Statement by Geoff Holmes, Lymington Harbour ... Annual Meeting notes 2013.docx 21/11/2013 at 10:16 1 of 27 Statement by Geoff Holmes, Lymington Harbour Commissioner To Lymington Harbour

LHC Annual Meeting notes 2013.docx 21/11/2013 at 10:16 1 of 27

Statement by Geoff Holmes, Lymington Harbour Commissioner

To Lymington Harbour stakeholders.

I’m going to be talking about the work of Lymington Harbour Commissioners: who we are, whatwe’re up to, some financial information, how we are governed and what we’re going to be doingin the future.

Lymington is a Trust Port and trust ports are independent statutory bodies, each governed byunique, local legislation and controlled by an independent board. There are no shareholders orowners. Any surplus is ploughed back into the port for the benefit of stakeholders who arebroadly the port’s users and the community.

The word ‘duty’ turns up a lot by in the running of a Trust Port. In this context, it means obligationsplaced on the Harbour Commissioners by the - snappy title - Pier and Harbour Order (Lymington)Confirmation Act 1951, which gets amended from time to time by one of the several HarbourRevision Orders that have taken place to update the regulations to meet changing needs.

I’ll be coming back to them later.

We have 3 main duties.

The Open Port duty requires us to keep the port open to all vessels. It goes with our other twomain duties of safety – our paramount duty - and ensuring ‘fitness for purpose’.

Harbour Protection, which I’m going to talk about next, arises from the ‘fitness for purpose’requirement: we must act to ensure that the Harbour will continue to be available to its users - andit won’t be, if we fail to act in time.

The next 5 slides come from the Channel Coast Observatory at Southampton University which ispartly funded by NFDC.


This next slide shows the Solent wide marsh loss according to the Channel Coast Observatory.

It covers the principal estuaries of the Western Solent and tells a pretty consistent story in each.

At Hurst, 18 hectares or 33% of marsh has been lost over 33 years.

!4


In Keyhaven and Pennington, 38 hectares equivalent to 46% has been lost over the same period.

Lymington has lost 58% of its marsh at a slightly lower annual rate of loss than Keyhaven andPennington at 1.1 hectares a year over 55 years.

The same pattern repeats in Pitts Deep, Beaulieu and Calshot.

This next picture of theouter Harbour shows therates of retreat at variousplaces in meters per year.

As you can see, the ratesalong the inward facingshores are about a half toone metre a year.

Out on the Solent facingedges the rates of retreatare between 3 and 5 metresa year, showing the effect ofmuch more exposure towave energy.

We can get a dramaticappreciation of the forecastchanges from these nexttwo slides.

This shows where we are today: the green areas represent marsh where it provides waveattenuation.


and this shows the Channel Coast Observatory projections for about 2040. It’s all but gone.

I guess your first question after seeing this is - and mine certainly was - why?

I have a paper by Andy Colenutt, a research engineer with the Channel Coast Observatory.

My understanding of the science is on shaky ground and if anyone wants a copy of the paper I’dbe happy to supply it.


The causes he sets out are increased wave action, lack of sediment supply, waterlogging whichI guess is coupled with sea level rise, dieback of the spartina grass as part of its natural life cycleand the effect of tidal currents.

Whatever the causes, there’s no doubt about the fact of marsh loss and the certainty of theeventual complete loss of the harbour protection provided by the marshes and with that goes theHarbour itself.

So, what are we doing about it.

Let’s do a bit of history first.

In 1989 the then Harbour Master, Alan Coster, observed that conditions on the Fortuna pontoonwere becoming untenable. The wave screens were built to deal with the increasing wave energythat passed over the thinning marsh to break up the fetch that was growing in Horn Reach andShort Reach, and cured the immediate problem. However, the wave screens on their own are nobetter than a quick fix and have needed repair from time to time after strong south easterlies.

Following that, a number of options were looked at for ‘soft engineering’ solutions. The remainsof the fibre roll trial on the east side of the river in Short Reach are still visible today, but it was nota success.

