Sea life under threat from UK housing plan

By Karen Carstens

Date: 18/03/04

PLANS to cull vast swathes of the English Channel's seabed for material to build thousands of desperately needed new homes in the UK could wreak havoc on a rich marine ecosystem and breach an EU habitat protection law, environmentalists and fishermen have warned.

Although Downing Street has yet to give the dredging project the green light, it has all but been approved by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, according to sources, with the government standing to make tens of millions of pounds in royalties.

It would involve the mining of nearly 200 million tonnes of sand and gravel from a crucial nursery for fish called the Median Deep.

Also known as 'aggregates', they are the main ingredients for concrete, which will be needed in vast quantities for the 200,000 homes that Prescott plans to build in south-eastern England over the next two decades. Otherwise the UK will face a dire housing crisis in its fastest-growing region.

Around half of the aggregates used in London and the south-east now come from the seabed, a figure that is expected to grow with the building boom.

But existing dredging grounds off the East Anglian coast and in the Thames river are close to exhaustion.

So now a consortium of six dredging companies wants to exploit the Median Deep. They are seeking 15-year licences to extract up to 177 million tonnes of aggregates, across 130 square kilometres of seabed. Total reserves are around 250 million tonnes, studies have revealed.

Lisa Browning, marine conservation officer for the UK-based Wildlife Trust conservation network, warned that the life of the seabed would take decades to recover from the dredging and might never do so.

If it went ahead, moreover, the government risks being dragged before the European Court of Justice for breaching the EU habitats directive.

A spokesman for Prescott's office said a final decision had yet to be taken.

"We're looking at these applications to dredge, but we have not approved them yet," he said.

"We do work closely with DEFRA[the department for the environment, food and rural affairs] and are happy to take their recommendations into consideration."

The UK government will also require from every applicant a coastal and environmental assessment, he added.

"We are in a position where we are absolutely determined to deliver on the new homes, without wrecking the environment," the spokesman said.

Aggregate producers, meanwhile, have claimed that only very small areas will be dredged one at a time, making the impacts manageable, and point to research revealing that dredged areas do eventually recover.

Usually on conflicting sides of most arguments, environmentalists and fishermen, however, agree that not enough is known about the area to allow such a large-scale project and add that it is easier to dredge en masse underwater.

The sand and gravel blanketing the Median Deep, deposited by ancient rivers when Britain was joined to the European mainland, provide an important habitat for carnivorous anemones, sponges, sea squirts and coral-like-reefs, which are protected under EU law.

These in turn provide fertile spawning grounds for crabs, shrimps, scallops, cod, plaice, bass, sole and herring and are vital to maintaining fisheries frequented by both French and UK trawlers.

• A report published yesterday (17 March) stated that the UK could need up to 120,000 new affordable homes each year in order to serve current and future needs and to prevent a 'boom and bust' housing market.

Plans to dredge the English Channel for aggregates to be used in the UK construction industry could cause environmental damage and breach the European Union's Habitats Directive.