Shoreline Management Plans

Eric Ollerenshaw Excerpts

Tuesday 30th November 2010 Westminster Hall

[Eric Ollerenshaw (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Con)]

May I add to the congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) on securing this important and timely debate? It is important because Britain has, I am led to believe, 11,073 miles of coast, and, although I do not have “coastal” in my constituency name, the longest boundary I have is part of Morecambe bay on the west coast on the Irish sea. The debate is timely because the shoreline management plans are due for completion in the next few weeks. They will be delivered through the Environment Agency and local councils. In the longer term, my hon. Friends have hinted at concerns about erosion and about which parts of England are going up and which are going down. When I learned geography at school, I was always told that the east was going down and the west was coming up, but now I am told differently. However, hon. Members will be pleased to know that I do not want to go into that kind of science; I was not the greatest geographer, although for a time I did manage to teach the subject. [Interruption.] Well, I always thought that geography was an easier subject than history.

Thurnham parish is in my patch. It is a rural parish with no particular centre. It is not a village; it is an area comprising scattered farms and caravan parks and caravan developments by the coast. The people who live there are retired couples and those who want to bring up their children in a rural area. It lies between the villages of Cockerham and Glasson Dock and it is part of Lancaster city council district. It is Thurnham parish’s experience in this process that I want to highlight.

Unlike most of England’s coastline, Thurnham has been protected by a “hold the line” policy, which means that it has a system of hard defences—in this case a sea wall and vast numbers of drainage channels. However, according to the Environment Agency, such defences have been thought to be inadequate for future years and the whole area is being reassessed as part of the shoreline management process.

We then come on to the interesting concept of managed realignment, which is a phrase that sounds almost Orwellian. The Library briefing says that

“managed realignment is still in an experimental phase with research showing many uncertainties in outcome.”

My concern is that we are basing many of our shoreline management plans on something that is experimental, and that is impacting on people’s lives and livelihoods. If a new experimental system is to be used, where has the effort been to explain the benefits of the scheme or to convince and win over those who will be affected? At the moment, the people in Thurnham believe that this is part of a cost-saving exercise.

Let me turn to the consultation on the second phase, which my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale) mentioned. Yet again, my constituents have had the same experience of consultation. There were two public meetings and a 12-month consultation in which everyone in this country, from the Ramblers Association to English Nature and English Heritage, was consulted—apart from the residents who live in the area. I am told that it was only when a district councillor asked a parish councillor why no one from Thurnham had been turning up to meetings that it was clear that no one had actually been told to turn up.

Eventually, the residents were involved in the process. We secured another couple of meetings to try to understand what was going on. The challenge from residents was, “Why are you just considering managed realignment?” That was after a long explanation of what managed realignment might involve. Again, the issue of compensation—or lack of compensation—arose. Some residents were even told that if this happened, they would have to demolish their own house to allow the sea and salt marshes to encroach. It almost seemed that the habitat of birds was far more important than the generations of people who had lived in the area for hundreds of years and who had invested a great deal of money there—some had done so just a few months before they found out about the operation.

We finally get to a stage in which the council recognises the residents and the residents are talking to the Environment Agency. The agency finally walks the sea wall and finds that it is in far better shape than it first imagined. Now it has been agreed that there will be a further look at the cost-benefits of managed realignment and of holding the line. The agency says that such a policy will involve £100,000, for which it hopes to bid centrally. If it does not get the money this year, it will try again next year. The completion of this process will take five years, but if it does not get the money this year it will take six years. In the meantime, that whole area is blighted in terms of the ability to sell property or invest more in thriving businesses. Farmers wanting to invest are lost in the whole process, wondering where to go from here.

On consultation, as other hon. Members have said, can the details of how the costs and benefits fit together be supplied to me and residents of the area, so that we can understand how the processes work? So far, the new Government have pushed for transparency and clarity on what the Government spend and how they operate, so it is not asking a great deal to see the spreadsheet analysis and the cost-benefit formulae behind it, so that residents of Thurnham can have some grasp of the process, even though they will now sit there for five, six or seven years with that blight on them.

In conclusion—I realise that other Members want to speak—my constituents’ experience of the SMP process has not been good. They were ignored at the start, and they have been treated as though they do not understand their own area. They are now asking the new Government to supply them with information and to treat them as the grown-ups they are by helping them to understand all the pressures on the Government in dealing with the coast. They live and work there, understand the coastline and have a contribution to make, and they are asking the Minister to let them.