Steering Group to review fact finding reports on Sidmouth’s coastal defences

Coastal process and engineering experts will present baseline reports at second steering group meeting today (24 February)

Members of the Steering Group for the Sidmouth & East Beach Management Plan (BMP) project will be meeting at East Devon District Council’s offices at the Knowle on Tuesday 24 February to discuss the findings of four key baseline reports – Coastal Processes (including cliff evolution), Coastal Defence Works, Environmental Issues and the Economics – upon which the rest of the project will be based.  The project was commissioned by the council in partnership with the Environment Agency (EA), Sidmouth Town Council, Cliff Road Action Group (CRAG) and the South West Strategic Regional Coastal Monitoring Programme.

These baseline reports form the third stage of the BMP project. The output from the project will be a Beach Management Plan, which is a non statutory method of providing a coastal defence plan for managing the structure and form of Sidmouth’s Main and East Cliff beaches. The project will appraise different options for managing the beaches to reduce the rate of beach and cliff erosion in an integrated, justifiable and sustainable way.

Three weeks prior to the meeting, three of the draft baseline reports were circulated to all the Steering Group members for initial comment in readiness for the meeting. The fourth report, Economics,will be presented at the meeting by CH2M Hill Halcrow, the coastal management experts who have prepared all the reports for the partnership. The deadline for final comments is 10 March, two weeks after the meeting.

The membership of the Steering Group has been chosen to represent a diverse, but balanced, section of the local community, to ensure that the community is involved in the project, particularly as they bring with them a wealth of local knowledge and views. The Group’s job is to bring local knowledge to the project, to advise on the development and delivery of the project and to act as a ‘critical friend’ throughout the process.

As part of the council’s commitment to public engagement on the project, the baseline reports will be published on the council’s web site and there will be public consultation on the draft BMP, once it has been produced later this year.

Councillor Andrew Moulding, the council’s deputy leader and chairman of the Steering Group said: “Community engagement is vital to the development of this BMP and their views on the report findings are crucial to establishing the baselines on which the rest of the project will be founded.

“The meeting will involve a presentation by Halcrow who will explain the findings of these extremely detailed reports for information and discussion. Once the baseline reports have been agreed, we can move on to the creative work, considering the options and deciding on the best courses of action.

“The recommendations of the BMP project are due in September 2015, but any future engineering work is dependent on funding from the Environment Agency,  DEFRA, and from other sources that we will need to explore, as well as on approvals from relevant regulators.”