£31 million spent on Bird Reserve in Somerset (1 Viewer)

Liddell-Grainger claimed a total of £166,109 in expenses, including for office, staffing and travelling costs, in 2007-2008.[10] Under revised regulations, in 2010-11 he claimed the reduced sum of £147,004 for expenses, the sixth highest of all MPs in that year.[11] Liddell-Grainger has registered his wife as a parliamentary assistant[12] and in 2010 included both his wife and his two eldest children on his list of staff, the only MP at the time to do so.[

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Swindon Addick said:

The local MP in question is Ian Liddell-Grainger. He seems to regard all spending on conservation as a disgraceful waste of taxpayer's money, and in general if you simply take his views on conservation (and flooding) and reverse them you won't go far wrong.

As I understand it, there are two separate projects going on at Steart, rather than one joint one. The port company are doing their works, which as you say are compensating for habitat lost in the port, and the Environment Agency are doing their scheme which is actually a flood protection scheme which has been designed to have environmental benefits, not a purely environmental scheme. The EA do that quite a lot, but Mr Liddell-Grainger isn't one to let the facts get in the way of a good rant, and won't be worried about that.

The irony that the main purpose of the scheme is to save the villages on the peninsula from flooding would be totally lost on him. He also seems incapable of grasping that dredging the rivers would not solve the current flooding (it might make a small difference if very well targeted) and that dredging willy-nilly would actually cause flooding downstream, where there are far more houses than the couple of dozen currently flooded.

Wikipedia says the EA project is due to cost about £20m. I suspect (but have no evidence) that the higher figure includes the port company's works.

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