| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Hinchliffe: I am concerned that consultation exercises do not mean a great deal, as assurances are not followed through. Does the Secretary of State or the Minister study assurances that were given in past consultation exercises of the kind that I have described to check whether they were carried through?
Mr. Horam: Such assurances are not given lightly, and they are taken seriously. I shall study past assurances that were given in this case when it comes before me.
The hon. Gentleman knows that Pinderfields is developing a business case for a major new development under the private finance initiative. Any proposals for merger will take that project into account, so there are two reasons for consultation. One is the possibility of a PFI initiative by Pinderfields, which I welcome, and the second is the possibility of merger.
Pinderfields Hospitals NHS trust is progressing PFI testing for redevelopment of the site to replace a fragmented configuration of buildings, many of which--as the hon. Member for Wakefield knows--are of poor quality. I have heard the hon. Gentleman--I agree with him--complain at great length about the age of some of those buildings. We want new facilities, if that is possible, not only for patients but for staff. I have seen for myself the huge improvement in morale that can result from new facilities, provided by whatever means. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman would wish to welcome that possibility.
The trust is making good progress and it should not be long before it selects the consortiums that will be invited to submit detailed proposals. There are some financial problems, as the hon. Gentleman is aware, but Pinderfields Hospitals NHS trust has made major progress in reducing waiting times and the length of waiting lists. In my view--
Mr. David Porter (Waveney):
Approximately 8,000 sq km of land in England and Wales lie within 5 m of present sea levels. Britain already relies to a great extent on sea defence and land drainage. Some of the low-lying areas that are especially susceptible to rises in sea levels are the coasts of East Anglia, Lancashire, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, the Essex mudflats, Sussex coastal towns, the Thames estuary, parts of the north Wales coast and the Clyde and Forth estuaries. Therefore, I am pleased to have the opportunity to raise the matter of sea defence and coastal protection before the Easter recess.
I have been applying for an Adjournment debate for some weeks now and I started at the time of the bad weather in February, which illustrated just how vulnerable is our coastline. I have just drawn a place in the ballot and it is a matter of luck getting a debate, just as to a large extent it is a matter of luck whether we escape major flood damage in any winter. This is a national problem, as I have said, but I have the greatest concerns for the coast of East Anglia. The worst of the winter and the unpredictable early spring weather should be over for now and our crossed fingers and hoping for the best got us through, but the wind is constant and the sea never sleeps--certainly not the North sea.
Erosion goes on all year round, sometimes unnoticed and sometimes dramatically. For many weeks of the year, a potent mixture of high spring tides and northerly winds can prove fatal. When the weather is severe enough--as it was most recently on the nights of 19 and 20 February--to describe the coastline as being at the mercy of the sea is no exaggeration. Sometimes aging sea defences are turned to rubble in minutes. Yards of sand cliff, battered and weakened by the wind, are literally blown out to be scoured away in the boiling surf of an angry North sea. Anyone who doubts the existence of God should stand and watch it.
Despite loss of land and some properties in Norfolk, in my constituency of North Suffolk and further south in Suffolk, most of the defences held, just, but it was close. Some of the Norfolk marshes were under salt water, some shingle banks disappeared and land at Kessingland and elsewhere in Waveney was lost.
Such problems are not new, by any means. The one-time city of Dunwich, which returned two Members to the House, is now merely a village. When the Lowestoft sea defences were built earlier this century, that accelerated the loss of half of Pakefield. When the 1953 flood defences failed, that claimed more than 300 lives and cost more than £900 million at 1989 prices to rebuild and strengthen. I remember walking as a boy with my father on the sea wall to the north of Lowestoft and looking out at the ruins of the sea wall on which he had walked with his father, in his turn, looking further out at the sea wall that was once there, and so on.
Very early after I was elected to the House in 1987, I raised sea defence issues in general and the case of homes at Easton Bavents in my constituency in particular. Houses were demolished moments before they fell into the sea and people lost everything, without benefit of insurance or compensation. So we know that the problem is not new. The east coast has suffered erosion and been in retreat for centuries. We might be
tempted to ask why we have not sorted the problem out by now, but anyone who has seen the sea and wind at work will know that it cannot be sorted out for long.
After the 1953 floods, when there were no cash limits for Government Departments and no direct controls on local authority capital expenditure, money did not run out. The then Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, accepted the report by the departmental committee on coastal flooding and major sea defences were installed. Many have been upgraded and replaced since, but most of those that survive are coming to the end of their useful life.
Ideas change and technologies change. When I spoke in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I complained about the plethora of bodies around the coast responsible for sea defence and coastal protection. There were more than 200, ranging from major councils to small harbour undertakings. I argued that there should be a national plan on what to save, where, and how to defend it. I said that the plan should be funded centrally, and not disproportionately by coastal dwellers and taxpayers. After all, the Royal Navy defends all our people and not just those who live on the coast. Since then, we have moved on. Larger shares of the funding for schemes are forthcoming from central funds, rather than local. We have had the National Rivers Authority and now we have the Environment Agency as a one-stop national body with a strategic overview of coastal protection.
We have seen several local authorities with common interests working informally together, pooling resources and ideas and recognising the two universal truths--that the sea knows no authority boundaries and that one man's erosion is another man's beach enhancements. I must pay tribute to Terry Oakes, a senior officer of Waveney district council, who has been a driving force in this work and is an acknowledged expert. Why, he even knows more than I do.
