Wiltshire (County) Council always had to survey the area for wildlife.

It was an established legal requirement, nothing recent.   Wiltshire Council seemed to have gone about this known requirement in an inefficient manner.

Dormice, for example, are at risk, have been diminishing due to loss of habitat and, crucially, are now a protected species that it is illegal to injure or disturb.

WC had been dormice-denying, despite factual evidence that they were there.

Though it also expected dormice to run along ropes 6 metres above the road.

A review of WC's surveys had said that not enough had been investigated.

And here is Wiltshire Council's concept of bats in the Westbury area:

There is something odd about this photograph from the WC web-site.   The picture was displayed by Wiltshire (County) Council at the start of the Inquiry.
We were then able to observe that WC's bats were Fruit Bats from the Far East.

But, expert consultants researching the impact of an eastern Westbury bypass, which was to pass through 4km of quiet countryside near to the Salisbury Plain, actually found one of our richest areas of our native bats in South-West England and possibly for the whole of the UK.   Wellhead Valley, which is adjacent to the famous Westbury White Horse, holds a very rare 13 of Britain's 17 bat species, including all four listed for special protection in the European Habitats Directive.

These many bats in the Wellhead Valley deserve the best conservation efforts.

Bats fly on established routes.   Wellhead Valley is a Special Landscape Area and an undisturbed established habitat.   Bats will not adapt to new routes.

The eastern bypass was planned to run the length of the Wellhead Valley.

Bats could not be trained to fly through new underpasses.    How unrealistic. Nor can bats be trained, amidst the disturbance of road construction, to follow artificial flight paths over a series of gantries, a strange concept of nature first.

The bats could have been driven out by a new main road through the valley.