Careful on those cliff walks!
- Thread starter dom
- Start date
grumpy_o_g
Well-Known Member
Don't know if it's still true but the coastal management plan for the much of Norfolk and North Suffolk was to basically let it erode. Oddly enough there was a little bit of Suffolk that got protected that was exactly where Anthony Wedgewood-Benn's dad lived - that got special funding.
LittleSister
Well-Known Member
It's not quite true, and never was, but mainly because the political will is not there to face the reality that the coast in this area has been retreating for around 10,000 years, and that it's neither economically or technically feasible to halt that.
Therefore the coastal management plans (available online), generally speaking, - confirm ongoing protection for towns and expensive infrastructure (like the Bacton gas terminal); allow retreat where there is little housing/infrastructure or sensitive ecology; and recognise that the extensive bits between those extremes will likely retreat in the longer term, but put off any decisions as to how this will be done for a few decades (read 'elections').
Of course the latter falls down when in the interim further erosion takes place where there are houses or whatever (e.g. Hemsby, Happisburgh), and MPs, Ministers and Councillors turn up and say 'something must be done', when the government has, quite rightly, not made funds available for everywhere be protected, and the financial cost of protection far exceeds the value of the properties affected.
The situation is complicated by the fact that the erosion of material in one place is typically what provide the material for the protective beach in another, so preventing erosion in one place will often accelerate it somewhere else.