Coastal erosion pay-outs under scrutiny

12 June 2009

Ministers are looking at whether property owners should be compensated if coastal areas have to be yielded to the rising sea because of climate change.

Environment Agency (EA) chairman Lord Smith told MPs that some of the coast would have to be surrendered. He told the House of Commons environment, food and rural affairs select committee that the EA had also advised the Government that the issue of compensation ‘needs to be seriously looked at’.

He said: ‘We understand the Government is considering this, but we don’t know yet what they have decided.’

Lord Smith said that, while compensation was automatically paid in some cases, for example where agricultural land was taken to provide an alternative habitat, there was no compensation where a property was lost because of coastal erosion, particularly where sea defences were no longer maintained.

He said managed realignment was something that might need to be considered, not as a blanket solution or as a preferred option, but where it was the necessary way of coping long-term with coastal erosion.

‘That needs to be looked at in detail in each specific instance together with local communities that may be affected. These are not decisions for us alone. These are decisions that have to be taken with the people that might be affected. That is a point we have been making very strongly to the Government.’

Lord Smith welcomed the Government’s draft Flood and Water Management Bill, which follows recommendations by Sir Michael Pitt to avert the problems that arose from the floods in 2007.

The Bill gives local authorities a leadership role in flood risk management and the EA an oversight role with the remit to devise a strategy for flood and coastal erosion risk management (Surveyor, 23 April 2009).

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