What's Their Bat 60?

Bat Shed Crazy.

The headline writer's dream. Mocking, aghast, anger. At a specific £100m of taxpayer money spent during construction of a stretch of high speed rail in English countryside. On a bat tunnel.

It holds a salutary tale for any aspiring solution seller.

One repeated all too often, year after year.

There's a traditional warning that buying and project decisions made on those first back-of-envelope sketches, if even ever so slightly off, can have wild affects when amplified come the end.

In this case, consider the Bechstein bat. The little flying mammal population size measured in their locale of proposed new line.

O-oh. Only 1,500 estimated to exist. Meaning critically endangered. Meaning there was a statutory obligation to protect them. Meaning many years of debate later, a one hundred million pounds sterling bat tunnel.

The whole national embarrassment of the process given lengthy cataloguing. Everyone wants to save the bat. Yet how on earth such a ridiculous outlay of cash got considered, let alone approved suggests a malaise much deeper.

That process is worth precautionary selling lessons of its own.

Yet here, the message is simpler.

Original catch-and-release testing saw a female bat hit the net. She was named Bat 60. On her presence that key initial estimate was made.

It turns out, that population measuring capabilities were merely nascent back when first done. Improvements in both thought and tech leading to a significant change in assessment nowadays.

A dozen years on, a Jan '25 figure being 21,600.

The bat no longer on the critical list. No longer in need of such grandiose habitat assistance. £100,000,000 totally wasted.

There's even reports that now complete, the vaunted Bat Protection Structure isn't even bat proof. The shield's mesh-size being wrong. Despite engineer warnings years before. An utter fiasco.

Many if not most solution bids stem from a problem encapsulated by a critical figure.

We are permitted to question this amount.

If we feel it doesn't tally with our experience. If might come across as merely surface-scratched. If has the whiff of other vested party impartial creation.

And when required, we must challenge.

After all, who wants to be attached to the legacy of buying their version of what would become their own unnecessary £100m bat tunnel?