Welcome to Warwickshire County Council

If you are submitting a planning application that may affect bats (e.g. if the roof will be significantly affected by the works) you may have questions about bats and planning such as:

• Why do I need a bat survey?
• What does a bat survey involve?
• Will I still be able to go ahead with my development if I have bats?

You may also find the following pdf document about bats and development useful, produced by the Bat Conservation Trust.

For information on who can carry out bats surveys, you can search in the for Yellow Pages under Ecological Consultants, or you could try visiting the Institute of Ecologists and Environmental Managers website (www.ieem.net). On this website you can search the institute's commercial directory of consultants to find local ecologists who can carry out the work for you. We recommend that you obtain a number of quotes, as prices can vary considerably.

If you have any further questions, please contact us using the details at the bottom of the page.

Information for Ecological Consultants

For a bat survey report to be accepted, the consultant must be able to demonstrate that sufficient survey effort has been carried out (in accordance with page 39 of the Bat Conservation Trust (BCT) Good Practice Guidelines). As a general rule this would include a daytime internal and external survey of the site and at least two activity surveys, conducted with sufficient man power and equipment. For example, surveys of multi-pitch buildings using a single surveyor are generally considered to be inadequate. Any deviation from BCT Good Practice should be justified within the report.

We expect bat survey reports to include sufficient detail to enable the Ecology Unit to feel confident in the findings of the survey and use them to inform subsequent recommendations. For this to be possible, we need to see certain essential information such as date of survey, who carried it out and details of their relevant experience (with licence number where appropriate), weather conditions, suitably sourced desk study of existing information, detailed methodology, detailed plan of the site, detailed results and subsequent recommendations with an explanation and justification for any conclusions. This is a uniform standard that we expect from all consultants and failure to adhere to this standard could result in the report being rejected by the Ecology Unit.

We assess bat surveys against the BCT Bat Survey, Good Practice Guidelines (2007), which is available to download from the BCT website for free - in particular see pages 27-28.

As a consequence of the recent judicial review (the Cheshire case), if a Natural England protected species derogation is required, discussion of the three derogation criteria will be needed in the report in order to justify the potential use of a planning condition. In addition, the report should include sufficient information to illustrate that appropriate mitigation measures will be possible within the scheme.

Ecology Unit
Warwickshire Museum Field Services
The Butts
Warwick
CV34 4SS

Telephone: (01926) 418060

Fax: (01926) 412974