The idea was that it would protect the edge of the marsh from wave action but it seemed to havethe opposite effect of trapping wave energy between it and the marsh. The rolls soon sank intothe mud, where they remain. The primary lesson was that where low cost solutions needengineering to make them work, they cease to be low cost.

LHC also tried replanting Spartina grass but that didn’t work either. The plants soon died: this hasbeen a common experience, that if marsh vegetation is dying it is new silt that is needed not newplants.

Natural England - formerly English Nature - initially opposed intervention on the marsh, in favourof letting natural processes eradicate the saltmarsh. The lack of active management to the saltmarsh was considered by Natural England to be key to its value as a habitat.

As a result progress stagnated.

In 2005, LHC began charging all River users an additional harbour due - the Harbour ProtectionLevy - to save for future expenditure on Harbour Protection. The Levy tops up LHC’s retainedprofits to provide the cash required evenly over the forecast remaining life of the marshes.

In 2006, LHC and its advisers began to sense a change in attitude from Natural England ands webegan the long process of obtaining the required consents. This was probably driven by theHabitats Directive from Europe. If it was important to provide compensatory habitats, the “nointervention” argument ceased to be valid. The response was one of developing the best optionfor nature conservation and harbour users. Natural England appeared to accept that thoughvaluable habitats were doomed, here was an opportunity to extend their life or increase their value.

We finally got consent to the breakwater project in 2008.


In 2010, using a short term loan from Yacht Havens Ltd, we constructed the Phase 1 breakwaterat a cost of about £1.4 million. That loan has now been paid off and we are preparing to constructthe Phase 2 breakwater in the next year or two.

Phase 1 was about 100 m long. Phase 2 will be 170 m long and it’s ironic that right now, we’reevaluating tenders for phase 2 so it would be wrong of me to mention any figures tonight.

We hope to fund that through a Treasury loan facilitated by NFDC, at no cost to local tax payersat a low fixed rate of interest available to government institutions.

These two breakwaters provide essential overlap at the entrance to shelter the harbour for aminimum of a further 10 - 12 years and rock is the only cost effective way to make good theprotection already lost.

You might be interested to see how the breakwaters are built: it’s a bit more than a pile of rocks.

Sheet piles are driven into the mud to form a box under the footprint of where the rock is to go anda geotextile membrane is laid over the top of the box extending a bit out on the side.


This piling box greatly reduces settlement and the overall amount of rock needed for a givenheight and rock isn’t cheap.

LHC considered three options as to where to put a breakwater, by then identified as the only wayto achieve certainty of effectiveness.

First: an outer line along the Solent edge of the saltmarsh.

Second: an inner breakwater on the line of the existing wave screens and third, the present lineof breakwaters.

The outer line was rejected as just too expensive and the inner line did not provide an overlap toprotect the waters behind it without compromise to the navigation channel.

This is where the breakwaters would go, assuming that the marsh loss follows predictions.

As you can see, phase 1 is on the port hand and phase 2 is on the starboard hand. Phases 3 and4 take the breakwater to close to the corner of the Normandy sea wall and 5 & 6 continue phase2 over towards Lisle Court.


Here’s what the Channel Coast Observatory predicts will be the effect when all the breakwaterphases are in place.


As you can see, they provide shelter for at least some intertidal mud and grass and have a netoverall positive effect on the marshes in the long term compared to what would have happenedwithout them.

Natural England won’t let us dump rock on viable marsh grass at any time, so even if we had themoney, we couldn’t build the whole scheme today.

Dumping rock on mud, once the marsh grass has gone, has a short term though relatively smalladverse environmental impact and to offset that, Natural England required us to do some habitatcreation through pumping mud on to the marsh.


Though this recharge scheme as it is called was required to comply with UK Habitats legislation,it has provided valuable lessons in techniques for marsh regeneration.

