How to solve the £100m bat tunnel problem

Why new reforms could make it easier to build infrastructure and protect nature better

Infrastructure costs matter. They are the reason why major cities in France (Paris-Lyon), Germany (Berlin-Munich) and Spain (Madrid-Barcelona) are connected by high-speed rail links, while major cities in the UK or California aren’t. Building high speed rail in Britain (£464m per mile) costs around 15 times what it does in Spain (£25m per mile), France (£31m per mile) or Germany (£34m per mile).

High Speed 2 (HS2) was meant to cut journey times between London and Manchester to just over an hour. Yet HS2 is unlikely to ever reach Manchester. HS2 was pared back by the last Conservative Government because its budget ballooned from the far-from-cheap £37.5bn to the frankly absurd £106bn. The current Government has hinted they may reverse some of the cuts to HS2, but even so, the prospects of HS2 proceeding as originally planned are slim.

When a project costs as much as HS2 does it is implausible that there’s a single simple reason. To screw up this badly you have to screw up a heck of a lot of different things at the same time. Yet certain errors stand out, not just because of their impact on the ultimate bottom line, but because they are symptomatic of a deeper rot. I am talking, as you may have guessed, about HS2’s £100m bat tunnel.

‘No bat death is acceptable’

HS2 is an unusual project. Instead of navigating our labyrinthine planning system as infrastructure projects typically do, HS2 (at least the first phase of it) was voted on and granted planning permission by Parliament in what’s known as a hybrid bill. After an intense debate that, among other things, led to a dramatic increase in the amount of track hidden in tunnels, Parliament approved the first phase of HS2.

In a sane world, HS2 Ltd would have then got on and built the thing. If only it were that simple. Despite Parliament passing a bill that along with all of its supporting documentation was so long that it weighed half-a-tonne when printed out (and was apparently moved around by forklift), Parliament left HS2 needing to gain a staggering further 8,000 separate consents from an array of government bodies and local authorities.

Many of those consents are related to environmental matters. Many of our key biodiversity indicators are in long-term decline. So, it is understandable that when designing a massive new railway there’s a desire to avoid disrupting the habitats of endangered species.

Unfortunately, it turns out HS2’s route travelled mightily close to a colony of Bechstein bats. As the bats were threatened in continental Europe, in order to comply with environmental regulations HS2 Ltd had to get permission from the Government body tasked with enforcing protections for nature, Natural England. Ironically, it turns out that Bechstein bats were less rare in Britain than we thought. Rail expert Michael Dnes has pointed out that better bat detection thanks to a device known as the autobat has dramatically changed our estimates of how many Bechstein’s bats there are in Britain. This has created a fair few planning headaches. The footprint affected by a single bat colony is large – covering around 100 square kilometres. Large swathes of the country now have to worry about Bechstein bat conservation.

On the question of HS2’s impact on the local Bechstein bat colony, Natural England took a firm view: “no bat death is acceptable.” HS2 Ltd then had to find an option that avoided any bat death. They looked at 17 potential mitigations and came to the conclusion that a 1km long bat tunnel was the best option. However, the scope of the project changed and the entire project stalled as they had to then gain planning permission from the local council for this bat tunnel. In the end, the bat tunnel’s costs rose from about £40m to £100m. It’s worth pointing out that this bat tunnel will go over an existing railway (that dates back to the 19th century) near an incinerator and landfill site

Within the Bechstein bat colony in question, there are estimated to be around 300 bats. In other words, we are spending around £330,000 per bat. This assumes that without a bat tunnel, all 300 bats would be killed by the high-speed trains. This itself is a controversial claim for two reasons. First, HS2’s boss has noted that there’s limited evidence that high-speed trains are a threat to bats. Second, the bat tunnel isn’t actually bat-proof. Planning consultants Arup note that the gaps in the mesh are big enough that bats could get in, but they’re too small for the bats to then fly out again.

In a recent speech, the PM described HS2’s Bat Tunnel as an ‘absurd spectacle’. What’s important to remember is that the Bat Tunnel isn’t an example of HS2 Ltd’s incompetence: it is the system working as intended.

Hinkley Point C in South-West England is set to be the most expensive nuclear power station in the world when it’s finished. Hinkley Point C doesn’t have a bat tunnel, but it could have a fish disco. EDF is currently in a dispute with environmental regulators over the requirement to install an ‘acoustic fish deterrent’. To save around a single trawler’s worth of fish (only 122 of which are actually ‘protected’ species), EDF must install 288 speakers to produce a jumbo-jet level cacophony to deter fish from swimming into the power plant’s water intake pipe. It should be noted that EDF have already installed a fish returns system to minimise fish deaths – something no other nuclear plant in the world has.

