Examination of Witnesses (Questions 238 - 259)
TUESDAY 12 MAY 1998
COUNCILLOR HUMPHREY
TEMPERLEY AND
MR DAVE
RENNIE
Chairman
238. Gentlemen, welcome and thank you very much for sharing
this platform. I really can think of no link between Yorkshire
and Somerset except a few hundred miles of England. We may discover
something which links you in the course of this questioning but
it does avoid musical chairs and I hope it makes for more efficient
use of your time and ours. We are very grateful to you indeed
for agreeing to share a platform. Just as we did with our last
witnesses we shall begin with one of you and move on to the second.
May I again emphasise that if something the other says interests
you and engages you and you want to add to his evidence, please
feel free to chip in. Keep it as informal as you like. Mr Rennie,
it will not surprise you to know that Mr Mitchell would like to
pursue some questions with you.
Mr Mitchell
Your evidence, unlike the other coastal authorities, accepts
a transfer to a single body of the responsibilities for coastal
protection and flood defence. Is that a counsel of despair in
view of the problems you face or is it an attempt to get an overview
on the policy?
(Mr Rennie) We are a new unitary authority and we
have taken over quite a large length of the coastline.
239. Are you adequately financed too?
(Mr Rennie) I would just correct a statement made
earlier. We are not just in the business of a managed retreat
north of the Humber. There are several areas where we are protecting
and shall continue to do so under the current regime. When we
as an authority addressed the issues raised by the questions you
posed, we were all quite surprised at the unanimity of the view
across the spectrum. We are actually a unitary authority which
is a balanced authority, where the three main political parties
have a fairly even representation. They were of one mind, which
was quite intriguing, that as far as East Riding is concerned
two years on we were still struggling with why local authorities
were actually involved in this process. If we take the shoreline
management plan—and you have probably listened to SMPs ad
nauseam since you started this—we are about to take the
final SMP to committee this week and it is East Riding which gets
all the pillorying from the local people; we are basically piggy
in the middle, that is where our councillors are. We were seeking
to find a way forward to establish what the big picture should
be for the longer term. Some of the issues are quite big for what
are relatively small local authorities, district councils. East
Riding is quite a substantial unitary authority but nevertheless
we found we had been drawn into quite diverse issues, not particularly
related to local authorities' primary functions. We try to unravel
some of those issues within the document we provided to you. The
shoreline management plan is there and in no way does it reflect
or does the East Riding Council have an opportunity really to
review the policies. The policies are there, set by MAFF. We are
not an agent for MAFF, we are an independent body. It is not like
being a trunk road agent or Yorkshire Water agent or whatever.
We have to present the policies which are virtually dictated by
a third body down in London or nearby in York. They are never
the ones who actually get all the flak. It is East Riding councillors
and each one is of the same opinion: we cannot represent the local
people on this and we want to change.
240. Do you mean because you cannot shape the policy?
(Mr Rennie) We cannot shape the national policy; it
is all dictated. Whether you are promoting a scheme it all has
to be determined by the priority system, which is all dictated
nationally, so why should local authorities be involved? They
are clearly involved in the planning process, clearly involved
in the structure plan and local plan processes, but as a coastal
authority we feel that we are just a piggy in the middle. That
may be quite a radical view.
241. It seems to me from what you say that you want to climb
out from under. You have a lot of angry residents who say they
are going to be washed away. I notice you refer to them as becoming
unduly affected emotionally. I would say hysterical. You are faced
with them, as a new authority, you have not shaped the plans but
you have to justify those plans to people who are in this state.
You really want to climb out of it, do you not?
(Mr Rennie) That may be a simple way of putting it.
As an authority we would still wish to be very much involved in
assisting and shaping that but the arrangement whereby a local
authority is in a sense left—
242. To carry the can.
(Mr Rennie)—to carry the can but the policy
is over there somewhere creates a tension and our members are
basically saying it should be sorted out.
243. If you had been involved earlier and you had put over
local views and local interests would you feel differently?
