One way to describe the ecosystem of lawyers, consultants and experts that has evolved around planning is the marvellous Russian expression Nomenklatura – a faceless, self-supporting, self-sustaining, unelected, group of unknown names that influence and control every aspect of planning, and thus growth and the economy. Because of the reputations they develop fighting “difficult” planning briefs the top planning lawyers hold significant sway and power over the local authorities, that their clients expect them to influence.

Planning procedural overkill makes for bad planning decisions. Especially when planners are so busy investigating the number of dormice on site, they utterly failed to consider the effects of the proposed quarry on vibrant local economies.

The Political Economy of Bat Tunnels

In the grand scale of things, the planning excesses and the man hours expended on debating a quarry no one really wants on Hamble Airfield are tiny. If you really want to understand how daft the systemic madness of planning has become… let’s talk about the UK’s world-famous Bat Tunnel.

In rural Buckinghamshire there is a small patch of ancient forest, Sheephouse Wood. It had the great misfortune to discover itself on the path of the railway from nowhere to nowhere – HS2. Among its varied wildlife are bats, including the very rare Bechstein’s Bat which, by dint of not being very reproductively minded, benefits from being very, very rare and thus a very protected species. Since it’s wisely chosen to live on a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSI), anything that threatens its favourable conservation status – for instance a speeding train (even rarer than a bat in the UK) – must be mitigated for.

After a couple of years of debate, surveys, consultations and more debate, the colony of probably less than 30 sexually disinterested bats are now protected from terminal contact with ambling locomotives by a tunnel built over the tracks. Should they wish to fly to the other side of their wood, they will have to fly over the Bat Tunnel. It looks marvellous. It is a triumph of British engineering and design. Someone will no doubt have won an architectural award for it.

The costs have been staggering. I am reliably informed the final bill will vastly exceed a quarter of a billion pounds.

And no one is quite sure how it happened.

No one recalls just how it was agreed that a bat tunnel was the optimal solution. No one remembers who first said… “we must protect the bats with a bat tunnel”. But it’s happened.

They followed process, stuck to procedure and precedent. Don’t try to read through all the documentation around the decision – it will only give you a headache, and you will expire from frustration with multiple discussions about scheduled works, mitigations, applications, EIAs (Environmental Impact Assessments), more mitigations and other such planning tosh and nonsense.

You can just picture what happened. At some point in a planning meeting, in a room full of very earnest planners, ecologists, planning consultants, their lawyers, and associated hangers-on, they reached item 37(b) paragraph 5.3 on the agenda. The dialogue escalated quickly from “we’ve found some stuff that might be bat guano” [hushed shocked silence] …. to a final conclusion years later: “so, we are agreed the best solution is a quarter yard’s worth of Bat Tunnel?” (A yardi s market slang for a milliard, a thousand million, or a billion as the Shermans say, (gratuitous use of more market slang to describe our American cousins… increasingly known as Septics for obvious reasons.)

The bats are blissfully unaware of the hundreds of planning officers, consultants, designers, environmentalists, bat-huggers, bat-sexual health professionals, and other concerned folk who bravely and courageously debated and argued their case. All the experts who opined at extraordinary length on the potential outcomes of bats vs trains incidents, who counted the bats, who opined on the sustainability of the tunnel design, who compiled the council’s multiple reports on landscape and woodland amenity, the inspectors who inspected and corrected the health and safety aspects of Bat Tunnel construction, and all the lawyers who represented the bats, the council, railway builders and others in the multiple meetings to discuss, plan and approve the bat tunnel.. are absolutely delighted.

Years and years of gainful employment and the satisfaction of zero bat vs train fatalities thus far. To be fair, the bat tunnel is likely to sit undisturbed by trains for some time yet, just like all the other HS2 infrastructure that’s been completed well ahead of the first expected trains on the line in 2033!

While a nod’s as good as a wink to the proverbial blind bat flying above a bat tunnel, was £250 million on a bat tunnel good value? Or should we have offered the flying rodents a much cheaper purpose-built Adams Family style haunted mansion with lots of bat eaves somewhere less endangered by trains?

And if you think Bat Tunnels represent a planning system that’s lost purpose, let’s not forget the millions spent on the “fish discos” required to dissuade the 40 or so tonnes of fish that might get sucked into the cooling system of the UK’s next generation Nuclear Power plants. It’s delayed the construction through endless debate for a decade or so.

What we do know is the planning system is very weighted in favour of bats and fish. And especially dormice. Planners will do practically anything for dormice.

But not people.
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Best regards
Bill