Groups fighting plans to abandon coastal areas to the waves have resolved to work together to convince the government to drop the controversial proposals.

Councillors from across Suffolk and Norfolk coastal areas and from all levels of local government met for a conference in Southwold today. Also among more than 100 delegates were coastal pressure groups, Natural England, Suffolk Coastal MP John Gummer and Euro MP Geoffrey Van Orden.

They were united in wanting to stop the Environment Agency’s policy of “managed retreat”, or letting nature take its course as sea levels rise and coastal erosion continues. The conference focused on the Blyth estuary, one of the areas which will be most affected by the policy, but also heard of concerns elsewhere on the Suffolk coast and in Norfolk. Delegates decided that co-operation and communication were the key to persuading government to drop the plans and instead invest in flood defences. (more…)

A Norfolk MP has denounced a minister’s response to parliamentary questions on controversial Broads surrender proposals as resembling “a dodgy insurance policy”.

Keith Simpson said he was considering organising a select committee-style meeting of the county’s MPs after the “unimpressive and contradictory” letter from environment minister Phil Woolas.

The minister was questioned last month at an adjournment debate in Westminster Hall, initiated by Mr Simpson and attended by most of the county’s MPs, on draft proposals by government conservation advisers Natural England to deal with the consequences of climate change in the northern Broads. (more…)

Flooding minister Phil Woolas will visit Norfolk in July and come face to face with people threatened with losing their homes and businesses if proposals to abandon 25 square miles of the Broads go ahead.

Those behind the Norfolk end of the visit have already made it clear the event should not be confrontational, but part of a reasoned attempt to force the government quango Natural England into dropping a controversial report first revealed in the EDP in late March.

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He will attend a meeting in Lessingham village hall, where he has been invited to make a speech on climate change and its effects on north east Norfolk. He will then face a range of questions from various Norfolk representatives.

The event has been organised by a newly formed group called the North East Norfolk Coastal Parishes Group, which includes seven parishes and the Norfolk County Association of Parish and Town Councils.

Read the full story by Ed Foss on the EDP website

Parliamentary debate on flood defences in Norfolk by Mr. Keith Simpson MP for Mid Norfolk in Westminster Hall 6 May 2008:

I requested the debate because flood defences in Norfolk are a crucial local issue. It must be seen, of course, against a wider background. We are all conscious today that whatever problems we face, they pale into insignificance compared with the news of what has happened in Burma, where a cyclone has killed a minimum of 15,000 people. We know that many other low-lying parts of the world face appalling threats. I think in particular of the people of Bangladesh.

For many of us, the Norfolk coast is about being at the seaside. I can recall, when I was a child—it may be difficult for some people to believe that I was once a child—of about seven or eight, with glasses and an incipient moustache, being on the beach at Cromer. Later, I was with my son George, perhaps on the beach at Heacham with the tide out, building sandcastles. As you know, Mr. Martlew, however well one builds sandcastles—as a military historian, I did so in depth, using stone and with as much defensive preparation as possible—when the tide comes in, it always sweeps them away. There could be a sense that the flooding that we face from both the sea and on the land is somehow inevitable, and that there is therefore nothing much that we can do about it. I do not believe that that is so.

Read the full transcript of the debate in the Commons Hansard

Norfolk MPs pledged to fight on yesterday after failing to win reassurances or concessions from the government over the mooted surrendering of 25 square miles of the county to the sea.

Environment minister Phil Woolas promised to visit the threatened area between Eccles and Winterton.

But he glossed over an invitation by constituency MP Norman Lamb officially to remove the highly controversial “worst case” sea defences option put forward by Natural England.

And he stressed in the Commons that “it is not the government’s policy to give compensation for the impact of floods and coastal erosion”.

Mr Woolas added that there was an obligation to answer the question of whether compensation should be provided “if damage has been caused by climate change rather than the natural processes of erosion or flooding”. But he did not answer it himself.

Read the full story by Chris Fisher on the Eastern Daily Press website