Save Our Selsey - Campaign for Coastal Defence

The countdown has started: 50 days to the publication of the draft Coast Defence Strategy (CDS). We have been lobbying hard to ensure that it is an improvement on the disastrous “Planning for the Future” document, which envisaged letting the Bill erode away, and flooding 28 homes, half the caravan parks and hundreds of acres of farmland.

We want a “hold the line” policy for the Bill; we don’t want homes or businesses destroyed; we want defences “sustained” (raised as sea levels rise), not just “maintained” (which means the sea will rise over them); we want a pragmatic, flexible approach to coast defence construction and funding, in which the community has a much greater say and involvement.

We are cautiously optimistic that there will be positive changes in the draft CDS. December’s workshop with the Environment Agency (EA) - kindly hosted by Selsey Town Council – may have signalled a turning point. Even so, we are not letting up on the pressure, and have no illusions that the document is going to meet all our expectations. We will therefore need all the public support we can get, especially in the 8 week consultation period that follows its publication.

If you trust the authorities to keep our community safe, just look what’s happening at Medmerry, where the Environment Agency (EA) is responsible for “holding the line”. The EA has taken out groynes and thereby weakened the defences, which it admits are now unstable and in danger of collapse.

It has now written to the seafront householders, effectively telling them to abandon their properties. So much for “holding the line”! The only action the Agency promised was to put up warning signs to keep the public away – but it even dropped this idea a few days later, because it thought the sea would wash the signs away.

This pathetic response is, remember, from England’s principal flood and coastal defence agency. This sad state of affairs is the inevitable result of leaving the public sector “responsible” for coast defence without giving it sufficient funds to do the job. This defeatist attitude has forced businesses such as Bunn Leisure to build their own sea defences, protecting the capital they’ve invested here in Selsey (and our economy with it).

Which brings us back to the CDS. There’s no doubt we need “hold the line” policies for East Beach, the Bill, and West Beach, but a policy is just a piece of paper. It doesn’t mean any coast defences will be built or repaired on these frontages, or at Medmerry, unless someone pays for it.

What we need are embankments, boulders and concrete, on the shoreline or offshore. Will the government pay for them? Ask the householders at Medmerry. Would everyone in Selsey like to get a bill for thousands of pounds to pay for them? We don’t think so. That’s why SOS is working with other groups, on a groundbreaking scheme that could provide a self-funding mechanism to pay for coast defences. More on this next month.

Meanwhile, down on our beaches, Bunn Leisure has finished placing boulders in front of the Oasis (at the time of writing the landscaping still has to be done). They have held up well under some testing storms. Similarly, the revetment (a fancy word for a pile of boulders) built by the District Council at Clayton Road has withstood heavy gales, and demonstrates that revetments are an economic way of protecting sea walls.

The revetment here cost about Ł900 per metre run. It sounds a lot, but repairing & rebuilding the sea wall is forecast to be 14 times more expensive, at about Ł13,000 per metre. So expensive, in fact, that none of the authorities want to pay for it. That’s why we need more revetments in front of our remaining sea walls, and in some places that need is really urgent. A stitch in time saves nine. We hope to convince the authorities of this logic.

To keep up to date, check our website and we’ve now got some members’ videos on www.youtube.com here.

e-mail: info@saveourselsey.org