So we have moved a long way. We have documents such as the shoreline management plan from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, which is a guide for coastal authorities and pulls together the disparate strands. We have a guide to good practice by MAFF called "Coastal Defence and the Environment". The flood defence committees of the old National Rivers Authority are working well and the internal drainage boards are working on all the rivers that drain farmland into the sea. The NRA worked on river management ideas and the Environment Select Committee three years ago wrote a report on "Coastal Zone Protection and Planning". The National Audit Office is also watching coastal defence. With all that happening, we should feel confident that the events of 1953 cannot happen again, but even so we know that they can. Statistically, they probably will in our lifetimes.
What are the options for any given stretch of coast? One option is, of course, to do nothing, but in Norfolk, the motto is "du different". In parts of Suffolk and Norfolk, managed retreat--as it is fashionably called--is being considered as shoreline management plans are put together. Crumbling sand cliffs feed beaches further round or down the coast--beach nourishment. That is a more environmentally natural process, and it appeals because it is nature taking its course. It works with the natural process instead of trying to fight against it. Retreat, however, was not the Dutch approach. They pushed out into the North sea. I accept that in Britain it is acceptable
for some stretches of our coast to have managed retreat, but which stretches? Where do we draw the line and how do we defend that line? Those are the crucial questions.
The second option is to continue rebuilding hard engineering structures, such as groynes and sea walls. Those are vital in many parts to protect housing and life, but no one has ever advocated encasing Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex in a concrete defence fortress. The third option is to break the power of the waves offshore--for example, with rocks from Norway or elsewhere. That is happening and is certainly useful, but rocks have no impact on the wind's destructive power. I suggest that more work needs to be done on artificial reefs--for instance, those made with compacted household or industrial waste--to lessen wave power. I say that at the same time as I acknowledge the work done by the Ministry of Agriculture's Advisory Committee on Flood and Coastal Research and Development, which long ago argued for improved methods of design and operation and the need for collaboration between scientific disciplines, funding agencies and overseas research teams.
In so far as there is an answer, it is in working towards a national strategy put together locally and incorporating a mixture of defences and managed retreat. The local consultations are a vital part of that. People place, not surprisingly, the highest priority on saving their lives and homes. Urban areas need high protection and good, well-understood and practised early-warning systems. Stopping new building near the sea helps, of course. But I come back to the crucial questions: where do we draw the line and how do we defend it? In parts of Waveney, eventually, the A12 trunk road--our economic lifeline--will become the line. How do we defend a trunk road against the sea?
Two years ago, in describing the state of our coastal defences following a coast protection survey of England, my right hon. Friend the Member for South-West Norfolk (Mrs. Shephard), in a written answer, stated:
Times move on, and with sea defence, time is not on our side.
Three other aspects must be borne in mind, especially in respect of the North sea. Last week, together with my right hon. Friends the President of the Board of Trade and the Secretary of State for the Environment--in his capacity as the Member of Parliament for Suffolk, Coastal--I attended the official opening of Sizewell B. That superb occasion crowned a civil engineering project greater even than the channel tunnel, putting in its place, as part of the nation's economic engine, a triumph of British engineering, design and build--a nuclear power station.
As a correspondent of the liaison committee and the neighbouring Member of Parliament--many of whose constituents work at Sizewell A and B, while others helped to build them--for a constituency that takes the safety of those stations seriously, I have a copy of the Suffolk local authorities' emergency plan. That excellent document inspires real confidence, and I do not condemn it when I say that its coverage of disaster caused by sea flooding is almost
nil. There are emergency plans for contamination, radioactivity and evacuation--not for overrunning by an angry North sea. That is understandable, but it means that the integrity of those power stations and of Sizewell C--which I hope will be built one day--must be guaranteed for ever. That provision must be built into the management shoreline plans for the future. If the protective sandbank of Sizewell were ever to be dredged, the credibility of those stations would be in question.
There are currently eight different licensed companies operating 2,000 to 8,000 tonne dredgers on our offshore sandbanks. I do not knock that industry. On the contrary, it is a valuable part of our local and national economy, and it makes a useful contribution to the Exchequer. The demand for aggregates for roads and buildings of 5.5 tonnes per person per year is insatiable, and those aggregates must come from somewhere. Thirty per cent. of that tonnage comes from the East Anglian coastline. I know about licensing, safeguards and agreements to cause minimum disruption to fishing, but many people feel that the rapid increase in erosion of the North sea coastline over the last 15 years is far greater than can be ascribed to natural factors or even global warming. Dredging must have an impact, even in an lively, undercurrent-strong, relatively shallow sea such as the North sea.
That impact must be felt on sea defences, fishing, and the beach and holiday industries. That impact may be accelerating, and further studies are needed--particularly as a large amount of our offshore sand is sold to Holland, which has stricter restrictions on offshore dredging because of that country's sensitivity to flood prevention.
In addition to the risks created by erosion and subsequent flooding that I touched on, whatever the mixture of causes, we have a lot of high-grade agricultural land. Given the uncertainties of the global food supply, it would be a madman who said that we have too much land in Britain and will have for ever, from here on in.
Other industries put pressure on the sea, such as gas and oil extraction--although I am not saying that they cause erosion, because clearly they do not. However, management plans must take account of all the uses to which the North sea is put, the pressures that it is under naturally and from man, and take a view--which should be built in to defence protection--of proposed future industrial uses.
1 pm
"The survey also identified some 135 km of unprotected coast which is at present significantly eroding and where the provision of works may need to be considered within the next 10 years."--[Official Report, 30 March 1994; Vol. 240, c. 770.]
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |