Berkeley reached a provisional stalemate on one of its London housing developments, earlier this year. The man charged with issuing licenses for the secure exclusion of bats from building sites had taken extensive sick leave and the project, was made to wait.

The bat licenser is just one of a series of cogs, each of which can bring the planning procedure to a stop, Rob Perrins, the house builder’s managing director conceded. He however, feels justified in being more aggrieved by this hold up.

“Tony and I know more about bloody bats than anybody. We built the London Wetland Centre back in the 1990s and we had to do a lot of work with the bats. We know everything there is to know but it is just one of those things you have to accept”, he said.

Berkeley is in melody with many of its superior opponents on raising apprehensions over the bureaucratic quagmire that, house builders say, is creating a housing deficiency. However, the similarities stop there.

Buying land and developing it as rapidly as doable, in the years prior the housing market crumple many of its peers had become extremely leveraged in an effort to chase volume.

In spite of the decoy of a rising market, Berkeley wedged to its management’s central proposition that house building was not a scalable business.