The habitat creation work was done over the last two winters and was jointly funded by the CrownEstate and Yacht Havens Ltd for which we are very grateful.

We are delighted that the habitat creation work and the whole of our Harbour Protectionprogramme has been recognised by the Crown Estate who gave us their Coastal Business Awardfor 2013.

The award citations recognise two main achievements:

work to regenerate the significant intertidal saltmarsh habitats in the area, as part of its longerterm plans to safeguard the future of Lymington Harbour.

And

reflects LHC’s extensive engagement with the local community in developing its plans

That second part of the award citation refers to the way in which community support made adifference in the lead up to consent being given for the Phase 1 and 2 breakwaters in 2009.

Over a thousand letters were written to the Regulators expressing support for the project as aresult of presentations made by my predecessor, Peter Griffiths, at the yacht clubs and elsewhere.

I’ll just spend a bit of time outlining the LHC recharge scheme.

The site chosen was just outside the Yacht Haven.


A cutter suction dredger between the most southerly pontoon and the wave barrier pumped mudto the recharge site where it was held in a discharge pen before overflowing into the adjacentcreaks

In the creeks, structures retarded the flow to help the mud settle and consolidate.

The discharge pen helped prevent a ‘scour hole’ developing at the pipe exit.

These structures were built with a combination of timber stakes, coir matting and hurdles.


Here’s the cutter suction dredger and here’s the material being pumped into the discharge pen:as you can see, it’s pretty liquid at this stage.

Here’s a series of before and after shots showing the retaining structures at work.


Here’s a couple of pictures taken some months after the recharge showing that a considerablequantity of mud – over 1,000 cubic metres - is being retained and colonised by grasses and it’sgood that interest is being shown by feeding sea birds.

The LHC recharge scheme is very similar to a larger scheme being done by Wightlink at theBoiler Marsh site at the eastern end of Pylewell outlined in yellow over at the top right.


This work was required by the Section 106 agreement that set out the conditions Wightlink hadto meet to achieve planning consent at the Ferry Public Enquiry.

This picture shows the location and comparative scale to the LHC scheme shown at the top leftin purple.

I’ll finish this section by looking at our future plans for Harbour Protection.

Valuable as the lessons are from the recharge projects, dumping mud in this way is veryexpensive. The LHC scheme cost £125K which is about 5 times as expensive as dumping at sea.

Because of the distances and double handling involved with the Wightlink scheme, the costs areeven higher at approximately 13 times the cost of disposal at sea. Importantly, this technique canonly be effective away from the seaward edge of the marsh where there is no wave energy.

We’ve been working for some time now to see how to scale up the reuse of dredged mud in anaffordable way.


Subject to consents, we begin a three year trial this winter in which barge loads of mud will bedumped in creeks and channels on the outer edge of the marsh.

If this works, we can potentially use a substantial part of our dredge mud, avoiding the longer tripout to the usual dump area beyond Hurst but more importantly, perhaps delaying or evenarresting the erosion of the outer edge of the marsh.

The great prize here is to delay or just possibly avoid the necessity of further breakwaters butthat’s asking a lot. We shall see.

I’m sure you’ve all seen this fine craft which is ideally suited to the job of taking dredge mud outat about high water, getting as high up in the tidal frame as it can, perhaps even going aground abit.

Doors along the bottom of the barge open, the contents drop out and the barge backs away,lighter by a 100 tons or so.

This slide shows the dump area just to seaward of the Wightlink recharge area off Boiler Marsh.


You can see for reference the approximate size of a barge and the initial area where the mud willbe dropped as tight up to the top of the bay as possible.

Last month, LHC ran an expert technical workshop aimed at looking for other options for HarbourProtection though rock remains the ‘default’ option if we find nothing better. Weinvited leading scientists and engineers with experience in coastal engineering and with localknowledge. Presentations were given by Norman Cox from LHC’s engineering advisors Black& Veatch, Professors Andy Bradbury and Carl Amos of Southampton University, Dr Colin Scottfrom marine consultants ABPmer and Stephen Akester, local resident and marine consultant.

