Every coastal council in England was meant to join a scheme to speed up planning for sea defences and harbour works by 2021. Five years on fewer than half have, and the government's current environment plan has dropped the target without saying so.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
In short. The coastal concordat for England, the government's framework for coordinating planning permission and marine licensing for coastal development, says in its own text that "the government's 25 Year Environment Plan includes a commitment for all local authorities with a coastal interest in England to be signed up to the coastal concordat by 2021" [2]. The page was last updated 19 October 2026, when two more councils joined [1]. That brings the total to 24 [3]. The Local Government Association's own Coastal Special Interest Group, the body that helped draft the concordat, says its membership runs to 57 councils covering 60% of England's coastline and 16 million people [4]. The government's current Environmental Improvement Plan, its flagship strategy for the natural environment, does not mention the concordat at all in 124 pages [5]. One documented mistake: four stars.
Picked from this week's GOV.UK publications feed: a routine-looking update to a decade-old planning document, verified live with no withdrawal notice, scoring on two criteria: the scale of population the concordat's own co-signatory says it covers, and a direct contradiction with the government's own current environmental strategy. This is a Tier 2 structured teardown: the concordat's own words, tested against its adopter list and the plan it claims to answer to.
A rulebook for the edge of the map
Coastal development is a regulatory headache by design. A seawall, a slipway or a harbour extension that crosses the intertidal zone can need both a marine licence from the Marine Management Organisation and planning permission from the local council, decided by different bodies on different timetables [2]. The coastal concordat, first agreed in 2013 and revised in December 2019, exists to fix that: a shared set of principles so applicants get "a first point of entry into the regulatory system" instead of navigating each regulator separately [2]. It was drafted by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, the Department for Transport, the Marine Management Organisation, the Environment Agency, Natural England and the Local Government Association's Coastal Special Interest Group, which represents coastal councils [2]. None of that is controversial. The document is explicit, though, that adopting it is optional: the LGA group "endorses the concordat and will recommend the principles to local authorities, while recognising that this is not a mandatory requirement" [2]. The question this document answers for itself, and the question the government has stopped answering, is what happens when a voluntary scheme with a universal target does not reach universal take-up.
The claim, tested
| The document's claim | What we found | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| "The government's 25 Year Environment Plan includes a commitment for all local authorities with a coastal interest in England to be signed up to the coastal concordat by 2021" (section 2.1, Background) [2] | The concordat's own adopter list, updated 19 October 2026 to add South Tyneside Council and Southend-on-Sea City Council, names 24 local authorities [1] [3]. The LGA Coastal Special Interest Group, the concordat's own co-signatory, states on its own site that its membership is 57 local authorities [4]. Measured against that figure, fewer than half of England's coastal councils have signed up, five years after the deadline the document still quotes as current | Not all. Not close to all |
| Section 6, "Review", of the same document: "The concordat will be periodically reviewed... to monitor the progress of this commitment" [2] | The only reviews on record happened in 2018 and 2019, both before the 2021 deadline arrived [2]. The update log since then records adopters joining one at a time, most recently this week, with no review of the commitment itself and no revised date [1] | The monitoring the document promises stopped before the thing it was meant to monitor was due |
| The commitment is credited to "the government's 25 Year Environment Plan", which the 2021 Environment Act required to be revised every five years as the Environmental Improvement Plan [2] | Direct text extraction of the current Environmental Improvement Plan 2025, presented to Parliament on 1 December 2025 under section 10(6) of the Environment Act 2021, found zero mentions of "concordat" across all 124 pages, including 19 pages that discuss coastal flooding, erosion and habitats [5]. The 2023 plan it replaced also never mentions it, across 262 pages [6] | A commitment the concordat still treats as live has been silent in the government's own strategy documents since at least 2023 |
Two more councils, five years late
The update that put this document in this week's GOV.UK feed reads, in full: "We've added South Tyneside Council and Southend-on-Sea City Council to the list of local authorities who are adopters of the coastal concordat" [1]. Read on its own, that is unremarkable progress. Read against the document's change history, it is the first addition since 23 June 2021, when the Council of the Isles of Scilly and Torbay Council joined [1]. For five years and four months, a scheme whose own text says it should have been universal by 2021 added nobody. Before that, the list grew steadily through 2019 and 2020: Boston, Cheshire West and Chester, Forest of Dean, Lancaster, Arun, Great Yarmouth, South Hams, West Devon [1]. The pattern across the full eleven years is of a document that keeps absorbing individual joiners without ever reconciling that drip-feed against the "all" it promised, or explaining to a reader why the other 33 councils in the LGA's own coastal group have not joined.
Credit where due
The government has not hidden any of this. The update log is public, dated and specific about which council joined when, which is exactly the kind of transparency a reader needs to check the arithmetic in this piece [1]. The concordat's five underlying principles, a single point of regulatory entry, better sign-posting, parallel assessments, are sound, uncontroversial fixes to a genuine coordination problem, and nothing in the document's substance has been found wrong here. For the 24 councils that have adopted it, there is no evidence the concordat fails to do what it says. The mistake is narrower than that: a document that still presents a national, time-bound commitment as current five years after missing it, backed by a review mechanism that has not operated since before the deadline, inside a policy area the government's own current environmental strategy no longer mentions.
Verdict
Four stars, from one documented mistake. The coastal concordat is not a failed policy in the sense of doing active harm; it is a document that has quietly stopped being accountable to the target that justified writing "coastal concordat" into the 25 Year Environment Plan in the first place. A reader who takes section 2.1 at face value would not know that the plan behind it has twice been rewritten since, and that the concordat's name does not appear in either rewrite.
The star score counts one documented mistake: the concordat's section 2.1 and section 6 present the 25 Year Environment Plan's 2021 commitment, for every local authority with a coastal interest in England to sign up, as current, when the adopter list stands at 24 against the LGA Coastal Special Interest Group's own 57-member base, the review mechanism meant to monitor that commitment last ran in 2019, and the commitment itself does not appear anywhere in the current Environmental Improvement Plan 2025 (124 pages) or its 2023 predecessor (262 pages), both checked directly by full-text extraction. One fall in the 1 to 3 band: four stars; the bands are on the ratings page. Checked directly against the concordat's main document, its adopter list, the LGA Coastal Special Interest Group's own membership page, and the full text of both Environmental Improvement Plans, fetched 20 October 2026. The document is tracked in the Daily Register; a revision will get a diff entry.
Sources
- A coastal concordat for England, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Department for Transport, Marine Management Organisation, Environment Agency and Natural England, published 11 November 2013, last updated 19 October 2026
- A coastal concordat for England (revised: December 2019), same publishers, December 2019
- Local authorities who are adopters of the coastal concordat (updated: October 2026), updated 19 October 2026
- About us, LGA Coastal Special Interest Group
- Environmental Improvement Plan 2025, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, presented to Parliament under section 10(6) of the Environment Act 2021, published 1 December 2025
- Environmental Improvement Plan 2023, Defra, published 31 January 2023