Many of the old farmhouses, cottages and buildings around here provide (often unwittingly) a perfect home for bats.
Most of us welcome these fascinating, highly protected creatures, -- that is until the time comes to carry out some urgent repairs or extensions to our houses. And that includes attic and cavity wall insulation which we are pressed by the government to undertake. For the most part farmers and other members of the public are encouraged to protect rare or endangered species and are often paid for doing so, but the opposite is true in the case of bats. It is illegal to harm, disturb, or prevent bats entering a building.
Before carrying out any work in your attic you must make sure that no bats are present. On this subject the normal presumption in law that you are: "innocent until proved guilty" appears to have been substantially reversed. As regards bats, you are deemed to be guilty until proved innocent. That is to say that English Nature, the guardians of the bats, applies the mantra "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". So it is necessary to undertake a costly professional survey before starting work or you may find yourself faced with severe penalties and you will certainly be faced with long delays. Stories abound of people having to spend large sums on a separate building to accommodate displaced bats.
Because of the well-meaning legislation, bats have become an anathema to builders and developers. Evidence of bats could cost them huge sums of money and so, far from protecting the creatures, some go to great lengths to remove them from old buildings together with all traces of them, and making sure that they cannot get back in.
If the powers-that-be are really determined to protect these endangered species, (the only mammals that have learned to fly), why on earth do they put a huge financial and administrative burden on those who would be their saviours? A more sensible approach would be to offer a grant to those of us who go out of our way to save the bats and to pay for the grants by sacking the army of bureaucrats who take great pleasure in wielding their power and snooping into our homes.
In short, well meant but ill-conceived legislation can often have the opposite effect to that intended.
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