Elephants in the sitting room by Dr H M Buckland

Comments

This final report reiterates the main environmental issues set out in Sarah Nason’s original document ‘Uneconomic Sea Defences’ the document which was directly responsible for the planning blight affecting people, jobs, schools, businesses (particularly the leisure industry), Local Authorities, transport, medical care and the rest from the Humber to the Thames.

While the Environment Agency accepts that as many as 5 million people may be affected by ‘Managed Retreat’ it refuses to address these ‘Elephants in the sitting room’ They are:-

1) Legal issues. Protocol 1 of the Human Rights Acts enshrines the right of ‘peaceful enjoyment of the property of individuals’ (property includes land). I can think of nothing less conducive to peaceful enjoyment than lying awake at night listening to a northerly gale, knowing that your local authority has deliberately neglected to maintain sea defences in obedience to EA policy; knowing also that your insurance policy no longer covers flood damage.

Strapped for cash after BSE, the Rural Payments fiasco, Foot and Mouth and under orders from the Treasury, the Agency tries desperately to escape legal liability under Common Law to continue funding sea defence maintenance. I believe their case is flawed and can quote 2 major legal judgments in support

The new Corporate Manslaughter Act legally binding as from April 2008 specifically includes DEFRA in respect of failure of maintenance. In 1953 300 people along the East Coast died in that disastrous surge.

2) The Moral Case for compensation is studiously and deliberately ignored. Holland, a very much smaller nation, with 40% of their population affected, has already set up such a fair system. Round about AD 1200, when the port of Withernsea was rendered unusable by silting, King John moved the entire population upstream to the river Hull, hence Kingston- Upon Hull.

DEFRA, the EA, Inland Drainage Boards, National River Authorities and the rest have for 100 years happily drawn salaries and inflation linked pensions to protect the public from flooding. Now when life becomes difficult they scramble to deny liability. They should not be allowed to escape so easily.

3) Elephant 3 is the Political Dimension. 5 million national and local authority votes from the Humber to the Hamble are at stake. There is little mention of the problem by the major parties or national media. In the last 5 years I have corresponded with 5 Secretaries of State for the Environment (Beckett, Morley, Pearson, Woolas and now Benn). (They really do come and go with quite bewildering rapidity do they not?). I have challenged their claim of Public Interest Immunity which ministers hope will protect them from the law.

4) Sarah Nason’s paper ‘Uneconomic Sea Defences’, which, by the by, has oddly disappeared from the EA website, airily admitted on page 44 that "The EA has no experience or expertise in handling the political and social consequences of managed retreat " That inexperience shows and should have deterred her from publishing the paper at all until she had had obtained that experience - she could perhaps have avoided the blight which has affected property from the Humber to the Hamble.

Furthermore she has wrongly used Average Annual Damage statistics from the insurance industry. Her assessments of what flood damages are or are not uneconomic are based on restoring property to its previous value and function - impossible if your house and land are surrounded by saltmarsh. She has completely ignored the economic costs of the permanent loss of productive farmland together with the costs of relocating and re-housing millions of voters and providing them with jobs, schools, and the rest.

Now after the fiascos of BSE, the Rural Payments to farmers, the Pirbright virus escape and in hock to the Treasury, the EA is desperate to hive off responsibility to Local Authorities with little or no hydrological expertise and different financial priorities from other LAs along their shared river.

Catchment areas are geographical entities and no respecters of private, parish, county, or even national boundaries; which of course explains why up to now IDBs, NRAs and the rest have campaigned for an over-arching national Authority.

Our present Government is praying that the next time a 1953 flood occurs it will be on somebody else’s watch.

Assuming that they accept scientific evidence of a 1 metre rise in sea levels over the next 100 years it is high time and gone that both political parties got a grip on what promises to the over-riding socio-political issue this century..

Dr H M Buckland

18 Augusta Close

Grimsby, NE Lincs