The House Article | MPs Urge Support For Homeowners Threatened By Coastal Erosion

Illustration by Tracy Worrall

11 min read6 min

Steps hang from the cliff leading to nowhere; fencing, too, curves into thin air while the skewed foundations of what was once a house slide down a sandy slope to the Suffolk sea.

This is Thorpeness, or what is left of it. The village is being eaten by the waves at a far faster rate than anyone expected and becoming emblematic of the increasing challenge of coastal erosion.

“On New Year’s Eve, we were dancing on those rocks in the garden,” says Roger Hawkins, the owner of a home apparently doomed to follow its neighbours, pointing to shoreline rubble. “The next morning, we were literally watching them fall into the sea.”

Hawkins and others at the water’s edge face not only losing their uninsurable homes but liability for the costs of demolition – and even a requirement that they first conduct a bat survey.

Thorpeness is a genteel sort of a place, notable for a boating lake, proximity to a nuclear power station, and a history of having been developed into an elite holiday resort full of mock Tudor houses. 

When local MP Jenny Riddell-Carpenter was first contacted by residents about coastal erosion, it was, she recalls, a relaxed conversation with everyone expecting five to 10 years to prepare for any damage.

Just eight months later, the local council is battling to save a second line of houses from falling into the sea. “The speed of it has been quite devastating,” Riddell-Carpenter says. In the last year, 28m of the cliff at Thorpeness has fallen away, forcing 10 properties – a mix of first and second homes – to be demolished in just four months. According to East Suffolk council (ESC), in some places as much as 16m of the shoreline has been lost in just the last four weeks.

Those working on the issue believe that the phenomenon should be a wake-up call for government. According to the Environment Agency, there are currently 3,500 homes at risk of coastal erosion across England in the period up to 2055. But that is not the full story. “The Environment Agency has told me the number will be much higher once there is a reassessment,” Riddell-Carpenter says. “People will need to be rehoused. We need to have an adaptive policy for rehousing these people. We need to prioritise that.”

Land loss due to climate change-accelerated coastal erosion is unavoidable

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Experts blame a combination of rising sea levels and increased storm frequency – both attributed to climate change. “Climate-change accelerated coastal erosion will continue for centuries, increasing the rate and extent of landscape change,” says Larissa Naylor, professor of geomorphology and environmental geography at the University of Glasgow.

“Land loss due to climate change-accelerated coastal erosion is unavoidable,” she adds. The East Coast of England has been particularly affected in recent years, with easterly winds battering the coast.

The House has visited Thorpeness on a grey and windy day towards the end of February. Picking our way down the shingle beach with Riddell-Carpenter and Karen Thomas, the strategic lead for coastal management adaptation for ESC, we pass a sign on the shore, warning visitors: “Stay away. Beach closed.”

“We’ve got 250-60 properties at erosion risk according to the current risk map,” Thomas says. While government funding has recently been made available for adaptive measures, such as managed retreat or rerouting roads deemed at risk, Thomas argues there is still a policy-sized gap for those at risk of erosion.

Currently, the council has a duty to rehouse those who have lost their main home and have no ability to buy or rent another. Thomas explains that the council currently has a map of the most at-risk homes, but there is currently an 18-month waiting list for social housing across the whole East Suffolk council area. 

While the pressure on social housing as a result of the erosion in Thorpeness has not been acute so far, the housing team is currently developing a new policy to give priority to those at very imminent erosion risk and embed planning for erosion. This would give the team the flexibility to be able to re-house people quickly if needed.

“Thorpeness is caught between the old way of doing the coast, which is you can keep putting stuff in front of things, and the new way of doing things, which is, if we can move people away from risk, that would be preferable. 

“In the middle, there are a few communities that do not benefit from either of those two options, and the best that we could do as a council was offer them demolition,” Thomas says.

“You’re still going to have to incentivise people to move or take it seriously, because no one’s going to move until they absolutely have to, because no one’s offering them anything.”

A Defra spokesperson told The House: “Coastal erosion is an extremely challenging impact from climate change, and we will always support coastal communities to adapt where the forces of nature make long-term defence impossible.

“This government is determined to make a difference and over the last two years more than £600m has been invested in protecting communities from sea and tidal flooding as well as coastal erosion.

“To help the communities that are most at risk, a £30m pilot scheme is underway to take further practical action including considering selective property purchases.”

One seemingly unfair aspect of the problem is how quickly your money can literally fall off a cliff. “There’s no compensation if you lose your home,” Riddell-Carpenter explains. Technically, homeowners actually need to cover the demolition of their home if it has been identified as high-risk. Thomas says the costs of demolition exceed the amount that can be claimed from Defra’s Coastal Assistance Grant (£6,000), therefore the majority of the bill must be footed by individuals or the council.

The House understands that the Environment Agency is looking at increasing the current figure after both Riddell-Carpenter and ESC raised concerns that the current compensation is inadequate.

