What does this even mean?

[Gone West]

@Ferdinand So 10mm as a minimum and the link recommends 20mm for replacement slots in mitigation work.

[AliG]

I think the evidence that birds can roost there, but no specific evidence of bats is very flimsy.

 

As I understood it there should actually be evidence of bats to drive further work.

 

I would present this report to planning and say that as they have not found evidence of bats that is enough.

 

Of course planning doesn't pay for more reports so could still ask for more, but they might take this as enough.

[janelondon]

As I understand it, you don't actually need evidence/presence of bats to be required to do emergence surveys. Even if there is no evidence of them, when doing the Phase 1 scoping, the ecologist will rate the building for "bat roosting suitability" - negligible, low, medium or high - which corresponds to the # of additional emergence surveys required - 0, 1, 2 and 3. Things like having gaps would contribute to increased suitability, as in our case. 

[canalsiderenovation]

3 hours ago, janelondon said:

As I understand it, you don't actually need evidence/presence of bats to be required to do emergence surveys. Even if there is no evidence of them, when doing the Phase 1 scoping, the ecologist will rate the building for "bat roosting suitability" - negligible, low, medium or high - which corresponds to the # of additional emergence surveys required - 0, 1, 2 and 3. Things like having gaps would contribute to increased suitability, as in our case. 

Yes, you seem to have hit the nail on the head, along with the fact we have trees, ivy and water!

[eekoh]

As a bat ecologist, I can assure that the council are entirely correct in their request for you to provide them with an ecological assessment of your proposals - they have a legal responsibility to consider impacts on protected species such as bats.  The fact that not all councils do request this information is down to lack of resources & knowledge in the planning departments resulting from however many years of austerity and cutbacks, not because its optional or somehow at their own discretion - in fact if you do get planning consent without this information there are a number of precedents for planning permission being challenged and even overturned due to the LPA failing to assess it adequately on all of the aspects they are legally required to consider.  

 

If you have a plot next to a canal (even if its in the centre of a city) and your architect told you that bat surveys wouldn't be needed then he/she hasn't provided accurate advice and really should know better.

 

It's also entirely possible to have had bats in a building for years without you ever realising.  If I had a tenner for every time I've found bats roosting where a client has told me 'there's no bats in our barn/house, we've lived here for years and never seen a single one' I'd be as rich as people seem to think us ecologists are!  

 

It is normal that a daytime inspection alone isn't adequate to confirm whether or not bats are present.  There are several different bat species that use buildings in different ways and not all of them leave evidence in places where it would be obvious to see so if the building has suitable features then emergence surveys to watch for bats actually coming/going is what it takes to comply with the current survey standards that the LPA can rely on when assessing your application.

 

Trust me on this, ecologists are not doing things just to make your life difficult or line their own pockets by screwing up your development.  Our role is to provide specialist advice on a specific aspect of your project that your architect/planner/builder/surveyor simply isn't qualified to do, and to make sure that you stay on the right side of the protected species legislation and don't expose yourself or your contractors to prosecution for wildlife crimes.

 

 

 

[canalsiderenovation]

2 hours ago, eekoh said:

If you have a plot next to a canal (even if its in the centre of a city) and your architect told you that bat surveys wouldn't be needed then he/she hasn't provided accurate advice and really should know better.

No, they never said it wouldn't it was a maybe, but to put in for planning and to see what they say. They'd already taken all photos of the inside of buildings lofts and submitted them and didn't want to say to have any surveys costing us £ if we didn't actually need them. These are local architects familiar with the local authority and planning officers do we trust their advice. Plans for a building with an inside swimming pool for a house less than a 5minute walk away close to the canal our architects did plans for didn't need an ecology survey! 

[eekoh]

Sadly I hear this quite a lot - unfortunately government cutbacks mean many councils no longer employ a County Ecologist to advise on planning matters so that LPAs often don't have access to the in-house expertise on ecology issues that they would have say 10 years ago.  Its incredibly frustrating for ecologists too when LPAs don't give consistent advice and completely understandable that people resent having to undertake work that they think someone else has escaped.  It undermines trust in my profession and the lack of consistency encourages architects and planners to advise their clients to 'submit and see what comes back' rather than planning for things from the outset, which then leads to situations where applications are delayed because the survey season has been missed or bats are found when contractors start on the roof and everything grinds to a halt.

 

 

 

[Jeremy Harris]

A friend of mine encountered this complete absence of understanding of ecology-related stuff when he applied for planning consent to build on a large area of his garden that had once been a commercial orchard.  All the old fruit trees had long since expired and been removed, and the area of land was just a large, well-mown, lawn, and had been for years.  He had an ecology report done, because the planners required it, which said much as would be expected for a large area of lawn, there was nothing of special interest there. 

 

However, the planners still had a record of the land having been an orchard in the distant past, so demanded a bat survey and also a badger survey (both completely pointless when you actually go and look at the land in question).  He ended up wasting thousands of pounds on surveys, which held up his build for well over a year, simply because of the ignorance of the local authority and the insane advice from their own ecologist, who never once visited the site, but relied on very old maps in order to form his opinion.

[ToughButterCup]

40 minutes ago, eekoh said:

[...]

Its incredibly frustrating for ecologists too when LPAs don't give consistent advice and completely understandable that people resent having to undertake work that they think someone else has escaped.  It undermines trust in my profession 

[...]

 

Good to hear the story from the other side of the farm gate. 

 

Change the words '... they think someone else ... ' above to ' ...  know that their immediate neighbours have ... ' and you'd be bang on in my case.

 

Here's the story

[canalsiderenovation]

So we now had the follow up survey to check for roosting bats, despite the lack of evidence in the first report.

 

I've just had an email:

 

The survey was a good one. We found no roosting bats, and it was quieter on the activity front than we would have expected from the location. There were soprano and common pipistrelles foraging around the edges of the garden, and a myotis bat that was foraging along the bank behind the house.

 

We didn’t see any birds nesting, but there was plenty of birdsong around us and some quite active blackbirds at dawn.

 

I’m hoping to get the findings written up this week but there shouldn’t be any restrictions from bats, a generalised method statement is usual as bats have been known to just show up sometimes, but the only timing restrictions will come from the nesting birds as detailed in the original report.

 

So, basically no issues. Annoying we had to pay for the follow up report to check for roosting bats even though there was no evidence, but there we have it. Hopefully we will now get a decision re planning as they wouldn't do anything until we had this....

[joe90]

@canalsiderenovation that’s a good result, crack on.

[canalsiderenovation]

Our architectural company just rung us today, the Council contacted them to apologise for the delay, they have approved planning and the materials and the full report will be with us at the end of the week (they have a backlog). Couple of conditions (which they think will relate to the ecology, bat boxes etc) but I so pleased the Council ignored the ridiculous comments from the consultancy stage from the Canal and River Trust who basically didn't like anything about the plans! Once we get the report we can then start to look at tendering and crack on with some major research, building reg plans etc and finding a builder for next year...... 

 

It's almost 12 months since we approached different companies, architects etc....

[joe90]

Really pleased for you, onwards and upwards.