Maintaining the fish disco will not only be costly, but could also put people’s lives at risk. Due to the murky water near Hinkley Point, it isn’t possible to use drones to install and repair the speakers. Commercial divers will need to be drafted in to perform the tricky (and dangerous) task. It is not an exaggeration to note that the workers most at risk of death at Hinkley Point C will be the divers tasked with repairing these speakers – that it must be stressed – may not even save a single fish.

‘A hundred times more effective’

Learning about Hinkley Point C’s fish disco and HS2’s £100m bat tunnel reminded me of a once-popular aid invention known as the PlayPump. The idea was simple and, unlike the £100m bat tunnel, intuitively compelling. In essence, it’s a merry-go-round attached to a water pump. Instead of adults spending their time toiling with a traditional hand pump, children would unwittingly pump water whenever they played with the merry-go-round.

The idea swiftly gained popularity (and funding). Backers included the First Lady Laura Bush, the Clinton Global Initiative, and Jay-Z. There was just one problem – the PlayPump was a terrible water pump. To get enough water to meet a community’s needs required way more energy than intermittent children’s play could provide. The result was that the children’s mums would typically have to step in to pick up the slack and because the PlayPump was designed to be a fun way for kids to pump water, it wasn’t exactly the world’s most efficient pump. Women would expend substantially more effort running around in circles than they would with a traditional hand-pump. They’d feel nauseous and in some cases, they’d injure themselves.

Of course, that’s if the pump is working. In actuality, many PlayPumps sat idle. Breakdowns were common and replacement parts were hard to come by. PlayPump’s weren’t cheap either. They cost around $14,000 a pop – much more than a traditional hand pump.

I first heard about PlayPump in Will MacAskill’s book Doing Good Better. MacAskill’s is a book-length argument for an idea known as effective altruism. In recent years, effective altruism (or EA for short) has attracted controversy - both for the ideas themselves and for the people espousing them. But the core idea in MacAskill’s book is sound – if you want to do good, then good intentions aren’t enough. What matters is whether our intervention, whether it is a PlayPump or a Bat Tunnel, is the best way of helping people (or bats). Organisations have sprung up to evaluate charities on their effectiveness. The most prominent, GiveWell, recommends people donate to charities tackling malaria over PlayPumps. One of their most counterintuitive findings is that giving people cash directly beats most traditional aid programmes.

The differences between charitable interventions can be huge. Global health experts reckon that the most cost-effective healthcare interventions are a hundred times more effective than the average (median) intervention. And remember, that’s the median. Half of all interventions are even less effective.

The Bat Tunnel strikes me as the PlayPump of conservation. Over £100m (and a whole lot of smart people’s time) spent for little in return. If there were a GiveWell for conservation, it is hard to imagine they would recommend the construction of bat tunnels. Indeed, when the i newspaper asked bat conservation expert Dan Whitby, he described the tunnel as a “ridiculous waste of money” and claimed that “If I had even a tenth of that money I would spend it on conservation work that’s 100 times more valuable.”

The problem is that environmental law in the UK isn’t about finding the most cost-effective ways to enhance biodiversity and protect endangered species. Rather it is about preventing specific harms caused by new infrastructure projects. In other words, following the rules takes precedence over impact.

The result is not just absurdities like bat tunnels and fish discos. It is things like nutrient neutrality regulations blocking 100,000s of homes from being built despite new homes only having a tiny impact on water quality.

This should enrage genuine conservationists too. Instead of focusing on what works and ensuring every pound spent towards conservation is as effective as possible, we are instead stuck with a system that prioritises compliance over impact.

If Labour are serious about delivering on their pledge ‘Getting Britain Building Again’ then fundamentally reforming this system has to be top of their list of New Year’s Resolutions.

The good news is that just before Christmas, the Government published a paper setting out its plan to get rid of fish discos and bat tunnels once and for all.a

What’s the Government’s plan?

Under the status quo, developers are required to assess environmental impacts (e.g. disruption of bat habitats, fish sucked into water intake ) and identify specific actions to solve them (e.g. build a £100m bat tunnel, install a fish disco). All of this takes place on a project-by-project basis.

Not only does this lead to expensive (and often ineffective) solutions such as the aforementioned bat tunnels and fish discos, but it slows everything down. Builders get bogged down producing mammoth planning applications with environmental impact assessments stretching to tens of thousands of pages. They spend years waiting for feedback from statutory consultees like the Environment Agency and Natural England. Developers fearful of environmental lawsuits causing delays (or even killing the project altogether) pay environmental consultants top dollar to gold plate every environmental requirement.

It is not a system we would design from scratch. The problem is the system is well-entrenched in legislation and governments are typically fearful of the charge that they are ‘watering down environmental protections’ from well-loved conservation groups like the RSPB.

Labour’s plan is three-pronged.

