Last week former Environment Secretary John Gummer observed that spending on sea defence is unfortunately vulnerable to public spending cuts.
Now, a strong case can be made for protecting sea defence from any spending cuts – it has for years been woefully underfunded. Despite being an island nation we spend less than 0.1% of all public spending on sea defence. Moreover, two of the 3 UK regions most vulnerable to coastal erosion (the South and East) receive the lowest amounts of all public spending per person. Eastern England which includes Mr Gummer’s former constituency of Suffolk Coastal receives the lowest amount of public spending anywhere in the UK (18% below average) despite having not only huge needs for sea defence, which Mr Gummer most ably championed, but also a percentage of elderly people well above the national average and a worse transport infrastructure than any other region (where else in England is two hours drive from the nearest motorway and an hour from the nearest dual carriageway?).
John Gummer is right of course though. The interest alone on the debt run up by the previous government is currently £43 billion a year, which is more than 50 times the total UK budget for sea defence. In such circumstances even the minuscule amounts we currently spend on sea defence are clearly vulnerable.
Yet, if we must have cuts to sea defence and I am certainly not advocating that we do, then herein lies an opportunity. Put simply, it is an opportunity to allow local people to undertake small scale works to defend the coast themselves. In short it is an opportunity to create the ‘Big Society’ that was a central themes of the Conservative manifesto.
However, there are currently two obstacles to this happening, the policies of Natural England and the Environment Agency.
Natural England has sought to prevent local people on for example, the North Suffolk coast from defending their property from the coastal erosion. Their basis for doing so is an argument that some cliffs should be allowed to naturally erode! Natural England’s aim here is not an attempt to protect the present state of the landscape. Rather, their argument is that allowing cliffs to erode may actually advance science as hitherto hidden fossils may come to light. Natural England’s value judgement that possible future scientific discoveries are more important than protecting people’s homes is perverse. By the same logic we should perhaps not undertake repairs to, say, damage caused to Westminster Bridge by river erosion as by collapsing it might reveal remains of the original Roman site. However, most fundamentally, this is a type of policy decision that should properly be taken by ministers, not by a quango.
The Environment Agency (EA) also currently presents a formidable obstacle to allowing local people to undertaking their own small scale sea defence schemes. The EA has permissive powers allowing it to undertake sea defence work, but has no statutory duty actually requiring it to do so. However, it can refuse permission for local people to undertake their own sea defence schemes, thereby preventing the type of ‘Big Society’ approach that was central to the Conservative manifesto. For example, on the North Suffolk coast close to where I live a local landowner has come up with an environmentally sensitive scheme to protect his land from coastal erosion. The family who are losing 16 acres of farmland a year to the sea are prepared to spend £200,000 of their own money on the scheme. However, the Environment Agency have refused them permission to defend their own land from the sea.
The underlying reason for this is that is that the Environment Agency works on the ‘assumption’ that certain areas of coastline must be allowed to erode in order to provide sediment for beaches further down the coast. It is on the basis of this assumption that they have refused permission to a number of property owners, such as the family I have referred to above, who want to defend or even maintain sea defences on their own land. This assumption was most unfortunately given a degree of legal recognition in the 2010 Flood and Water Management Act that was hurriedly passed just before the election was called. Section 38 of this gives a specific legal right for the Environment Agency to actually create flooding or coastal erosion. This is a badly thought out section of legislation that needs to be changed, not least because, the Environment Agency's assumption, that stretches of the coast must be allowed to erode, is contradicted by a body of scientific research going back more than 50 years. This research shows that the overwhelming majority of beach sediment actually comes, not from coastal erosion, but from the weathering and erosion of inland landscapes, with the resulting sediment being carried down rivers to the sea. In fact, even on the most rapidly eroding coasts no more than 5% of beach material comes from erosion of nearby cliffs. As one textbook on coastal geomorphology puts it:
"The most obvious answer to the question as to the source of coastal sediments would be - coastal erosion. Many early texts suggested that cliff erosion resulted in sediments which were moved along-shore to fill in bays and estuaries - thus smoothing the coastline. Such a simple direct mechanism is rarely encountered. In fact coastal erosion is responsible for an almost insignificant proportion of the total input of marine sediments.Inman (1960), for instance, suggested that even in the temperate zone where wave energy is highest, less than 5% of beach sediments directly result from cliff erosion. This is a conclusion supported by Valentin (1954) who shows that, despite rapid erosion of the Holderness coast in Eastern England, amounting to over 1.5m/year, less than 3% of the resultant material was contributed to adjacent beaches. Emery and Macmillan (1978) estimated that an average erosion rate of 5cm/year from the entire cliff coastline of the world - some 50,000km, would provide only 0.04 per cent of sediment contributed to oceans by rivers. In fact rivers supply over 90% of the total marine sediment input..." (J. Pethick 'An Introduction to Coastal Geomorphology' London:Edward Arnold,1984:68)
The shingle beaches that are a prominent feature of the Suffolk and Norfolk coastline provide a good illustration of this. The relatively small amounts of flint found in local cliffs are completely inadequate to create these large shingle beaches in which the predominant rock type is flint.
