This is a record of the Sidmouth Beach Management Advisory Group meeting where we met the new team, South West Flood and Coastal.
The agenda
Notes from previous meeting of the Beach Management Project Board meeting on 8th April 2024 concerning the previous consultants Atkins Keir who are no longer being used. The Project Board sits above the Advisory Group and they should report to us regularly but don’t seem to be doing so.
Also ‘The updated terms of reference for the Advisory Group for your information. These have been updated to align with the Shared Service project involvement.’ ( to me these appear to be an update of the first draft of the TOR which was later revised but then seems to have been ‘lost’: as such it has many errors)
There seems to be a bit of confusion about the difference between the Project Board and the Advisory Group, SWC&F think they looked around Sidmouth with the Advisory Group but this was the first time we met them so they must have been with the Project Board. Please bear this in mind when reading their slides, shown below.
I was surprised to see that the Outline Business Case was online as we ( Advisory Group) had not been notified. At our previous meeting in 2024 we were promised it would be online by the end of the week, it wasn’t. After checking every week for a couple of months we decided to wait to be told. As you can see it went online in June 2024. https://eastdevon.gov.uk/beaches-harbours-and-coastal-information/coastal-protection/beach-management-plans/sidmouth-and-east-beach-management-plan-and-scheme/sidmouth-and-east-beach-outline-business-case/
The only things not mentioned in the slides below are that
1) they have started letting people know a tender process will be starting soon and they have had interest from several companies.
2) they hope to hold a meeting for interested companies on 16th June
3) work in the sea does not usually require Planning Permission as it is handled through other mechanisms but work onland will have to go through the EDDC Planning process. So there may be one or unusually two applications when we get to that stage.
4) it is unlikely that they will chose to do physical modelling as it is very expensive. The Advisory Group has been pushing for physical modelling in a wave tank because many of the numerical models that have been produced so far have been shown to be wrong.
5) handover document X8 refers to a Scoping doc/Brief that was put together by Chris Lockyear and Tony Burch at the request of Tom Buxton-Smith ( EDDC Eng Project manager) and Cllr Geoff Jung. Chris and Tony have the professional credentials to do this. The document went through many iterations and was very comprehensive but it would appear it is not to remain in its current format.
Get yourself a cup of coffee, and perhaps some headache tablets, and settle down to be fully informed ( well as much as we are!)
You may think that many of the steps shown have been done already, and you would be right. It often feels as though we are going round in circles and covering the same ground time and time again but it is unavoidable when you constantly have new people tackling the same problem. With any luck we will actually make progress this time.
If you can’t understand the jargon … welcome to the club! This meeting ran for over 3 hours from start to finish.