Severn Barrage

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Monday 22nd April 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Cope of Berkeley, in his extremely able introduction to this debate, mentioned four particular downsides. I would have to add a fifth, which would be flooding. Somerset has had a terrible winter. The effect of the barrage there, as the Severn surge comes up the channel and the Parrett is trying to empty the flood water down into the channel, has not been properly modelled by Hafren. I doubt whether anyone will be able to model it sufficiently. By dint of simply having the barrage, you might be writing off a large part of Somerset. You only have to look at what was flooded this winter to see how likely that is. That is a tremendous downside, especially, obviously, for the people of Somerset. It is a matter that needs to be settled.

The noble Lord, Lord Cope, remarked on what he called ditheritis, which is an extremely important point. Back in 2004, Friends of the Earth published a good comparison between the barrage and smaller, more varied schemes, particularly tidal lagoons. It is now 10 years later and we have lost the lead that we might have had on tidal lagoon technology. It is not too late to imagine that we could still forge ahead with it, but which investors will put their money into anything like that before they know what will happen with the barrage? This needs to be settled and settled urgently.

The smaller schemes offer tremendous upsides as well. If we are thinking about technology that we can export, we can pilot a number of things—the tidal stream and the tidal lagoons, as suggested in Swansea bay, which join up with the land and ones that do not join up with the land as suggested for Bridgwater bay. They relate better to communities and would undoubtedly bring the same sort of employment opportunities as a whole barrage but with a more varied application throughout the world. Not everyone has the place to build an enormous barrage. It might be a world tourist attraction, but it would not be the sort of technology that would lead to replication across the world. There would be only one or two other places where a barrage-type structure as proposed would be applicable, whereas the tidal lagoons could happen in a number of other places.

My question to the Minister, which is not original this afternoon, is what is DECC doing to support the piloting of tidal lagoons? It has been remarkably silent on that subject to date. I remember going to see the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, when he was the Minister to talk to about this. He was very helpful, and we had a discussion about habitats and so on. He, of course, was a Defra Minister and it was the responsibility of another department on the energy side, but departments have changed name so often that I cannot remember what it was called then. We really need to get on now and make a decision so that we can look at the more promising technologies.