mch said:
Yes, it's a shame that digging a cave is seen as having priority over letting badgers live their lives undisturbed. I would be interested to know what you did with the badger after 'evicting' it?
Presumably the badger was rehomed.
From "The Badgerland Blog", one of several sources easily found on the internet:
"Badger licences are normally granted because there is a genuine need to move the sett. Some-one just not liking the idea of them coming into a garden to forage for worms is not a serious enough reason ? even if they cause lawn damage. The licence process is looking for a serious health and safety reason (such as building/road subsidence or digging into a flood defence) or because of a need to move the sett to allow the development to take place. There is no provision in the law to simple render the badgers homeless or to have them killed. This is why a badger licence will normally require the landowner to build a new artificial sett for the badgers nearby. The licence will then normally require that the badgers are monitored to see that they have been accessing the artificial sett. This may require night-time observations or the use of infra-red wildlife cameras. Once it is clear the artificial sett has been explored by the badgers; the process of closing down the natural sett can start."
There's a lot of work and prior planning that would have gone into getting that licence (not just coming up with a good reason).
They would probably not have got the licence without a badger survey being done and unless they had a tame expert that would have cost them.
Meanwhile, having done a bit of research into what their obligations were likely to be, they would have gone about building a new sett.
From the same source as above:
"In order to get the badgers into any new sett, an expert will need to get them out of their old sett. However, there is a "closed season" for evicting badgers from setts; and this normally runs from about December to June. During these months there may be young cubs underground; which would starve to death if their mother was captured above ground and could not return to feed them."
From the OP it sounds as though they avoided this closed season.
I doubt that anything illegal has been done, and presumably the cavers will supply details of the licence they got from Natural England (it's not in the public domain for Data Protection reasons).
But I still think it's a shame.