Comment

Bats have ruined my house sale – Rachel Reeves is right to give them the boot

As Rachel Reeves insists home-owners renovating their properties need no longer worry about nesting critters, Laurel Noakes reveals how trying to do the right thing for roosting bats turned into a nightmare

Thursday 30 January 2025 07:27 EST
59Comments
Rachel Reeves says growth must trump green priorities in Heathrow row

In her speech on growth on Wednesday, Rachel Reeves said: “We are reducing the environmental requirements placed on developers when they pay into a nature restoration fund… they can focus on getting things built and stop worrying about the bats and the newts.”

After the year I’ve had, this would be an absolute dream. Bats might be a challenge for a major developer; for an individual, they’re a nightmare.

My mum is 83 and lives in a very old house in an area of outstanding natural beauty. Last year, I persuaded her to sell part of it and renovate another part to live in as she gets older. That’s where I opened the gateway to hell, as far as conservation is concerned.

As part of the planning application to split up the property, we had to get planning permission and an ecology report. I put my hand up straight away and said that we had bats. Nevertheless, we still had to pay more than £3,000 to get an ecologist to come and confirm that fact.

As part of the development, we wanted to demolish a wooden barn to extend the property for my mum to live in. But of course, we had bats nesting in there, and so even though mum needs all sorts of stuff for her own wellbeing, I had to prioritise the bats.

We had to wait two months until the bats had left and then pay an ecologist to come and prove they were no longer there. Then – and bear in mind my mother still doesn’t have so much as a stairlift at this point – we had to demolish the barn and reconstruct it a few hundred yards away for the bats to return to next year.

We had to exactly replicate the living environment for them and their flight path into the barn; it had to face in the right direction and have a clear runway for them to fly in. We had to provide alternative accommodation for them in case they didn’t come back to that location. The builders found it hilarious.

‘We will have spent around £15,000 on the bats by the time we even sell the house’
‘We will have spent around £15,000 on the bats by the time we even sell the house’ (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

All of this is before anything happens for my dear old mum; the bats have taken priority over a pensioner’s wellbeing. The bats are completely accommodated – we couldn’t have done anything more for them! – whereas my mum still lives in a house that is unfit for her needs.

Every time I think we are through the saga, I get an email saying, “Oh, don’t forget, we need to come back and check the bats are still around in three months, six months, 12 months”, and each time they come, it’s another couple of grand. We will have spent around £15,000 on the bats by the time we even sell the house.

But bear in mind that that was with me finding a local ecologist through a conversation in a pub. The company that I’d originally found were going to charge us way more than that.

I am on the side of ecologists; I want to preserve nature and make things as good as possible. But I think the difference in pricing from the first ecologist I found for the second one shows me what a rip-off it is. All they do is come and crawl around in your space and say: “Yes, you got bats.” I know that! Everything has such an excessive price tag. The whole process needs to be reexamined.

Until you have to deal with this sort of thing yourself, you don’t know about it. It opens up this whole new portal I’d previously been completely blind to. The number of people who’ve gone “We have bats…” when I tell this story – they seem to be more common than rats.

Perhaps we do need to have another bat count. Most people I’ve spoken to don’t bother telling anyone and tear down their buildings anyway. So it feels like if you play by the rules, you get penalised, whereas it seems to be a huge benefit to break them.

The blanket approach for everybody in planning is where the issue lies. My understanding is that developers have to pay into a nature restoration fund for them to get permission. It doesn’t take into consideration everyday muggles like me and my mum. There’s no benefit to us paying into such a fund as the one Reeves described – we’re not ripping up hedgerows, we’re just trying to survive as a family, and a family who has to go through the same system as a major developer. We’re not Taylor Wimpey.

We’re hoping to put the half of the house for sale on the market next week, but we’re still not out of the woods. We haven’t been signed off as having completed the project. Meanwhile, my mum has been unwell recently and the necessity of getting her housing sorted has become really urgent. Again, all the money we’ve borrowed has gone to prioritise the bats, and that feels so topsy-turvy.

My position in the world is very much, “Yay, bats!” but also, good grief: it’s “Yay, my mum!” more.

The author is writing under a pseudonym

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

59Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in