Environmental organisations Thamesbank and Thames Blue Green Economy (TBGE) have accused the Port of London Authority (PLA) of seeking major new powers for itself to pursue wide scale commercialisation and development of the whole tidal River Thames without proper public consultation.
Environmental organisations Thamesbank and Thames Blue Green Economy (TBGE) have accused the Port of London Authority (PLA) of seeking major new powers for itself to pursue wide scale commercialisation and development of the whole tidal River Thames without proper public consultation.
Photo by Philip Reiner
The NGOs have written to Rt Hon Grant Shapps, MP Secretary of State for Transport warning that the PLA has failed to hold meaningful public participation on its draftHarbour Revision Order (HRO) which sees the PLA granted major new powers to itself, enabling it to facilitate and benefit from wide scale commercialisation and developmentof the whole 95 miles of the tidal Thames. This starts at Teddington Weir in west London, winds its way through the most heavily urbanised city in Europe, continues throughEssex and Kent where it finally joins the North Sea.
Thamesbank & TBGE are asking the Minister to scrap the current draft Harbour Revision Order and their Thames Vision 2050, and restart the consultation process to allowlawful public participation, in the ‘broad public interest’, to take place.
At the end of April this year (2022) the PLA concluded a two month consultation process on its draft Thames Vision 2050, saying “we will review all feedback, pick up withstakeholders where needed, and finalise Thames Vision 2050 for release in early summer.”
According to the NGOs, the PLA’s ambition to significantly enlarge its statutory jurisdiction from the navigation and safety in the Port of London has been “skilfully shrouded”from the public by what they describe as “the inane and misleading ‘Thames Vision’”.
The NGOs have called for the document to be renamed the ‘PLA Vision’, which was formulated without “adequate and effective public participation” and “reflects in no shapeor form, the diverse stakeholder interests and input into the formulation of it”, the letter says.
The letter states:
“ Instead, PLA’s true ambitions for itself, and the legal changes sought, are not mentioned in their ‘PLA Vision’ document but buried deep into the on-going arcane HROprocess, clearly inappropriate for transparency, accountability and effective public participation.”
The PLA ran an informal, pre-submission consultation on the draft HRO in 2019 and heard back from more than 50 stakeholders. The PLA said it had reviewed the feedbackand made adjustments “where appropriate”, before submitting its application for a Harbour Revision Order to the Marine Management Organisation (MMO) in April 2020.
In a statement which accompanied the submission, Robin Mortimer, chief executive of the PLA, said:
“I am very pleased that we have now been able to submit the HRO document to the MMO, amended following the informal consultation.
“The MMO now has opportunity to review the document and validate it, ahead of their formal consultation. We have requested that the MMO formal consultation does not startuntil the current coronavirus restrictions are lifted. In the meantime, everybody now has opportunity to review the document ahead of the formal MMO consultation starting.”
However, the NGOs say it appears that the MMO itself did not carry out an adequate and effective, inclusive and transparent formal public consultation process on the draft Order, which needed to engage widely with stakeholders of “broad public interest” in and across the tidal Thames, London & the Estuary, and to whom the PLA areaccountable.
On 18th August 2021 the PLA published a formal notice stating that the Port of London Authority had applied to the Marine Management Organisation for a Harbour RevisionOrder under section 14 of the Harbours Act 1964 which requires a statutory 42-day public consultation.
Due to the nature of the proposals of the application, a 56-day consultation period was agreed starting from that date.
The notice said:
“The MMO will pass to the applicant a copy of any objections and other representations received.
"If an objection is duly made and not withdrawn then the MMO may cause an inquiry to be held. Any objections duly made and not withdrawn and any representations dulymade will be considered before the MMO decides whether or not to make the order.”
Failure to carry out Strategic Environmental Assessment and enable thorough public consultation
In October 2021 Thamesbank wrote separately to the Marine Management Organisation setting out detailed objections to the Proposed Port of London Authority HarbourRevision Order, including:
“failure to conduct a Strategic Environmental Assessment for the HRO meant there was no understanding of an audit of the River’s marine facilities, slipways, drawdocks,steps and stairs. Thamesbank argue that without a thorough assessment of existing facilities and those that might be required in future it was not possible to draw up amaster plan/vision for the future or the likely scope of the level of investment needed.
failure to meet the requirements of the Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in EnvironmentalMatters. These include the right of everyone to receive environmental information held by public authorities and the right to participate in environmental decision-making."
The Convention states:
“Arrangements are to be made by public authorities to enable the public affected and environmental non-governmental organisations to comment on, for example, proposalsfor projects affecting the environment, or plans and programmes relating to the environment, these comments to be taken into due account in decision-making, and informationto be provided on the final decisions and the reasons for it.”
Thamesbank told the MMO:
“The present PLA management system is very effective in keeping the public and stakeholders well away from any actual decision making ….
They engage, and then do exactly what the PLA had intended to do in the first place. There appears to be no accountability or ways to address what is wrong with the wholeThames management at the moment, which is failing in many ways now.”
Thamesbank is calling for the PLA ‘Vision’ to be dropped until there is an agreed cross-section of community, NGOs, orgs, businesses and statutory bodies joined together asa partnership, as has been done in the non-tidal Thames ” … and as was created by the first Mayor of London for the tidal Thames in his first London Plan of 2004.
The PLA has not published any details of any objections or any other representations which were subsequently forwarded by the MMO.
Thamesbank and TBGE have now asked Grant Shapps to make a Harbour Revision Order directing the PLA to reconstitute its Management Board to properly reflect all Thames stakeholders. The NGOs are asking the Secretary of State for Transport to order that the PLA’s current ‘Thames Vision’ document and the draft Harbour Revision Order, be scrapped and started anew, to allow lawful public participation, in the ‘broad public interest’, to take place.
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