the dilapidated house we're buying - a house that is empty, listed, and leaking.

The house is quite likely to have bats in it, since it's in the countryside, empty and full of holes!

I sent floor plans and photos to an ecologist who said a "preliminary" survey would be £540. He didn't give an estimate for the full survey.

I replied to ask:

1. Could he estimate for the full survey?
2. Could we just go straight to the full survey, given that it's so likely there are bats?
3. Could we skip the survey, and just do mitigations, on the assumption there are bats?

He said:

1. £1200-£1800 estimate, but cost "could vary significantly" above that
2. No, the preliminary survey decides what later surveys are needed
3. No for a "whole raft of technical, practical and legal reasons", and the council's building consent most likely wouldn't even be legal if they gave it to us on that basis

Googling around, these costs seem pretty standard.

Now I am keen to look after bats, and keen that wildlife is protected, and would want to put bat boxes etc in even if there were no bats - but this is starting to feel like a racket.

Firstly, how can it be so difficult to say how much something costs before starting work? Secondly, why do we need to spend £2k+ on surveys, if we just agree to do mitigations? We can't not repair the roof - the house will fall down if we don't! So the only question really is how to mitigate.

Are bat surveys the racket they appear to be?

Or - perhaps some MN ecologists out there will know - are there good reasons why the system appears to be so opaque, expensive and bureaucratic?

Insane that you need them for repair work to a house that already exists - I could understand if you were building something new on the plot.

How much do you want the house? Extensive repairs + listed building already sounds like too many headaches!

The listed building isn't mine, just OP's.

Yeah, though, I'd have thought a simple repair should be okay - it's just finding someone official who can okay that.

I'm thinking this is just something we need to pay the right professional to make it go away as fast and economically as possible now. My health comes first.

Your reports wouldn’t pass the ‘competent person’ test and you could be at risk of prosecution if you did particular things while not holding either the statutory personal or work plan EPS licences.

The law is the law regardless of what/why you want to do works.

I didn’t say otherwise?

I thought the government when considering getting rid of bat surveys.

https://www.bats.org.uk/news/2025/01/planning-reform-bad-for-bats

Well no but you suggested doing surveys was insane on an existing building.

Therefore I was just pointing out the law can be broken regardless of if the building is being repaired or is new.

Potentially in some scenarios yes. The (bullshit) idea is that money will pay for strategic mitigation on a large scale instead and that this will be more beneficial. Not that there’s any evidence for this whatsoever.

It’s not the law yet and it’s aimed at developers so how it might apply (or not) in this scenario isn’t clear yet.

The whole “survey” world is an extortion racket in my opinion.
My Horses paddock has a big electricity Pylon in it - the national grid are replacing one of the wires. A few weeks ago a man came round to inspect for Otters. There are no otters because there is no water, no river, no ponds, not even a ditch! But even so, he insisted on coming out and looking, no doubt charging £500 when a quick check on google maps could have told him the nearest stream is a good mile away. No wonder everything is so expensive these days!

I can assure you the majority of surveys are indeed done for a reason even if that is to “rule out” something.

With some of the larger companies it can be a fear of bad publicity or legal issues and they send someone out for literally anything. Like a pond on an aerial that’s no longer there. Or a stream that’s been culverted and underground for years. To tick a box.

For what it’s worth otters have been known use woodland pretty far from water for breeding. Why that would affect the changing of a wire on a pylon I’m not sure. That does sound strange. Probably some sort of mistake somewhere.

Many years ago I had to have a bat survey and afterwards the surveyor left his business card and for job title he had "Batman"- which I thought would be a pretty cool response when asked what do you do for a job?

You're right, the only reasonable course of action here is to retrain as a bat ecologist 😉

In other words: to defeat bat ecologists... You must become a bat ecologist

Yeah, it looks like going the government route is going to take as long as government routes usually take ('we might be able to get back to you in the next two weeks unless Wendy's off that day'), so the next step is contacting ecologists in the area...

Or indeed, @1dayatatime , put out a signal for Batman...

Further bulletins as events warrant...

Surveys of bats, badgers, great-crested newts and over 150 trees plus an extensive geosurvey and having to install around 200m of newt fencing by hand cost us a fortune in one of our builds. The joys of planning laws!

Your bat signal is right, the handle is a giveaway 😆. I’ve worked in Scotland, England, Wales and in Europe on this sort of thing. There are territorial differences in the methods and processes as well as species and seasonal considerations. For I’ve said here I have assumed people are in England or Wales and general enough to apply to Scotland too

@BatSignal do you need the name of a qualified, competent and lovely person to do your bat survey in the Cardiff area? If you do, please PM me. Decades ago I used to teach this chap and we're still in contact on social media.

It all sounds a total nightmare - sending sympathy to all involved.

“Did you know it takes longer building a bungalow in the twentieth century than it did building a cathedral in the twelfth century?”

Re costing and estimates

Its difficult to estimate because they will have no idea what type of bats are present and in what numbers.
They alsoneed to find out where they are nesting

Specialists sit out through the early hours in the dark watching for movement. Many people will be there surrounding the property watching and counting. They are also looking at flight paths, nesting locations and species etc.

If on day one there’s just one or two it’s easy to count and identify.
If you’ve got 20 or so, more people are needed to carry out the survey

Of note not all bats are the same. Some are far rarer than others and it’s extremely important to be aware of this

Its impossible to estimate costs on an unknown.

It is so incredibly costly. My brother lives out in the countryside and wants to put up solar panels on an outside building, that was once a cowshed or something like that. I'm not sure exactly what. The local authority won't sign it off without a bat survey, which is going to cost £800! Yet just down the road there is a giant solar farm being constructed. It just seems mental, a few solar panels on a south facing farm building can't be done if it disturbs a bat but bring on thousands of acres of solar farm, less than a mile away. The planning restrictions in this country seem mad sometimes.

Bats don’t nest in fields though.
They do in barns
Its not comparable

And while bat surveys for the solar farm
development may have been ruled out there are likley other protected species/habitat surveys they had to do. I appreciate the feeling hard done by but domestic planning apps have way more exemptions on all sorts of permissions than commercial

It can be done. You just need a licence. Although some local authorities do go over the top. I have had to argue with a few myself when they have made bonkers comments or asked for surveys that are not needed.

Plus. Giant solar farm will have had to have had all sorts of wildlife surveys too.

The UK was for generations a world leader on environmental legislation - clean air, wildlife, food safety etc. I’m not going to argue that it’s worked or that the way it’s regulated is sensible and fair, or that corporations find ways to cheat, but there are two broad principles underpinning the laws -

Well functioning ecosystems are necessary for human well-being and prosperity.

The beneficiary of the proposed development should bear the cost of meeting the standards expected, not the taxpayer.

Well exactly, and a ground mount field scale solar farm will have involved a huge range of ecological and archaeological surveys and reports costing tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds…