More Is Not Necessarily Better – Says Coastal Access Forum

Quality is more important than quantity – that's the message this Easter from an influential body set up to examine the issue of public access to the coast.

Freddie de Lisle, chairman of the Coastal Access Forum, which represents a wide range of coastal businesses, organisations and individuals, says that the Government needs to have a better understanding of how its proposals to extend a statutory right of access around the English coast will impact on a whole raft of coastal based businesses.

"Our concern is that, by concentrating on providing more access, the government will not achieve its manifesto commitment to improve coastal access. Increasing the amount of access available is easy to measure, improving the access experience on the majority of the coast where access already exists – and where established businesses operate - is more difficult to achieve and rather more difficult to measure."

The Coastal Access Forums says that congestion - free roads, good public transport to and along the coast, car parking and modern, well maintained, facilities are the things that would actually encourage more people to the coast – and that the current Government proposals will deliver none of these.

"Increasing access in areas which do not have any visitor pressure is not really providing any improvement. Taking a right of access over land occupied by a huge range of existing coastal businesses is actually just providing a bit more access on a shoestring - to the possible detriment of those businesses," he said.

Mr. de Lisle said there was a real danger that the government had under estimated the cost of the Natural England proposal and that it had overlooked the very real impacts on existing businesses – including tourism.

"Defra and Natural England should have ensured that the business community was a vital part of the consultation on coastal access and to date, it has not been - this needs to be remedied both before and during the legislative process. We are concerned that if this proves to be one more under-funded scheme it can only lead to existing resources being spread even more thinly," he said.