Council should have saved our beach huts, owners insist

MORE than 20 beach huts reportedly worth around £25,000 are to be removed from a crumbling cliff top after the local council “did nothing” to prevent coastal erosion, according to their furious owners.

The structures and decking on which they sit were left dangling after subsidence caused by storms and heavy rainfall at Milford-on-sea, Hants, and will be demolished for safety reasons.

The council has closed a section of the cliff and terminated the licences, some of which cost nearly £1,000, of the affected huts.

But owners of the properties at Hordle Cliff have criticised the council’s “shoreline management plan” and its failure to help them.

Paul Major, 69, a lecturer at Brockenhurst College, lost his £25,000 hut to the sea two years after buying it. He represents Hordle Cliff owners in the New Forest Beach Hut Owner’s Association, which was founded in 1990.

He told Mailonline: “The sea wall further along the beach needs extending, or big boulders need to be positioned along the shore to break the waves as they come in. But the council is not interested.

“Nobody was aware of the council’s do-nothing policy, it wasn’t very well publicised. Everybody was blind to it.”

The huts have been a feature of the popular seaside spot near other historic landmarks, such as Tudor artillery fort Hurst Castle, for generations.

New Forest district council said it had “no statutory duty to deliver flood and coastal erosion risk management measures” and added that prosepective purchasers should “undertake their own due diligence before investing in any purchase”.