Marine conservation strategy planning

Tender description

Four second-generation Shoreline Management Plans (SMPs) were developed between 2006 and 2012 for the coastline of Wales (including cross border locations with England) in accordance with Defra guidance of 2006. These documents are owned by four respective coastal groups, adopted by each local authority and received Welsh Government Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Branch (WG) approval in late 2014. This contract is required following the instruction from WG in their FCERM remit letter to Natural Resources Wales (NRW) of June 2020 to ‘Liaise with the Environment Agency and lead on extending the Shoreline Management Plan (SMP) portal and refresh to all four Welsh SMP areas’. As in England, this contract is not a request to, nor a commitment to, undertake a third edition of SMPs but to produce an evidence-based review of SMP implementation to date. The need to deliver this Shoreline Management Plan (SMP) Refresh purchase is documented within Welsh Government’s (WG) Flood and Coastal Erosions Risk Management (FCERM) remit letter to NRW for the current financial year of 2020/2021. Likewise, this purchase is also noted in paragraph 190 of WG’s revised National FCERM Strategy for Wales published on Tuesday 20 October 2020. Work Package 1 comprises the production of a stand-alone Supplementary Guidance Document on SMPs in MS Word and PDF form for Wales to sit alongside Defra’s original SMP Guidance of 2006 used in England and Wales. This will capture present evidence, policy and strategy changes etc since 2006 in Wales that bear direct relevance to coastal risk management and the onward implementation of SMPs in Wales. Work Package 2 comprises the production of technical ‘Health Check’ reports for each of the four SMPs in Wales. Production will require consultation with Coastal Groups (on which NRW are represented) who are owners and responsible for implementation of the SMPs (their policies and associated action plans) and serve to capture what has and hasn’t worked well to date since SMP publication, what could be done to improve future implementation and the creation of recommended next steps for the short and long-term.