(Mr Rennie) Probably not in the long term. Clearly
the policies are going to be shaped nationally, there is going
to be little influence by one local authority and that is presumably
why historically there has been a lot of gathering together of
local authority groups, coastal authority groups and locally plus
nationally to try to influence policy. Ultimately it is MAFF who
set the policy but they are never up at the front line.
244. The policy affects you adversely in the sense that this
is the area which is going to be washed away, therefore the erosion
problem is going to hit you more severely. In a sense you are
saying you would rather avert your eyes to it anyway.
(Mr Rennie) No. If you were planning for the long
term you would definitely plan. Every authority is going through
a part of the planning process, whether it be structure plan,
local plan or whatever. It is setting that process right for the
longer term, for the sustainable longer term, to inherit places
which have been protected for 100 years. However, in the shoreline
management plans there is a clear statement that is a worry for
the longer term: how long can we protect these locations? That
is national. It really is not local, especially when the local
authority, as you have already heard this morning, does not necessarily
have the funds for doing this in the long term. It has to be at
the national centre. It is not just an opt out. We really do genuinely
believe that it is time to challenge what has been there for the
last 45 or 50 years.
245. I detect a note of disagreement from Somerset.
(Councillor Temperley) May I just explain my background
and then it might explain my remarks? I am the Vice Chairman of
Somerset County Council, Chair of the National Park Authority
which is responsible for quite a length of coastline plus Exmoor
National Park and I have been a member of the regional and local
Flood Defence Committee for longer than I care to remember; probably
something like 14 years. I live in an area which is subject to
flooding and most of the area I represent is an area which is
susceptible to flooding. I just do not recognise this particular
picture.
246. You are not being washed away at eight metres a year.
(Councillor Temperley) Actually Somerset County Council
owns the railways line which is subject to coastal erosion and
we have put in a coast defence scheme and are just about to embark
on another one. I have found over the years I have been involved
that the MAFF engineers and the MAFF people are incredibly cooperative
and incredibly helpful. I do not actually regard them as being
the villains of this particular piece. There are lots of problems
with the system, which it would be useful to explore. May I answer
an earlier point? The national spending is £260 million,
of which £31 million comes through MAFF grant and £211
million comes through a local authority levy. It is my belief
that the local authority levy system broadly works but has one
major flaw and that major flaw is that the levy is within the
cap and so authorities which are capped have in the year in which
they make budget decisions to choose between sacking teachers
and flood defence, which is actually not really a decision which
is particularly easy to make. It tends to be that the people who
are involved in flood defence are not in the majority in any kind
of county council or any kind of local authority and it is very
important that the flood defence spending is seen to be outside
that system. If I go to the electors in Somerset and say we need
to spend an extra £10 a head of council tax on flood defence,
we can get that money. If I go to them and say we are going to
remove 30 or 40 teachers to pay for flood defence, they will probably
tell us to wait a while, so there is a long-term and a short-term
issue. Eventually we think we get the money back through SSA,
but in the short term we do not and in the short term spending
additional money on flood defence is very painful. Taking the
levy and a disregard system, the ACC, the Association of County
Councils, argued for many years that disregard of police, national
park and flood defence levies was the appropriate way to deal
with this and I hoped there might be a recommendation for your
Committee to that effect. It is a very simple way of focusing
the issues. Then the issues would be: do we spend more money?
Do we ask the council tax payer to pay? In many cases I think
the council tax payer would be happy to pay.
247. The right way is to lash the teachers to the rocks.
Even if that were done, it would not change your view, would it,
Mr Rennie?
(Mr Rennie) Not at all because there is this semi-muddle.
I am intrigued that Somerset are involved in flood defence, because
obviously down our coastline there are areas where it is the responsibility
of the Environment Agency and there are areas which are the responsibility
of East Riding and then there are other private interests as well.