First, they plan to end the project-by-project approach to assessing impact and identifying mitigations. Instead, they want the process shunted up a level so that instead of multiple project-based assessments and interventions, we have a single strategic assessment of an area and a delivery plan that could feasibly cover a whole range of different projects from housing developments to renewable projects.

Second, not only will the responsibility for identifying environmental impacts and mitigations shift from the developer to the state, the responsibility for delivering it will shift too. This doesn’t necessarily mean that government agencies will do the dirty work of creating salt marshes and new habitats for bats. This will likely be left to experienced conservation groups, but which interventions are picked and funded will be the job of the state.

Third, and finally. Developers will be required to pay for the interventions to be delivered at a tariff related to the scale of their development. For example, a 500 home development might have to make a large contribution to a new sewage treatment plant, while a smaller 10 home development would only be required to contribute a fraction of the cost.

This would be a big change, but there’s precedent. The Government’s working paper cites the example of district-level licensing for Great Crested Newts. This got rid of the extremely inefficient practice of surveying and moving individual newts. Instead, money now goes to the creation of new ponds for newts to live and thrive in. More newts are protected at a lower cost and development can proceed faster.

There’s also already a move in this direction for offshore wind. Conserving nature at sea is a challenge. Fish tend not to stick to specific catchment areas, they swim around. Likewise, birds don’t stay in a single spot. Nature simply makes a mockery of the standard project-by-project approach. As a result, offshore wind projects – a fundamentally green source of energy – have to piece together environmental assessments that stretch to tens of thousands of pages and get stuck in complicated legal battles about specific interventions. For example, one wind farm off the coast of Norfolk had its planning permission quashed in court only to be restored eventually with a new ‘kittiwake implementation and monitoring plan’ in place. Going forward, instead of proposing specific interventions (e.g. the creation of new nesting spots for lesser black-backed gulls), developers will instead contribute to a new Marine Recovery Fund that can better account for the inherently transient nature of fish and birds.

There are two big advantages to a new approach along these lines.

One is speed. Instead of all that haggling and paperwork, developers can get spades into the grounds after paying a transparently-set tariff. This is really important. The faster development can proceed, the cheaper it is to finance. Cheap finance matters because it improves viability. The more viable development is, the more goodies local areas can get in turn for granting permission. That might mean new green spaces, but it could also mean upgrades to the local road network or including more affordable (sold at below market rate) housing. Speed is particularly important when it comes to energy security and decarbonisation. There is simply no way to reach the Government’s Clean Power by 2030 target without dramatically slashing planning timelines.

The other is effectiveness. If you prioritise actually conserving and restoring nature over legal proceduralism, this new approach should be extremely attractive. Instead of picking from a very narrow list of interventions designed to meet legal requirements (rather than doing the most good), area-wide delivery plans can choose the best interventions from a much wider-list. This should excite conservationists. Instead of wasting money on fish discos of dubious effectiveness, funds will flow to the sorts of interventions conservationists know work best like restoring wetlands.

In Back to What We’re Good at, Britain Remade’s plan to get Britain building again, we called for something very similar.

“Where projects are likely to lead to negative environmental outcomes, developers should either be required to purchase off-the-shelf nature recovery solutions from a government approved list that is linked to species abundance targets in the Environment Act - or contribute to a central Nature Restoration Fund that is deployed to bankroll the recovery of species by 2030, in line with the strategic targets set out in the Act”

Back to What We’re Good At, Britain Remade

When Britain Remade calls for policy change, we typically focus on changes that can be delivered through what’s known as Secondary Legislation. In other words, we prioritise stuff that ministers can get done fast without getting bogged down in lengthy legislative processes. There’s a lot that can be done on this front, but there’s a limit to what can be done without new primary legislation. Unless we amend the EU-derived legislation that the Habitats Regulations are based on, Britain will keep building bat tunnels and fish discos.

What’s most heartening about the Government’s new policy paper is that it is explicit: "This is not achievable under the existing legislative framework.” The Government gets the need for new primary legislation

This will almost certainly mean a fight is on the cards. Campaign groups who have fought hard for the existing Habitats Regs will understandably be reluctant to see the debate re-opened. But they should be constructive rather than defensive for two reasons. First, because the regs as written are standing in the way of many of the changes we need to tackle the biggest threat of all to biodiversity: climate change. Second, because while the status quo forces developers to take actions to limit their impact on the environment, they don’t necessarily ensure cash goes to tackling the most pressing problems in the most cost-effective way. Instead of expensive but ineffective bat tunnels, money would instead go on creating thousands of artificial roosts or investing in better hedgerow management.

Wasteful spending on fish discos and bat tunnels should infuriate everyone whether their priority is world-class infrastructure or protecting endangered species. By fixing the Habs Regs, we can cut the cost of building new clean infrastructure and go beyond preserving the nature we have to actually enhancing and restoring it.