Romney Marsh Flood Risk: Cllr Tony Hills Warns Sea Defences Must Be Strengthened

Cllr Tony Hills speaks to The Shepway Vox Team about sea defences, flooding, warming waters, sewage, planning and why Romney Marsh must not be treated as somewhere that can simply be “let go”.

There are interviews about policy, and then there are interviews about survival.

When The Shepway Vox Team sat down with Cllr Tony Hills (pictured), district councillor for Romney Marsh Ward on Folkestone & Hythe District Council, the subject was not an abstract climate debate, nor the usual council-chamber fog of strategies, frameworks and laminated good intentions.

It was water.

Water from the sea. Water through shingle. Water in ditches, drains, sewers, fields and groundwater. Water that keeps Romney Marsh alive, and water that, if badly managed, could one day help take it away.

Hills has been warning about this for years. His first serious wake-up call came, he says, in 1998, when coastal strategy work brought home what could happen to the Marsh if the sea got in.

At the time, he says, “I wasn’t aware how serious it was.” That changed when he saw maps showing how water could overtop or pass through the coast, move through the ditches and lower ground, and gradually join up into larger flood cells.

For Hills, this is not theory. Romney Marsh is personal. He talks about childhood summers at Greatstone, fishing from the beach, the lighthouse being built, the power station appearing, and the old Dungeness fishing community before much of it disappeared.

Through the 1970s, he recalls, there were “about 30” wooden fishing boats working from the beach. Now, he says, there are only “three working boats”.

The Marsh, he says, is “my community”. Around 24,000 people live there. There are thousands of homes, businesses, roads, farms, churches, sewage works, water infrastructure and nationally important sites. The idea that this landscape is somehow expendable clearly angers him.

Romney Marsh is often called the fifth continent. Hills prefers another phrase.

“It’s a gift from the sea,” he says. “I always say it’s a gift I don’t want to give back.”

“Shingle is not a seawall”

One of Hills’ central points is brutally simple: people misunderstand what the coast actually is.

“Shingle is not a seawall,” he says. “It’s porous. Water comes through shingle. It comes under shingle.”

That does not mean shingle defences are pointless. Quite the opposite. Hills sees them as a crucial first line of protection. But they buy time. They are not magic. They are not concrete certainty. They are part of an engineered system that has to be understood, maintained and upgraded as the climate changes.

The existing defences, he says, were designed to a high standard for the conditions expected when they were built. But that is the problem. They were built for one climate, while the Marsh is now facing another.

He talks about sea-level rise, storm surges, groundwater and salinity. His fear is not only that waves come over the top. It is that water gets in, water cannot get out quickly enough, and salt water damages the very farming landscape that makes the Marsh what it is.

“The biggest challenge is groundwater,” he says. “As the sea goes up, the water level goes up, and salinity is our big nightmare.”

For Hills, that means the Marsh needs more than one defence. It needs a working water system fit for the century ahead.

Pumps, ditches and the “canary in the coal mine”

Asked what the single biggest investment Romney Marsh now needs, Hills first gives the most important answer: recognition.

“The single biggest investment,” he says, is “to recognise the problem.”

Then come the practical demands.

He wants proper planning for emergency and long-term water movement across the Marsh. He talks about 24-hour pumping, intermediate pumps, and widening and deepening the dyke system so water can be moved around more quickly.

“I want 24-hour pumping,” he says. “I want intermediate pumps across the Marsh, and I want to widen and deepen the dyke system.”

A scoping document, he says, has been prepared for the regional flood and coastal committee. Hills describes it as his “canary in the coal mine” — a plan that can be taken off the wall and put into action when the problem becomes impossible to ignore.

That phrase matters. Hills is not pretending the risk can be abolished. His argument is about resilience: reduce the damage, move the water, protect people, keep the Marsh functioning for as long as possible.

“We can’t prevent it,” he says. “We can only make it less worse.”

Praise for officers, frustration with government

Hills is not one of those politicians who lazily blames every public servant in sight. He is clear that the Environment Agency has good people.

“EA has got some really good officers,” he says.

But he is equally clear about the wider failure.

“They haven’t got the resource. They haven’t got the money.”

