Severn estuary barrage plan dropped

The Government?s decision to drop plans to build a 10-mile barrage across the Severn estuary to generate ??green?? electricity from tides has been welcomed by wildfowlers and landowners.

Haydn Jones of the Gloucestershire Wildfowlers Association said: ?The barrage risked creating one environmental disaster to create another. They would have had to dig up half the Mendips for the concrete and the estuary?s wetlands would have been reduced to a muddy lake. The Severn has the whole range of wildfowl and every conservation designation. The estuaries are covered and exposed twice a day; you can?t replace them by digging a few ponds.?

CLA deputy president Harry Cotterell said: ?There were huge unresolved problems with the plan, not least the need it would have created to flood thousands of hectares of good coastal land to provide compensatory habitat.?