There is a degree certainly of confusion in the minds of the public
as to who is actually responsible for what. Inevitably it is the
local authority who cops the lot as to why this or that is not
happening and why it is taking so long to get the money together
for the project. As you have probably heard, it does take quite
a number of years and the whole planning process. When you have
a community under threat, you have to start early but because
of the problem of the cost/benefit analysis it is a number of
years before you can actually do anything. That is terrifying
for people who are living in these locations. They just do not
know where it will run to. The uncertainty. If for instance the
shoreline management plan guaranteed the financing of that—and
that is a long-term guarantee because they are meant to be 50
years long—then there would be a degree of security in that,
that this is actually what will happen. However, there is this
total uncertainty in the whole process at the moment and raising
money locally is in a sense missing the point in my councillors'
view. It has to be of national significance.
(Councillor Temperley) In Somerset we have one of
the smallest local authorities in the country, West Somerset District
Council, which is the coast defence authority. In that case, with
MAFF grants and that kind of system at 75 per cent and systems
whereby the capital cost is fully reflected in SCAs and so on,
that authority has been able, with a bit of help from the county
council, to promote quite major coast defence schemes because
the ratios are very favourable.
248. You presumably face more compensation problems in the
East Riding then?
(Mr Rennie) There are no grounds for any compensation
at all at the moment.
249. I want to follow this compensation argument because
you talk about geared compensation. Could you expand on that and
what it means?
(Mr Rennie) There are various aspects of compensation.
What the East Riding had addressed in its mind is the issue where—because
the policy in the shoreline management plan is basically to do
nothing, retreat, primarily because the value of the property,
of the land, does not justify expenditure of any significance—there
is this person living on top of the cliff knowing that there is
nobody to help, they could have moved in in the last five years.
You have to have some system where if you are going to introduce
compensation, then it has to be related to the price they paid
and the cost of rebuilding and the length of time they have been
in that property. Some of these people have been in their properties
for the whole of their life; that has to be more valued in terms
of public expenditure than somebody who has just moved in in the
last ten years. There is no mechanism. We have a system where
if you live in a community of 20-plus people, dwellings, plus
a road needs diverting, you may get a scheme off the ground. If
you are in a smaller community or if you are literally on your
own in an isolated property, you really are caught. Okay, public
expenditure is for the public good and this is where the whole
issue becomes very difficult. In terms of where our authority
is, it is seeking ways to address that situation where, through
no fault of their own, they have inherited that property or have
lived there for a long time and the erosion rate is increasing
over time, they are caught with no value left in their property.
250. Have you done any pilot studies as to how it would work?
(Mr Rennie) Only preliminary basic analysis. We lose
a property virtually every year. It is not as simple as that obviously.
That is along a coastline of 40 kilometres which is under threat.
We are losing about two metres a year but in some places it goes
up at a tremendous rate locally because of the type and height
of the cliff. On that basis it is not an enormous cost to the
total community, the country, but I do not know what the full
cost would be around the country.
251. What is most of this property? I used to go on holiday
with a family which had a converted railway carriage stuck on
top of the cliffs which we call a "batch" in New Zealand.
Is it that sort of stuff? Holiday stuff?
(Mr Rennie) No, it can be anything from a full farm
through to individual dwellings. Because of the precarious nature
of the location, a lot of temporary type buildings have been put
up. The value of those is reflected obviously in the lower value.
It is the full-blown properties. The irony is that when properties
are getting to a dangerous condition, very close and beginning
to tumble over, we are forcing a demolition order on these properties
to protect the public and then firing off the cost of that to
the individual. Not only do they have to face the cost of relocating,
rebuilding, they are actually being penalised by another part
of the planning process. The whole system if quite fraught. It
is not surprising we get the aggro we do along our coastline.
(Councillor Temperley) We have identified an area
of common ground in the sense that there are some principles here
which are quite important. We choose to spend quite large amounts
of money to protect property in certain circumstances where there
are appropriate financial and environmental conditions to allow
that to happen. Sometimes we choose not to. There was some talk
earlier this morning about managed retreat and there is an example
of an area where the coast defence has been severed at Northey
Island on the Blackwater estuary. I believe the farmer and landowner
involved have been compensated to allow an experiment to take
place. We have a similar situation on the Exmoor coast where a
major coast defence has been breached and about 100 acres of farmland
have been made totally useless as a result of the permanent breach.
