Unfair flood defence charges for some Eastbourne residents

I refer to the Pevensey Coastal Defence Ltd private sector entity.

It manages the coastal defence for nine kilometres from the one kilometre of Sovereign Harbour adjacent to Pevensey Bay to the west then the eight kilometres east all the way to Bexhill-on-Sea.

Its website purports that this is completely free to all homes and businesses it protects, included in our regular taxes.

It is free to all the 17,500+ homeowners of Pevensey Bay to Bexhill, but it is most definitely not free to the 4,000 or so homeowners of the privately owned (by The Wellcome Trust, which owns Premier Marinas) Sovereign Harbour.

In their unique (estate agents disguised, in defiance of The Code of Practice for Residential Estate Agents effective 1 October 2015) Sovereign Harbour residents are levied a 2020 annual estate rent charge of £263.55 per Sovereign Harbour residential unit in addition to their council taxes, irrespective of whether their flats or houses are worth £168,000 or moderately more (most) with a very few of £1.4 million.

Sovereign Harbour residents alone, via the Sovereign Harbour Trust, pay a significant amount of this as a flood defence charge to the Environment Agency, which in turn pays the Pevensey Coastal Defence Ltd. Nowhere else in the rest of Eastbourne or any other part of the UK or Europe or world is there a similarly priced annual estate rent charge with its flood charge surcharge.

We, the 4,000 or so residents of Sovereign Harbour object strongly to ourselves alone having to pay this while the 17,500 plus residents, all constituents of Huw Merriman MP, in Pevensey Bay to Bexhill, in the very same flood defence zone, pay nothing.