Richard Hammond has made a career out of going faster. This month he met the one thing in Britain that cannot be hurried. As reported in The Times, the former Top Gear presenter’s plans for the Georgian manor he bought on the edge of Abergavenny (a heritage-style showroom for his thirty cars, a library, a memorabilia gallery, a padel court where the tennis court now stands) are in the slow lane on account of bats.1 Three dusk surveys conducted between June and August found eight species using the 21-acre estate to hunt and roost, among them the soprano pipistrelle and Leisler’s bat. Footage taken by the bat surveyor, showing bats flying out of an old stone barn that Hammond intends to turn into a bar, can be admired on Monmouthshire council’s planning portal. To proceed, he may have to fit bat boxes and design dedicated roosting voids into the renovated buildings. A man who once crashed a jet car at 288mph now waits on a mammal that weighs less than a pound coin.
Anyone who has tried to get something done in a developing country recognises classic bureaucracy: drudging between offices to get various documents signed and stamped, only to be told you must first go somewhere else to get a different document signed and stamped. Weeks go by as you sit and wait in drab offices whilst your inner voice ponders “to bribe or not to bribe”.
Britain is regularly pilloried as a nation in decline, and the charge sheet writes itself. The heavy industries have gone. We no longer invent new technologies; instead, we just implement those pioneered in San Francisco and Hangzhou. Universities are merging and cutting courses to stay solvent. Potholes go unfilled. I bring good news. We have quietly developed a new home-grown form of world-leading economic activity. I call it bureauctivity (bureauc[racy] [product]ivity): bureaucracy so thorough and well executed that it has become a productive industry in its own right.
bureauctivity /bjʊəˌrɒkˈtɪvɪti/ noun [mass noun]
economic output generated by the performance of regulatory compliance to a professional standard; the conversion of administrative obligation into measurable production: the survey, conducted over four nights by five licensed ecologists with thermal-imaging equipment, was a triumph of bureauctivity.
ORIGIN blend of bureaucracy and productivity.
Consider what happens when someone wants to knock down a barn and build houses on the site. In the amateur bureaucracies of the world, this is where the stamping and shuttling begins, at the end of which nothing exists except frustrated developers and richer officials. Not so in Britain. Here a bat survey will be conducted. This is no mere formality or sinecure. Ecologists with degrees, accredited by their own chartered professional institute and operating under a survey licence from Natural England, will attend in teams as the sun goes down.2 They work to the Bat Conservation Trust's published methodology, now in its fourth edition, which specifies how many surveyors a building of given complexity requires and how many dusk emergence surveys must be spread across the May-to-September season.3 Thermal-imaging kit supplements the human eye: the favoured instrument for the job, the Pulsar Telos XP50 monocular, retails at £2,529.4 Echolocation calls are recorded, the bats identified to species and a full report written, with sonogram appendices running into the double digits.
Elsewhere, a bribe disappears into a pocket and produces nothing. Here, there is genuine industrial activity. High Speed 2 is spending more than £100 million on a much-maligned kilometre-long curved structure in Buckinghamshire so that bats never need meet a train.5 Construction is underway, and whilst HS2 is perennially in doubt, that bat tunnel will certainly be completed. And it will be built to last. No other nation on earth could produce a hundred-million-pound bat tunnel. The national accounts record it as output, because it is.
In Yes Minister Sir Humphrey Appleby explains how the nations of Europe would greet a proposed European regulation: "The Germans will love it, the French will ignore it, and the Italians and the Irish will be too chaotic to enforce it. Only the British will resent it."6
But on this rare occasion Sir Humphrey was wrong. The British don’t resent such regulations; we thrive on them. Whitehall even has an official term for implementing European rules more rigorously than Brussels asked: “gold-plating”, a practice the government solemnly promised to abolish in 2010.7 In truth, post-Brexit, this segment has flourished.
Consider our rivers, or rather, the paperwork beside them. Under nutrient neutrality rules, derived from European habitats law we chose to keep and then applied with fresh vigour, housebuilders in affected catchments must demonstrate, calculation by calculation, that their development will add not one gram of nitrogen or phosphorus, depending on the catchment, to the local watercourse. While, at the 2023 peak, roughly 145,000 homes queued behind this arithmetic, an entire secondary market sprang up: mitigation credits, generated by taking farmland out of production and building wetlands, bought and sold so that the spreadsheet balances.8 Soil surveys, water sampling, nutrient modelling, laboratory invoices: real scientists doing real work for real money. The homes may not exist, but the economic activity certainly does.
