Home owners who face losing their East Anglian properties to coastal erosion were offered the hope of receiving proper compensation last night.

The chairman of the Environment Agency has suggested that the government sets up a buy and lease scheme along the region’s coast.

Lord Smith said that authorities such as North Norfolk District Council should be given funding to purchase and then lease back up to 250 homes that are likely to fall into the sea in the next 20 years. (more…)

The chairman of the Environment Agency Lord Smith has unveiled a radical plan to help hundreds of homeowners threatened by coastal erosion.

The coastlines of Norfolk, Suffolk and Lincolnshire have been particularly vulnerable to the sea with many losing their homes without compensation.

Lord Smith has told BBC Look East local councils should buy up homes threatened by the sea and then lease them back. (more…)

Hundreds of homes on cliffs around Britain should be bought by the Government because climate change is accelerating the pace of coastal erosion, according to the head of the Environment Agency.

In an interview with The Times, Lord Smith of Finsbury said that some parts of the coastline were now impossible to defend and it was unfair that people should lose their homes through no fault of their own.

Local authorities should be given the funding to buy vulnerable houses at a rate based on their original value rather than the market value, he said. They would then lease them back to the owners until the property became uninhabitable. (more…)

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’. (more…)

As fears grow of a metre sea level rise by the end of the century, the Environment Agency has told Sky News Online it is impossible to defend all of Britain’s coastline.

Many places along the UK’s East Coast will become particularly vulnerable to flooding. (more…)

Coastal campaigners from Norfolk have had an “encouraging” meeting with the man in charge of the nation’s flood defences.

A group of politicians, councillors from the north and east coasts and residents of seaside and low-lying Broads villages met Environment Agency chairman Lord Smith yesterday.

Afterwards an upbeat North Norfolk MP Norman Lamb said he was very encouraged by the comments they heard. (more…)

A FRESH call will be made for the Government to carry out an investigation into whether offshore dredging has contributed to large losses of land on the East Riding coast.

In the past year, unprecedented chunks of cliff measuring almost three times the length of a double-decker bus have disappeared into the sea. (more…)

AREAS of the Suffolk coast will not be abandoned “unless it is absolutely necessary”, the chairman of the Environment Agency said yesterday as he held a series of meetings with groups concerned at plans to stop maintaining some of the estuary defences.

Lord Smith, who was flown by helicopter up the coast from Bawdsey to Easton Bavents, said he wanted the agency to work with local communities to identify the best solutions and find funding from a variety of possible sources.

“We want to make sure we protect as much as possible. We need to agree solutions for each individual estuary. I certainly don’t want to abandon anything unless we absolutely have to,” he said. (more…)

SEA defence campaigners will today urge top decision-makers to help remove legal barriers to enable public-private partnerships to “hold the line” on the Suffolk coast for at least the next 20 years.

Lord Smith, chairman of the Environment Agency, is due to see the eroding coastline and meet groups which are opposing the agency’s plans to phase out the maintenance of flood walls in Suffolk’s estuaries.

The agency – working within updated guidelines issued by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) – believes the work would not be sustainable and cannot be justified, economically or environmentally, especially in the face of rising sea levels.

However, campaigners will today call on Lord Smith to help local authorities and landowners to “hold the line” for the next 20 years to allow more knowledge to be developed about coastal trends. (more…)

In an article on the Public Service website, Chris Smith (Lord Smith of Finsbury), the new chairman of the Environment Agency, talks about the challenges facing him and his agency is to relate the giant, global issues surrounding climate change to the grassroots level, connecting to local communities and involving them in decision making.

“The environment and our stewardship of it is quite simply the most important issue facing our generation,” he says. “The Environment Agency stands at the point where environmental change has its greatest impact on the lives of ordinary people. It’s where floods and water quality, and planning and handling of waste and a whole range of other issues are both directly relevant to people and have their greatest impact.”

It is vital that the agency works alongside communities, rather than imposing solutions on them, Lord Smith argues. (more…)