UK Nature and Environment

Bats are being “scapegoated” by Rachel Reeves, Chris Packham has said, after the chancellor suggested the winged creatures were getting in the way of economic growth.

Reeves recently said she wanted businesses to “focus on getting things built, and stop worrying about the bats and the newts”, and this week the press release announcing her shake-up of all the UK’s regulators mentioned bats six times. A very niche directive to Natural England, the nature watchdog, to take advice from the Bat Conservation Trust out of a planning document, became the linchpin of Reeves’s deregulation plan.

“It’s absolutely absurd,” the broadcaster and nature campaigner said. “I am always someone who likes to deal with the facts so I would really like to know over the course of a year how many planning applications are completely refused because of bats, as a percentage of all those across the country. I am going to hazard a guess that it would be a fraction of 1%.”