“a long meeting and a great deal was said…” [VGS representative]
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Earlier in the week, there was a much-delayed meeting of the Sidmouth Beach Management Plan.
Here are the initial notes made by the VGS representative, from the BMP Advisory Group pages of the VGS dedicated pages:
Advisory Group meeting 22nd May 2025 Cellar Bar Kennaway House
This long awaited meeting came at short notice and was supposed to be at STC HQ, but at even shorter notice was moved to Kennaway House. This less than satisfactory organisation resulted in some members of the Advisory Group having previous arrangements so they could not come; and a lack of facilities to record the meeting, which had been promised as a matter of transparency. As we were a small group the acoustics of the room were poor and the recording I attempted to make was a failure. All in all not a promising beginning.
However, once again the ‘yet another’ new set of people dragged us into unwilling optimism. EDDC has joined with Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council to create a more efficient group of engineers to work on Coastal projects (South West Flood and Coastal). We now have a full time dedicated Engineer whose whole job is to get this Beach Management Scheme underway.
It was a long meeting and a great deal was said, so much in fact that it will appear on a separate page when I have copies of the slides they showed.
The members of the Sidmouth Community who were able to attend the meeting were from the Cliff Road Action Group, the SVA, the VGS, the Beach Ramp group, Tony Burch was there as an independent expert who worked on the BMP at Sidmouth before he retired and who still takes a keen interest. The others who attended were there in an official capacity for STC or EDDC, The Environment Agency, and South West Flood and Coastal
There should be a ‘longer version’ of this report forthcoming.