The closest approximation the statisticians offer to what I mean by bureauctivity is a category called professional, scientific and technical activities, which is not a perfect fit, but it is where the bat reports, the nutrient budgets and the compliance reviews get filed. In 2024, while the economy as a whole managed growth of about 1 per cent, that sector grew 3.2 per cent, the strongest performance of any services sector.9 A sector not far off a tenth of the economy, growing at three times the national rate.
In the three months to October 2025, that same sector contracted by 1.6 per cent, the largest negative contributor to services output. GDP promptly fell by 0.1 per cent, the first three-monthly decline in nearly two years.10 Industrial production had been shrinking for six consecutive quarters and nobody noticed a thing. The paperwork professions paused for one season and the whole economy went backwards. I am not sure any single statistic better captures modern Britain: we can survive without making cars, but not without writing reports about the implications of making cars.
The OECD has long rated Britain one of the least regulated economies in the developed world on paper.11 That is the exquisite part. Much of this compliance is not strictly required by legislation. Much of the modern British bureauctivity relies on “industry best-practice”, “guidelines”, “standard operating procedures from a Local Authority planning teams”. Health and safety, safeguarding, procurement compliance, planning consultancy: each has its own institute, its own accreditation ladder, its own awards evening and its own conference season at a Midlands hotel. When Parkinson observed in 1955 that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion"12 he meant it as satire. The UK made it our principle industrial strategy.
Whatever else you say about these jobs, they are done superbly. Other countries have bureaucracy the way they have potholes, as a symptom of neglect. We have it the way the Swiss have watchmaking: precise, credentialed, admired by connoisseurs and increasingly the thing propping up GDP.
It is a true British success story. Hammond will get his bar in the end, and the survey reports will be immaculate.
The Times (2 September 2026) “Bats leave Richard Hammond’s mansion renovation in the slow lane”, David Brown. thetimes.com. Three dusk surveys between June and August 2026 found eight species, including common and soprano pipistrelle, brown long-eared and Leisler’s bats; the planning application was submitted in August and the public consultation closes on 16 September 2026.
Survey licences for disturbing protected species are issued by Natural England (bat survey class licences CL17-CL20, gov.uk); the professional body is the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management, chartered by Royal Charter in 2013. cieem.net.
Bat Conservation Trust (2023) Bat Surveys for Professional Ecologists: Good Practice Guidelines, 4th edition. bats.org.uk/resources/guidance-for-professionals.
Bat Surveys for Professional Ecologists, 4th edition, strongly recommends night-vision aids (thermal or infrared) on emergence surveys, and surveys omitting them must justify the omission; see NHBS, "Thermal Imaging and Bat Surveys" (nhbs.com/blog), which names the Pulsar Telos XP50 as "excellent for bat surveys". Priced at £2,529 at CleySpy (cleyspy.co.uk), August 2026.
BBC News (November 2024) "Bat safety barrier will cost £100m - HS2 chairman". Sir Jon Thompson on the 1km curved Sheephouse Wood bat protection structure, Buckinghamshire; 8,276 consents required for phase one; a bored tunnel and re-routing were among the more expensive alternatives considered. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3dep92x054o.
Lynn, J. & Jay, A. (1980) Yes Minister, series 1 episode 5, "The Writing on the Wall", BBC. Sir Humphrey Appleby, on the proposed Euro-pass identity card.
"Government ends 'gold-plating' of European Regulations", Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, gov.uk, 15 December 2010.
Planning Resource (2023) "Housebuilders claim that number of homes blocked by nutrient neutrality rules has soared to 145,000", reporting Home Builders Federation figures; the HBF's current campaign material puts the figure at the height of the issue at 160,000. Natural England's Nutrient Mitigation Scheme (launched March 2023) sells credits generated from wetland creation and taking land out of production.
ONS (2025) Index of Services, UK: December 2024. Services output rose 1.3% in 2024; professional, scientific and technical activities rose 3.2%, the strongest annual growth of the services sectors. Whole-economy growth of 1.1% in 2024 (revised from 0.9%): ONS quarterly national accounts. The sector was 8.6% of UK gross value added in 2024 (ONS GDP(o) low-level aggregates).
ONS (2025) GDP monthly estimate, UK: October 2025. GDP fell 0.1% in the three months to October 2025, the first three-monthly fall since December 2023; professional, scientific and technical activities fell 1.6%, the largest negative contributor to services; production output fell for a sixth consecutive three-month period.
OECD Product Market Regulation indicators, in which the UK has long ranked among the least restrictive economies in the OECD. oecd.org.
Parkinson, C.N. (1955) "Parkinson's Law", The Economist, 19 November 1955.