Andy Bradbury, who’s also on the Lymington Harbour Advisory Group, gave us his updatedprojections for the way the marsh is retreating, confirming that the original projections still holdtrue about the more aggressive marsh loss on the outer edges.

Professor Amos presented his own work and that of post graduate research students in hisDepartment. Perhaps the most striking finding from their work is that tides on the leading edgesof the marsh are ‘progressive’, not ‘standing’.

This slide is a bit technical to say the least but its message is not that hard to take in.


The diagram on the right shows depth of water on the vertical axis and tide rate along thehorizontal. Chart datum is half way up the vertical axis and zero tide flow is half way along thehorizontal axis.

With a standing tide, the flow rate reverses at or close to low and high water but with a progressivetide, the flow rate reverses at some point away from high and low water.

The significance for the marsh is that sediment can only settle out at the right level for saltmarshto colonise or be replenished when a low current speed coincides with high water. Unfortunatelythis is not the case along the leading edge of the marsh and therefore the erosive effects of thewave and tides are not being offset by new sediment depositing.

The presentations were discussed by an audience of technical experts assembled to give us thebenefit of their experience and there was a wide ranging debate which LHC will be taking time toreflect on.

The bodies represented were the Crown Estate, Natural England, the Deben Estuary partnership,Lymington Yacht Haven, the Marine Management Organisation, The Lymington Harbour Advisorygroup, the Lymington Society and five Harbour Commissioners.

Last year, our overall income was about £1.3 million, a little up on the previous year.


That’s made up of Commercial Income, harbour dues and the harbour protection levy.

I said earlier that the levy is there to top up our retained earnings so that over the 30 or so yearsit will take to build the breakwaters as the marsh recedes, we have enough cash to pay for thework, with loans to smooth out the peak demand for cash in construction years.

Those of you lucky enough to be around at the end of that time will want to remind the thenHarbour Commissioners to stop asking for the levy and to get back to normal, whatever that is bythen. The levy has been kept separate from Harbour Dues as a whole to make that possible andtransparent.

We can break that Commercial Income down again in this way.


70% or so from residents, 14% from visitors, 12% from sublets and the rest is mainly the slipway.

Sublets are interesting. Until 3 or 4 years ago, we didn’t do much in the way of sublets, or togive them their full title: seasonal sublets.

These are predominantly annual berths which are vacated for a period of time by the mooringholder and which are let out on a month by month basis. Analysis showed that visitor berths werebeing under utilised so following consultation in our strategic planning process, a smallpercentage of visitor berths have been given over to seasonal sublets. You may ask why notconvert them to permanent berths and there are two reasons. Firstly over the winter months weneed these berths to provide temporary accommodation while other mooring areas are beingdredged. Secondly, it will allow us to adjust the number of moorings available to visitors shouldnumbers grow.

Sublets have proved a valuable extra source of income and are widely used by people on theresidents waiting list.

Back to the numbers: here’s the income and expenditure statement for last year.


As you can see, we made a healthy surplus after transfers to various reserves and paying off thePhase 1 breakwater loan.

The wave screen reserve is a provision for repairs to the wave screens.

It’s already been called on as a result of damage in south easterly strong winds and they continueto be at considerable risk of further damage until the overlap of protection provided by the Phases1 & 2 breakwaters is in place in a year or two.

On to Governance.

I said right at the start that trust ports are independent statutory bodies, governed by unique, locallegislation and controlled by an independent board.

The Board members – the Harbour Commissioners - have a duty to manage the port properly andthat’s what Governance is about. Lymington’s Act of Parliament has been revised fromtime to time by what are called Harbour Revision Orders or HROs. As we speak, we are in theprocess of another Harbour Revision Order, a big one, as HROs go.


This HRO is aimed at modernising our regulations and acquiring powers more suited to our dutiesthan they have been up till now.

