Shoreline Management Plans

Simon Hart Excerpts

Tuesday 30th November 2010 Westminster Hall

[Simon Hart (Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire) (Con)]

May I start my short submission by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) on securing this debate? I confess that until I saw the debate title in the Order Paper, I did not realise that there was a shoreline management plan for my part of Wales, a point that was reflected upon by others this morning. That is all the more embarrassing because 60% of my constituency is a variety of shoreline. That is a great asset most of the time, but not when it comes to parliamentary boundary reviews. That, however, is a debate for another day.

The coastline is probably the single most important feature for the tourism industry in south-west Wales. Indeed, I slip into the conversation the fact that National Geographic magazine says that it is the second most beautiful coastline in the world. It beats Suffolk and Devon, and even Essex, to that coveted title. Although erosion is not a particular problem in my constituency, management is. For my constituents, the shoreline is not only beautiful and spectacular cliff. It also has beach, marsh and wetlands, as well as estuaries, and balancing the conflicting interests of agriculture and tourism is a constant battle. It is a battle for everyone, including the Pembrokeshire national park, and that has to be reflected in the management plans.

Not many people know this, but before becoming a Member I spent a little time working for the Environment Agency in south-west Wales as an official valuer. One of my earliest jobs was to value the sea wall between the Severn bridge and Trostre steel works in Llanelli. Those who can picture the map of south Wales will realise that it covers pretty much the entire coastline. I made one stupid decision and one sensible one. The stupid decision was to walk every inch of it; the sensible decision was to base my fees not on value but on time. That was just as well, because the capital value of such an asset is £1. Who would want to accept the liability?

That is a serious point. The wall was a hugely important physical feature for the Environment Agency, but it was also important to everyone who had an interest in the estuary. The problem for the agency was that every time one crossed a local authority boundary or a legal boundary between farms, or even when one crossed into a new wildlife trust area, the rules changed. It was impossible to have a cost-effective and cohesive policy for the sea wall along almost the entire stretch of coastline. The upshot is that it was not managed properly, and people’s businesses and livelihoods were put at risk.

We are of course sympathetic, as other Members have mentioned, to the point about the ever-increasing pressure on the wildlife asset. However, if there was ever an example of how these things pan out in reality, it is the Cardiff bay barrage. Significant sums were spent on giving migratory wild fowl preferment over the interests of farmers and residents. However, as soon as the barrage was constructed, nature adapted particularly successfully, as it often does, to the changing circumstances. Twenty years on—that is about the right time scale—there is no evidence whatever to suggest that there was a detrimental impact, particularly on migratory wild fowl in the area. The Cardiff bay barrage is a living example of a management process that involves a lot of physical alteration to the coastline, but which has no adverse effect on wildlife. We need to take careful note of the fact that it is possible in such circumstances to have your cake and eat it.

I want to revert to the point about liability and the legal point. As we proceed with the plans and with future shoreline management, we could give local authorities greater responsibility for taking such matters into account through the planning system. In addition, the legal profession may not have been particularly effective in one or two cases when it has come to undertaking searches on behalf of people purchasing properties adjacent to shorelines, to future management plans, and to attempting the impossible task of second-guessing the effects of nature over a long period.