The Professor Will See You Now: Bats
4 min read
In an occasional series, Professor Philip Cowley offers a political science lesson for The House’s readers. This week: bats
Do you remember the ‘Vote Labour and the bats get it’ part of the election campaign? I missed it, which is curious, because bats are a big deal at Cowley Towers. Had I clocked Labour’s chiroptophobic tendencies, I would have abandoned all academic neutrality and been out on the doorstep, day and night, urging the electorate to… get Keir Starmer into No 10 sharpish.
Much of the current discussion around relaxing planning regulations has focused on the effect on large-scale developers and big-ticket projects like HS2. But having just done a domestic renovation project, I know how these same rules affect run-of-the-mill properties as well – and just how ruinously expensive they can be.
The short version of events is that we had to treat bats (and newts – but it’s best if you don’t get me started on the newts) as if they were descended from the gods, while shelling out obscene amounts of money in ecological surveys, Natural England licence applications, and so on, just to be allowed to do up our own home. Money is a vulgar subject, so I shan’t say exactly how much – but I have worked out that to cover the costs I require the editor of The House magazine to commission these columns until some date in 2038. (That last sentence is a conservative estimate, not a joke.)
With my homeowner hat on, this stuff drove me to despair. Yet with my academic hat on, I saw it as a good example of how policy is made; how you start with what seems a reasonable set of goals – in this case, to protect wildlife – and how that grows, through assorted pieces of legislation and regulations, overseen by largely unaccountable regulatory bodies, into something which I suspect bears little resemblance to what was originally intended – and which comes as quite a surprise to lawmakers when they learn about it. It will form a central part of what is yet another entry in the long list of my unwritten books: Batshit Crazy: The Unintended Consequences of Well-Meaning Laws.
One reason why the book may well remain unwritten is just that it would have to roam so widely – both in terms of both examples and explanation. A key issue involved is the quality of legislation, on which there just happens to be some excellent new research published in Statute Law Review. The researchers went and asked around 600 solicitors, barristers and academic lawyers a series of questions about the quality of law. These are – to adapt the phrase often attributed to Otto von Bismarck – the people who eat the sausages.
What was especially neat about this piece of work is that as well as asking about the quality of legislation in general – which everyone bitches about – they asked respondents to identify a particular law they had been working with recently and to talk about that, which helped produced more focused answers.
Unsurprisingly, questions about the quality of law in general produce more negative responses, but the top complaint, whether you were looking at judgments on legislation in general or specific pieces of legislation, was that it was unnecessarily unwieldy and complex. Next came complaints that wording was ambiguous or that too much of the legislation was left to be interpreted, either by secondary legislation or other guidance. The three most common perceived causes of problems were that it was written by people without sufficient expertise in the area; that additional regulations or amendments have cluttered it up; and that it was designed primarily for political not legal purposes.
The survey was conducted in England only, for simplicity, although I’d put a lot of money on these being UK-wide issues. It was carried out in early 2024. Obviously, things are different now.
Further reading: LSE GV314 group, Cobblers: Lawyers Views on the Quality of Legislation, Statute Law Review (2024)
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