There are two ways in which the HRO does that: first, it extends our ability to regulate to coverenvironmental matters, something that came to light during the ferry issue.

Up to now, while we are required by the Government’s Port Marine Safety Code to ‘have regard’for environmental matters, there is a hole in the existing drafting of our powers that prevents usdoing much to fulfill that duty.

This is put right in the HRO.

The second change in LHC’s powers through the HRO is to be able to issue what are calledGeneral Directions. In effect, a General Direction is a byelaw: it applies to everyone. Up till nowLymington, like most other ports has relied on Byelaws to provide the rules of the roadsupplemented by the Harbour Master’s more limited Special Direction powers which can only beused to deal with a specific issue at a specific time.

Unfortunately if circumstances change and there is a need to change the rules in order to fulfillLHC’s safety duty or environmental obligations in a timely manner, the process to obtain a newByelaw through the DfT and Parliament is simply not working, taking up to ten years in somecases.

General Directions are, for us, a way to keep our regulations fit for purpose and suited to changingcircumstances. The process of making a General Direction - in effect a new byelaw - involves anew local consultation and arbitration process that ports will increasingly be using.

This arbitration process is set out in a code linked to the recently enacted Marine Bill has beenagreed at a national level between the Department for Transport, the British Ports Associationtrade body and the RYA. The code allows permanent General Directions to be made or revokedwithin about six months.

We took the HRO consultation slowly, recognising that there were many people especially inleisure sailing at local and national levels, who are rightly concerned about Harbour Authoritiestaking more powers. We discussed the HRO and the new bye laws it will implement with theHarbour Advisory Group and with important stakeholders such as the RYA, the two yacht clubshere and Wightlink. As a result, we resolved many issues that could have led to anunnecessary and expensive public enquiry.

The HRO is now fully agreed with the statutory and important local consultees and awaits formalconfirmation by Parliament.

With these new powers, we can issue directions to vessels on safety and environmental groundsand we will have new powers to exclude any vessel larger than the current W Class ferries shouldthis prove necessary on safety or environmental grounds.

I mentioned the Department For Transport’s Port Marine Safety Code a moment ago: it’s a codeby which Harbours should manage safety. While it doesn’t carry the force of law, harbours wouldbe very unwise to stray too far from it.


One of the PMSC requirements is that we conduct an annual audit of our safety systemssupervised by an independent external auditor which we do every year and publish the result ofthe audit on our web site. The Port Marine Safety Code is complemented by another DfTguideline document called ‘Modernising Trust Ports’ now in its second edition.

MTP2, as it is known, sets out standards by which Trust Ports such as Lymington should begoverned and how they should conduct their business with special emphasis on consultation,transparency and accountability to stakeholders which we do our best to live up to.

Both the Port Marine Safety Code and Modernising Trust Ports are available for download fromDfT’s web site

MTP2 also sets out how a Trust Port should select and appoint its Commissioners, who serve a3 year term extendable once to a second term except for the chairman, who may serve a 3rd term.

We have 9 independent volunteer Commissioners appointed on merit and the full time HarbourMaster and Chief Executive who is also a Commissioner.

10 Commissioners is a pretty standard number for the size of the board: too many makes forunwieldy debate and too few makes it hard to bring to the table all the skills required.

Our appointment process is fully in line with MTP2: we advertise vacancies in the local paper, ourappointment panel consists of two Commissioners, an independent person and the Chairman ofthe Harbour Advisory Group - I’ll come on to them shortly.

We now publish brief biographies and photographs of the Commissioners on our web site alongwith the dates at which their term or terms began.If any of you has ambitions in that direction, youcan tell when and what kind of vacancies should occur by taking a look at the web site.

Here’s a list of the present Commissioners: I won’t read it out but it’s on the LHC web site.


As you can see, each Commissioner has a general area of competence they bring to the boardand they cover the broad areas required of a Trust Port: finance, general business skills, IT,personnel, port operations and safety.

