Earlier this month Hilary Benn the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs lectured farmers on the need for them to produce more food in the UK, in order to combat climate change and feed a growing population. I am sure I was not the only one to be struck by the irony of that. Mr Benn is responsible for the Environment Agency whose ‘managed retreat’ policies propose abandoning to the sea thousands of acres of farmland that have for centuries been defended or even reclaimed from the sea.
Now, a think tank linked to the Royal Institute of British Architects has suggested applying the government’s ‘managed retreat’ policies even to UK cities, such as Hull and Portsmouth, as a possible response to rising sea levels. Their report suggested allowing parts of large urban areas on the UK coast to flood, while preserving their historic centres – so that they would become ‘like Venice’.
That so respected a body as the RIBA should suggest a partial abandonment of sea defences around cities shows quite how strongly the government’s deeply flawed 'managed retreat' option for sea defence has taken hold. The underlying reason for this is not that most of the areas currently under threat of 'managed retreat' are technically difficult to defend, although cost is certainly a factor in many instances. For an island nation it is shocking to think that we spend less than 0.1% of government spending on sea defence. However, the most fundamental reason is that neither the Environment Agency nor any other government body has any statutory duty to defend the British coast. Instead, the Environment Agency have what are termed permissive powers. In other words they are permitted to interfere in decisions about what sort of sea defences are allowed, but they do not actually have to do anything themselves.
A future Conservative government needs to approach this issue with much more joined up thinking than the present government. I have argued elsewhere on Centre Right that much of the sea defence funding that DEFRA channels through the Environment Agency would be better spent through local councils who are genuinely accountable to local people. However, regardless who undertakes sea defence work, it is vital that the government creates a statutory duty to defend at least some parts of our coast.
At the moment we are in the perverse situation where the government is seeking to impose a statutory duty on future governments to stem future climate change in order to combat, amongst other things, the increased flood risk from sea level rise. However, the government has not imposed on itself a statutory duty to defend the coast against flooding and erosion.
This is despite sea levels having been slowly rising since we began systematically recording them 150 years ago (see the above chart from the UK's Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory).
This should clearly be a priority for a new Conservative government to sort out.
