SOS December 2011
Last month we described a
potential 5 year “Beach Management Plan” for Selsey, to maintain our
beaches (not our sea walls). It would largely involve “beach recycling”
i.e. keeping a fairly uniform quantity of shingle in front of the sea
walls, by moving beach shingle from areas where it is building up, back
to areas from where it is being depleted.
There is no money yet to pay
for this Plan, but we hope it may get government funding early next
year, because it is such a very cost-effective way of protecting the
Town.
Hence our anger that a
completely unnecessary bureaucratic threat to all this is now looming,
in the form of proposals for a network of Marine Conservation Zones
(MCZs) around the UK. This sounds like “motherhood and apple pie” –
indeed originally, MCZs were principally to protect fish stocks, to
which no-one objects.
However, the bureaucrats in
charge of the process have wildly extended the scope of MCZs. Instead of
concentrating on fish - and the offshore areas where they spawn or shoal
- they have labelled vast areas of common seabed as “in need of
protection” and proposed dozens of inshore MCZs, including areas already
heavily protected by existing legislation. This includes Selsey, where a
proposed 13km2
MCZ even runs up the beach itself...exactly where we need
to do the beach recycling.
In
MCZs new regulations, policed by unelected bodies, may prevent lots of
traditional activities - essentially harmless to the environment – from
taking place. The Selsey MCZ isn’t yet confirmed (a public consultation
is due in 2012), but we’ve already been told that shingle will have to
be “sourced from outside the MCZ”.
This means we may not be
permitted to keep the £1m worth of shingle recently placed on Selsey’s
beaches (at taxpayers’ expense), and will have to watch it move away
down the coast, leaving our sea walls once again exposed to being
undermined by the sea.
In any case, negotiating new
(MCZ-related) red tape will mean coast defences cost more – so it will
be even harder to get government funding (because “value for money” is
the key measure for success).
This is one reason why the
District Council, MPSG (of which SOS is a member) and the Town Council
had all asked that the MCZ boundary was moved 100m off Selsey’s shore,
so coast defence works (and all beach activities) were outside the MCZ.
That appeared to be agreed at a local level, since it had no negative
impact on conservation. However,
in the formal MCZ proposals (made by a remote, Regional body) this local
accord – which covered other points, too - was ignored.
Various groups such as
divers, anglers and fishermen now share our concern that the proposals
do not match what the local groups agreed, and will unnecessarily hamper
or curtail economically important/leisure activities which are perfectly
sustainable.
SOS will join with others in
opposing the MCZ as proposed, lobbying for an outcome which reflects
Selsey’s circumstances & needs.
Save
our Selsey