Mar312017
Ms. Vanaja N. Sarna, IRS (C&CE:1980) presently holding the charge as Member (Administration), has been appointed as Chairman, Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC).
Mar312017
A new ground-breaking competition will allow flood defence projects around the country to apply for a share of £1 million to help protect even more homes and businesses, Environment Secretary Andrea Leadsom announced today.
This government funded competition is the first of its kind and will be open to innovative projects that plan to use landscape features such as ponds, banks, meanders, channels, and trees to store, drain or slow flood water.
Natural flood management already forms an important part of the government’s flood strategy and funding these new projects builds on £14m already committed to similar schemes across the country.
Environment Secretary Andrea Leadsom said:
I am delighted to offer more support for local communities looking to employ natural flood management measures to better protect their homes and businesses.
We now carefully look at flood risk across an entire catchment area from a river’s source to the sea – to make sure we have in place the best tailored mix of natural as well as concrete, engineered defences to better protect communities.
The Environment Secretary announced the new competition in Leicester, where a natural flood management scheme is already successfully in place reconnecting the floodplain with the river.
This scheme has not only reduced the flood risk to 1,200 properties, it has transformed public spaces along the river, with improved seating areas and cycle paths for the local community to enjoy. A total of 100 trees and 7,000 shrubs have been planted and wildlife such as grey heron and little egret are now regularly seen around the area.
The new natural flood management competition will give small-scale natural flood management projects around the country the opportunity to apply for funding, so they too can achieve similar results.
Environment Agency Chair, Emma Howard Boyd, said:
At places such as Leicester, Morpeth, and Medmerry, the Environment Agency has already shown that natural flood management can reduce flood risk alongside traditional flood defences and property resilience.
There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to natural flood management: it’s about using a range of measures, from creating ponds and woody dams to redirecting river channels, that work together to reduce flood risk. This competition is a great way to explore the different ways these approaches can benefit communities and the environment.
Details of the competition and how to apply are available here.
The deadline for competition entries is 19 May 2017 and the successful projects are expected to be announced by the end of June 2017.
Notes to editors:
Applications are to be submitted through existing Catchment Partnerships – bodies formed of local people, landowners and statutory bodies that work together to manage whole river catchments.
Upstream management of flooding is already a central theme in many areas, including the Cumbria and Calderdale Flood Action Plans.
The Government has already provided £4.1m to natural flood management demonstration projects in Holnicote (Somerset), Pickering (North Yorks) and Upper Derwent (Derbyshire).
Mar312017
UKIP Defence Spokesman Bill Etheridge has slammed a decision by politicians to force the Army to cut £10bn from the defence budget over the next decade calling it “irresponsible and illogical.”
Mr Etheridge said the decision to make the Army and the Navy “scrap it out” for funding was “bad government” and “all of our Armed Forces should be properly funded.”
“This failed policy of pushing the ‘soft power’ of foreign aid rather than hard power of a properly defended country is an irresponsible and illogical policy which has not worked so far and will continue to fail.
“Only this week there were rumours that our helicopter carrier HMS Ocean was being sold to Brazil: this is part of 3 Commando brigade which are one of our two brigades who can rapidly deploy to theatre. Are we only going to be left with one?
“Instead of hiding behind this bureaucratic shield that the government are meeting the NATO targets of 2% of GDP we need urgent investment in the military, which the Army’s own think tank concluded would be unable to withstand an attack from Russia for longer than an afternoon.
Mar312017
The statement put out today by the European Union setting out their guidelines for negotiating with the UK over the next two years is “bound to create more division amongst EU nations”, said Paul Nuttall, the UKIP Leader today.
“By wrapping the negotiations in a bureaucratic straitjacket all that they guarantee to do is highlight the already glaring differences of approach amongst the rump 27 nations in the bloc.”
“As we near March 2019 and the UK”s final days as a member, national politicians in national capitals will realise that the package approved by Brussels will not be in their own specific interests nor that of their citizens.
“Brussels wishes to play hardball with the reciprocal rights of individual citizens. How will Poland, for example, react when 1 million plus Poles live in the UK and only about 30,000 UK citizens live in Poland and their rights are threatened? Those million citizens vote, so do their friends and families. Polish people will expect their own Government to do a deal to protect their own citizens. The EU’s rigid approach will be seen as the problem, not the UK.
Mar312017
These 12 scientific reviews provide the background for the Caribbean Marine Climate Change Report Card 2017, one of the Commonwealth Marine Economies Programme’s specific outputs from its first year. The Caribbean Marine Climate Change Report Card 2017 is a regional evaluation of the impact of climate change on the marine environment in the Caribbean, which will provide vital evidence for further analysis of the resulting socio-economic issues.
The scientific reviews cover the following topics:
The views expressed in the review papers do not represent the Commonwealth Marine Economies Programme, individual partner organisations or the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.