It is therefore clear that the whole basis on which the Environment Agency has objected to many sea defence schemes lacks adequate scientific validity. It is essential that the Environment Agency takes a good hard look at what the scientific literature actually says on the origins of coastal sediments and allows people to take reasonable steps to defend their stretch of coastline.
Some sea defence schemes will of course still need at least some regulation. For example, any scheme that interferes with the movement of sediment to another part of the coast – such as groynes that trap longshore drift (the zig zag movement of sand and shingle up and down the beach by breaking waves) , or structures that interfere with offshore currents which also transport sediment.
However, there are many small scale schemes that do not fit into these categories. These include:
1. Maintenance of existing coastal flood defences such as mud banks, many of which, particularly in estuaries the Environment Agency are planning to abandon under ‘managed retreat’ policies.
2. Creation of new small scale hard engineering sea defences. Such as placing gabions (wire baskets filled with rocks) at the foot of eroding cliffs
3. Soft engineering schemes such as planting marram grass to encourage sand dune formation.
It is these sort of schemes that the government should be actively encouraging local people to undertake. This is the ‘Big Society’ we want to encourage – local communities seeking to help themselves, rather than simply relying on the government to do everything for them.
There will of course always be a need for the government to undertake larger scale sea defence works. Although, as I have argued before, this could almost certainly be done more efficiently and with greater local accountability if most sea defence funding was channelled through local councils, rather than through the Environment Agency. There is also a need to give the government a statutory duty to defend at least some areas of the coast such as major towns from erosion and flooding. However, at a time of public spending restraint, it is essential that we encourage local self help schemes.
To facilitate and encourage the ‘Big Society’ approach to sea defence the new government could:
1. Give landowners a right to maintain sea and river flood defences on their own land.
2. Create a presumption in favour of local people being allowed to undertake small scale sea defence schemes providing that they do not interfere with the movement of sediment to other parts of the coast and of course that they obtain planning permission from the local council in the normal way.
3. Examine ways in which tax relief can be granted to landowners and local communities involved in undertaking their own small scale sea defence schemes.
4. Revise existing shoreline management plans (SMPs) and estuarine strategies so that the existing four options (advance the line, hold the line, no active intervention and managed retreat) are clearly stated to refer only to the actions of central and local government and do not in themselves restrict the possibilities of action being taken either by coastal landowners or local communities living near the coastal and estuaries. This would give local communities the possibility of reversing deeply unpopular 'managed retreat' policies that have been effectively imposed on them by the Environment Agency.
5. Consider setting up a small scale academic research institute for coastal geomorphology along the lines of the British Geological Survey. This could probably be started with as few as half a dozen scientific staff. Its aim would be to undertake research and provide independent scientific advice to coastal communities and others on the type of small scale sea defence schemes that are effective.
Since at least Roman times communities living around the British coast have sought to defend their local area against the sea. In doing so they quite naturally created what we now call ‘the Big Society’. It is time to allow them to do so again.