There is no mechanism whereby that landowner can be compensated
under present legislation. We have made a decision locally, which
is unwelcome in some quarters, not to maintain that sea defence.
The consequences are that an individual has lost a great deal
of money, or a great deal of value. There does seem to be a point,
if on the one hand we allow people to be protected at public expense,
when we choose not to protect them that would seem to be an area
where some kind of compensatory principle could apply. We make
the point from Somerset that if we chose collectively with the
Environment Agency that a particular area of low-lying land should
bear the brunt of the flooding in order to protect other places,
or to reduce the standards of investment required elsewhere on
the system, then again there might be scope for some kind of limited
compensation measures in order to facilitate that happening. Sometimes
we can find compensation measures through ESA payments, environmentally
sensitive area payments, or through management agreements, SSSI
payments and so on, but those examples are somewhat haphazard
and depend on the particular circumstances. The general principle,
where we choose as a society to abandon the defence, does seem
to me right that there should be some kind of public—
252. That principle of compensation where you cannot defend
it would be horrifying for the East Riding, would it not? With
managed retreat you are giving it all up.
(Councillor Temperley) Yes.
(Mr Rennie) The longer term issue is probably where
you are looking to sort out. If there are major communities, towns,
which are threatened long term, you cannot go on for ever unless
you end up creating an island of some of these communities in
the very long term. You have a really serious problem. If compensation
is going to be at the door of local authorities we would run a
mile on the issue. It has to be part of the MAFF grant system.
The other issue on compensation which we are certainly having
to work through is the issue of compensation related to the effect
of public works on other people elsewhere. As you may know, we
are actually locked into a Lands Tribunal issue but it is pertinent
to this. In most other areas, where you undertake public works,
there are already land compensation principles related to that.
On public works for coastal defence there does not seem to be
any basis for compensation for the increased effect of erosion,
if that is proven, or whatever. It is a very tight system currently
and I am just concerned that the existing basis of the Coastal
Protection Act compensation is purely related to negligence by
the authority in the way it has constructed that particular coastal
defence.
253. What you are referring to there is a case at Mappleton,
is it not, where the farmer lady claims that work which has been
done, has meant faster erosion than she was led to expect so the
farm disappears more quickly.
(Mr Rennie) Yes, that is the claim.
254. This is going to be an important test case.
(Mr Rennie) Yes. That is going to the Lands Tribunal
in October this year; it has now been fixed.
255. I see why you say what you do with all this hanging
over you.
(Mr Rennie) We probably have several other compensation
claims against us. All this is inherited from former authorities,
which is rather nice. I do not know whether there are many other
cases around the country but today many of our citizens are into
compensation for issues. It is a natural thing and when public
bodies are encouraged to go and do things and then they face an
enormous uphill struggle with compensation issues as a result,
something has to be sorted out nationally.
256. Has the council made any provision for compensation?
(Mr Rennie) Not directly. We have obviously communicated
very much with MAFF and they are paying the costs of our position.
There is a big uncertainty about what will happen if the claim
goes against us. There is no guarantee from MAFF on that.
257. In this kind of case you have to be involved in the
need to prove the argument. Are you doing research on the causes
of this acceleration of erosion?
(Mr Rennie) Very much so, related to the case.
258. Generally.
(Mr Rennie) There is a lot of work going on but no,
not generally. The shoreline management plan identifies this issue
of compensation and basically says more research should be undertaken
nationally on this issue.
259. It seems to me that the essence of the council's position
is that you are faced with a nightmare and it is not of your creation.
You are having to carry out a policy which you have not influenced,
determined by somebody else. You would just rather opt out.
(Mr Rennie) It is not as simple as that. The new authority
provides the opportunity for a review of the situation. My council
is basically saying—and that is not without prejudice to
the future; we will obviously continue; there is no issue there—they
will implement and adhere to the policies.
Chairman: We must wind up the specifically Yorkshire section
there. We have one question about coastal erosion to put to you
in writing. May we move on to Somerset specifically?
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