For now, ESC has managed to fund the gap. But Thomas explains that Thorpeness is not an isolated incident. Just up the coast in Corton, Thomas says, there are a lot more houses at erosion risk. Thomas explains that council demolition costs are not sustainable for the number of homes at erosion risk, so it will be a challenge if there is no additional assistance from the government.

In Corton, Thomas and the council are already thinking about what the opportunities might be for new housing, or temporary housing. She also raises the possibility of renting the property out to those working on the nearby Sizewell site to make money before it is knocked down.

The costs for taking down a home extend beyond simple demolition. Utilities must be disconnected, and properties surveyed for asbestos, even bats. Thomas explains that the challenges have been exacerbated by the nearby construction work on a £40bn nuclear power plant at Sizewell C.

“There are challenges around trying to get someone to do a bat survey, it’s really difficult because there aren’t a lot of bat survey specialists, and they’re all tied up with Sizewell.”

The cost of demolition has also been pushed up by Sizewell – getting machinery to the site is more complicated because of the project. “We’ve just got the perfect storm of getting vehicles here, getting the right expertise in,” Thomas explains.

Riddell-Carpenter mentions that there is a question over whether those benefiting from the shoreline economically could have a role to play in contributing financially towards the council’s current work.

When The House visits Thorpeness, the council is trying to plan ahead, aiming for a natural cliff line with the second row of houses across the road remaining. Ultimately, the council wants to end up with a wide beach that will become a natural defence. With a good beach, Thomas explains, erosion will be close to one metre a year.

But it is just a temporary fix. “The houses on the other side of the road might have 15 to 30 years, but you might only have five, if we’re unable to manage this the way that we’d like to.”

After leaving the beach, The House visits resident Roger Hawkins’ home, after seeing it from the beach. Hawkins was one of those who contacted Riddell-Carpenter in May last year when the threat facing the homes on the front still seemed like a far-off worry.

Hawkins explains that the house, which he designed, is now 20 years old. It was originally a second home, but his wife has recently retired, and they had hoped to make it their permanent residence.

Hawkins is now spearheading several protective works to, as he puts it, “buy time” for both his property and around 24 others. In total, the works will cost £500,000, funded 50:50 with the council and privately. Hawkins hopes the move will buy two to five years, by which point the rate of erosion may have stabilised.

Under the current non-statutory Shoreline Management Plans, defences can be installed in a way that allows managed realignment of the coast, but cannot have any negative impact on communities elsewhere along the shoreline.

While Hawkins is facing a worst-case scenario, unable to insure the home he could lose, there is a sense that such resources and expertise would not be available to all communities.

After leaving Hawkins, The House walks down North End Avenue, where the houses on the frontline have been demolished and the second line on the other side of the road stands resolute, for now.

The avenue feels almost haunted by the ghosts of the now-demolished homes. Garden gates and walls remain standing, now marking the entrance to nothing but compact muddy earth, and the remnants of some garden paving.

On our return, Riddell-Carpenter says that she would like to see the government allow communities to be more agile in their response. “Have a pot of money, let the community access it, let us lead the adaptation,” she urges.

Our conversation pauses when the MP stops and points out two apparent “doom tourists” ignoring a “Road Closed” sign and heading down a forbidden path past demolition sites. “It’s really infuriating that people are travelling to this part of the country to have a look at what is going on. Let people have their dignity. Their home is being pulled down,” she bristles.

Thorpeness is the first in a long line of communities that are going to be affected

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Another policy hole, as Riddell-Carpenter sees it, is the fact that there is “nothing in law” about not declaring a property as at risk of coastal erosion when it is sold. “People have tried to sell their homes and not too long ago some were bought. That needs to change,” she says, adding that this is something she is pushing the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government on.

As The House says goodbye to Riddell-Carpenter, she reflects that Thorpeness “is the first in a long line of communities that are going to be affected” by coastal erosion.

“I think this has shone a light on [the fact that] we’re not getting away from climate change.

“The whole system needs to be relooked at, just to make sure, are we doing enough to support our communities? I would argue at the moment, we’re not. That’s because we weren’t expecting it to happen this fast. Where can we make lessons learned?”

Liberal Democrat MP Caroline Voaden is seeing a similar problem 352 miles away, in her constituency in South Devon. In the village of Torcross, intensifying storms and higher waves are buffeting the community. While there is an Environment Agency sea defence wall in place, Voaden says it “is clearly not enough to protect the homes now that the beach has eroded and dropped by several metres”.

Currently, around 20 homes are being affected, with several more directly behind those. “The houses are very badly damaged and it’s not clear whether people will be able to go back into them. The waves race up the wall and crash down on the top of the houses, blasting out windows and raining shingle down on the rooftops.”

Voaden says the incident raises difficult questions over who should be responsible. For some, their properties were bought when erosion “wasn’t even a conversation” and “for them to lose everything feels deeply unjust”. She says we need to start thinking seriously at a national government level about how coastal erosion is managed and who is responsible for what.

“The long term is still a big unknown, with climate change effects likely to intensify. But for now we need to bolster the defences we have, protect those homes and give people the time to make long-term decisions.”