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Campaign for Coastal Defence
Feb. ’10: Selsey Life
Coastal protection complications.
January’s headline on the newsagents’ boards may have raised the impression Selsey has been awarded money towards sorting out its erosion problem. Unfortunately, the real picture is more complicated.
In December Chichester District Council was awarded £450,000 from DEFRA, for three initiatives related to “Coastal Change”. One of these is to look into feasibility of setting up a Community Enterprise for Selsey (a sort of profit-making charity, run by the local community). The idea is that, if it gets established, it would use any surplus profit to help maintain the town’s coastal defences. The government money only helps the first stage of this process (trying to get the Community Enterprise established) – it doesn’t put anything directly into the coast defences.
A couple of local councillors came up with the Community Enterprise idea over a year ago, and have been giving outline presentations about it to various community groups & organisations (including SOS). They suggested the Council included it in a bid to DEFRA’s Coastal Change Fund (only available to District Councils), and assisted in the bid preparation. The total award is less than the amount requested. It should soon become clear how the money will be re-allocated between the different initiatives.
In January SOS - along with other UK grassroots coastal groups - met with Natural England, the government’s environment advisers. Their policies are against intervention in processes such as erosion, and the drift of shingle along the seashore – particularly where intervention is needed to protect people’s property and land, rather than the environment. This means homes & businesses can be lost, unnecessarily, and increases the cost of coastal defence e.g. At Pagham, the cost of the scheme to protect homes there doubled, when Natural England objected to the shingle needed being taken off Church Norton spit (instead, a large quantity of shingle had to be dredged from the English Channel).
These policies affect Selsey. Local shingle drifts from Selsey down to Church Norton and Bracklesham. It could be responsibly recycled, in an affordable, ongoing “beach nourishment” scheme to keep sufficient shingle in front of our sea walls so they aren’t vulnerable to damage. Very simply, you transfer the shingle from where it is collecting, to where it came from. It slowly drifts back again - but all the time it is front of the sea walls, it is doing a job of defence. However, to do this you’ve got to have permission to use the shingle, and here is where those Natural England policies get in the way. We made our points known to Natural England, and a cordial but frank dialogue has started.
To learn more about this, and for an update on coastal defence matters, please do come to our AGM (advertised in this edition of Selsey Life).