That is the repeating tension in his answers. The officers often understand the risk. The system does not move fast enough. The public only wakes up when water is already at the door. Government, in his view, is far too good at responding after disaster and far too poor at acting before it.

He also worries that local councils are now thinner than they were. District councils, he says, are expected to do more with less, while residents quite reasonably demand answers and solutions.

“You haven’t got the manpower,” he says. “We can’t do it.”

That is not a comforting sentence. But it is an honest one.

How do you keep pressure on a dry day?

Flooding is easy to discuss when the storm is on the news. It is harder when the sun is out, the beach looks calm, and the ditches look harmless.

Hills believes one answer is local involvement. He wants the flood-warden idea broadened into something more practical: water wardens who understand flooding, water quality, infrastructure and testing.

He talks about citizen science, regular testing and weekly logging of findings.

“It’s the weekly bit that is so important,” he says.

His point is not only technical. It is cultural. People have to feel that they are part of the defence of their own place. They have to understand what the ditches do, why the drains matter, where the water goes, and what happens if the system fails.

But he does not want to frighten people into despair.

“I don’t want to frighten people,” he says. “I want to inform people, give them strength.”

That may be the most useful line in the interview. Climate politics can collapse into doom. Hills is offering something more practical: don’t panic, but don’t pretend.

Fishing tells its own story

Hills’ climate argument is not only about sea walls. It is also about what is happening in the water.

Asked what local fishermen are telling him that official reports do not always capture, his answer is bleakly plain.

“Don’t catch any fish.”

Behind the bluntness is a deeper story. He talks about changing sea temperatures, food sources moving north, the loss of good cod seasons and the arrival of species once less common locally.

He says his son now catches mostly octopus. There is more squid. Bluefin tuna have returned because the bait fish have returned. But the old pattern has changed.

“We lost the last good cod season,” he says, putting it around 2016.

Official reports may measure change in tables and graphs. Fishermen see it in what comes up, and what no longer does.

Sewage, water quality and councils waiting too long

On sewage and water quality, Hills does not give a neat party-political answer. He talks about water privatisation, long-term underinvestment, weak control and the reality that clean water and sewage systems cost money.

But he also thinks local action matters.

He backs targeted testing and an evidence-led approach. He also makes clear that visibility matters. If agencies and companies will not move fast enough, residents and councillors need to gather evidence, press the issue and force it up the agenda.

His view is not simply that someone else should solve it. His view is that the Marsh and its coastline need people prepared to keep pushing, even when the system would rather look away.

Planning in flood-risk areas

New housing and development add another layer of pressure. More homes mean more surface water, more drainage demands and more people potentially living with flood risk.

Hills is plainly uneasy about development that does not properly build in resilience. He points out the contradiction of rules that restrict single-storey homes on the Marsh while people still live in caravans in flood-risk areas.

The wider issue, he says, is that councils face limits. Developers can appeal. Planning decisions are shaped by money, policy and risk. But his underlying point is clear: building on the Marsh cannot be treated like building on higher ground.

Homes in flood-risk areas need to be designed for the world that is coming, not the one people remember.

“I’m doing my bit”

Asked what he wants his legacy to be — stronger sea defences, cleaner water, better adaptation, or simply making sure Romney Marsh is still here for the next generation — Hills does not reach for a grand monument.

“I’m doing my bit to make sure Romney Marsh is here for the next generation,” he says.

Then comes the harder truth.

“That doesn’t mean I’m going to win.”

His aim has two parts. First, he wants to keep the Marsh physically defended for as long as possible. Second, he wants people to understand and accept the risk without surrendering to it.

There is something very Romney Marsh in that answer: stubborn, unsentimental, dryly funny, and not remotely interested in being written off by people in offices somewhere else.

Hills says he has generally tried to work with people rather than against them, though he admits he has fought when he felt he had to. He believes the coast cannot simply be forced into submission. It has to be understood.

“You can’t stop it,” he says. “You have to work with it.”

That may be the central message of the whole interview.

Romney Marsh is not just land behind a beach. It is an engineered, fragile, living system. Its future depends on sea defences, drainage, pumping, farming, planning, sewage infrastructure, public understanding and political courage.

On a dry day, that can all feel distant.

But the Marsh has never been defended by pretending the sea is not there.

The Shepway Vox Team

Dissent is NOT a Crime