In addition, we have a number of portfolio sub-committees which meet from time to time as theirbusiness requires.


As you might imagine, the Finance Sub-Committee is responsible for the management andstatutory accounts, audit and budgeting,

The Personnel Committee advises the board on pay and related matters, the Moorings Sub-Committee manages our stock of moorings and proposes changes to the tariffs, the veryimportant Safety Sub-Committee is responsible for overseeing the safety regime and keeps aclose eye on all incidents in the River.

Business Development is a new group which we have formed to focus on getting more visitors tothe Harbour and other means of increasing LHC’s revenues.

The Crown Estate lease Sub-Committee has been busy this year as we are in the process ofconcluding a new lease with the Crown Estate which will extend our tenancy well beyond the termof the Phase 2 loan finance.

With any luck, the Crown will be generous to us in recognition of the way we’re preserving theirasset.

Finally, in this section on governance, I’ll cover the Harbour Advisory Group.

This group consists of representatives of each of the principle stakeholder interests groups in andaround the Harbour: recreational users, commercial boat owners, ferry operators, marinas, localpeople, local business, environmental interests and coast protection

It was set up in 2002, under LHC’s then new constitution, to represent the interests ofstakeholders and to give them a voice in Commissioners’ meetings.

The Chairman of the Harbour Advisory Group, John Bence, attends Commissioners’ meetingsbut does not have a vote.


In sitting in throughout the meeting, the Advisory Group provides oversight of LHC’s decisions anddebates and can draw attention when the line between what is done in open session and incommittee has been got wrong.

LHC always consults the Advisory Group before any major decisions concerning the Harbour aretaken. This particularly applied during the 2010/2011 Strategic Planning process and in thepreparation and consultation period of the Harbour Revision Order I mentionedearlier.Suggestions, comments or complaints are always welcomed by LHC and when they comevia the Advisory Group, they come with added weight and LHC treats all such matters seriouslyand fully.

Not quite last, but certainly never least, I’d like to talk a bit about safety.

Safety is LHC’s number one concern and it can never be taken too seriously.

We are fortunate in Lymington to have a long established and continuing good safety record withrare major incidents.

Here’s a table from the LHC web site which we update every year in our Annual Report.


As you can see the total number of safety incidents is stable or declining slightly. Speed continuesto be a worry and from time to time, we do prosecute. It’s also worth noting that ferry relatedincidents remain at their historic low level.

Finally (well, nearly finally) let’s look at how we’re getting on with the developments we committedto in our Strategic Plan in 2010, where we said we’d put power on Dan Bran and this is aconnection tower.


You may notice a couple of differences from the usual sort of equipment you see on most marinas.

We’ve gone for a bit of new technology here that will be more convenient for users and easy andcheap for LHC to administer.

Visitors and residents buy electricity in advance at the office and enter a PIN on the keypad shownhere or wave a card over the reader on the side to initiate their supply when they plug in.

There’s no risk of someone using somebody else’s power as the supply is disconnectedautomatically when you unplug and we send an email out to resident users whose power accountneeds topping up.

Resident berth holders will shortly have the option of managing their account and paying on lineas final system trials are about to take place.

We’ve put in new IT to help on-the-water sales and to collect information about our visitors so thatwe can contact them with offers, news and details of special events.

We’re getting on with changes at the Town Quay which in the first place, will be improvements tothe moorings of the commercial fishing fleet, making it easier to get on and off their berths andproviding pontoons between piles.

We have also started to investigate options for providing additional walk ashore pontoons at theTown Quay and will be publishing proposals for consultation on how and when this might be done.

We’re also working with Lymington & Pennington Town Council to promote local tourism and runevents in a joined up way between the Town and the Harbour.

Documents

Statement by Geoff Holmes, Lymington Harbour ... Annual Meeting notes 2013.docx 21/11/2013 at 10:16 1 of 27 Statement by Geoff Holmes, Lymington Harbour Commissioner To Lymington Harbour