Bats are being “scapegoated” by Rachel Reeves, Chris Packham has said, after the chancellor suggested the winged creatures were getting in the way of economic growth.

Reeves recently said she wanted businesses to “focus on getting things built, and stop worrying about the bats and the newts”, and this week the press release announcing her shake-up of all the UK’s regulators mentioned bats six times. A very niche directive to Natural England, the nature watchdog, to take advice from the Bat Conservation Trust out of a planning document, became the linchpin of Reeves’s deregulation plan.

“It’s absolutely absurd,” the broadcaster and nature campaigner said. “I am always someone who likes to deal with the facts so I would really like to know over the course of a year how many planning applications are completely refused because of bats, as a percentage of all those across the country. I am going to hazard a guess that it would be a fraction of 1%.”

So how did this small mammal become such a lightning rod in planning issues? Bats began to be protected under EU law in 1992, when the UK was part of the bloc, under the habitats directive. This legislation protects threatened animals across Europe including dormice, great crested newts, otters, water voles and stag beetles. It means their habitat must not be disturbed without mitigation, and the successful passing of the directive was long fought for and celebrated by environmentalists.

The problem is that certain species, such as bats and newts, get tangled up in planning decisions because their habitats tend to be near people’s homes. Bats roost in the attics of buildings, meaning extensions and demolitions have to take the creatures into account, and newts like to live in ponds which can be near human dwellings and therefore are subject to disturbance from construction work. When building a new structure, the landowners have to survey the area for bats, to see if going ahead would destroy their roosts. If it would, they need to make provision for them, such as leaving an old barn for the bats to roost in or creating a suitable habitat nearby.

The government this week said Reeves’s “radical shake-up” would “cut costly red tape that fails to deliver for local communities, such as hundreds of pages of guidance on protecting bat habitats”, arguing “it should not be the case that to convert a garage or outbuilding you need to wade through hundreds of pages of guidance on bats”.

But Packham and other conservationists argue that humans have “learned to live with bats effectively and cheaply”. Packham said he recently made space for the creatures in the roof of a property he built without issue.

He said bats were being scapegoated, adding: “They picked bats because most people never get to see them and engage with them because they are nocturnal. They wouldn’t pick on hedgehogs or red squirrels, for example.”

The UK has 18 species of bat, all protected by law. They are important in themselves, as beautiful and sensitive creatures that are under increasing threat, but they are also an indicator species. When bats disappear from a landscape, other species soon follow. This is because they are especially sensitive to changes in land use, habitat quality, and climate. They also suffer when there are declines in insect populations, which are their primary source of food.

Although bats are shy, most people could find one if they went to the right place at dusk. They can be found all around the UK in a range of habitats, accounting for almost a third of all mammal species in the country, and they occupy wetlands, woodlands and farmland, as well as urban areas. But four of the 11 British mammal species that are red-listed as being at imminent risk of national extinction are bats, and two more British bat species are near-threatened.

Packham thinks that the recent assault on nature by Reeves and Keir Starmer – who was recently accused of making misleading claims about spiders – will backfire with voters.

“It’s a PR disaster for Labour,” Packham said. “Do they not realise millions of people in the UK love wildlife; more people are members of the RSPB than all the political parties put together? People love wildlife much more than they like these numpties banging on about bats and newts.”

References to the Bat Conservation Trust’s guidance on surveys for bats will also be removed from planning guidance. The charity was puzzled by this, and its CEO, Kit Stoner, said: “It was a shock to hear that government proposes removing reference to the bat survey guidelines. They are not an instruction manual but provide a baseline for good practice. It is inconceivable that this guidance is just removed without any consultation or explanation.”

The now infamous £100m bat tunnel, commissioned for the HS2 rail project, is perhaps the best example of this bat-bashing. But nature groups say they never asked for this; in fact, other protections including green bridges and habitat creation were proposed.

“There’s been an awful lot of misinformation about that bat tunnel over the last few months,” Craig Bennett, CEO of the Wildlife Trusts said. “Does the law and the planning system require HS2 to spend £100m on a bat tunnel? No. Did Natural England ask for the bat tunnel? No. What the law required HS2 to do is to avoid harm to the bat population or … create new bat habitat. What we would have preferred is for them to think about this before deciding where they put the railway line or create lots of new habitat for bats.”

Wildlife groups are now looking at whether they can take the government to court over its plans to deregulate. Packham said: “People like myself will be on this straight off. If there is any legal recourse to this, we will fight it.”