Agenda item

Dominic Watkins from DWF legal on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) and David Walker from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), will be giving presentations updating the Board on the review of beach safety and the work of the National Water Safety forum respectively.

The Chair welcomed David Walker, Head of leisure safety policy at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) and Dominic Watkins from DWF Law LLP to the meeting.

David gave Board members an update on the work of the National Water Safety Forum (NWSF). He explained that the Forum was a network of over 100 expert members whose goal was to prevent accidental drowning. The Forum’s UK Drowning Prevention Strategy 2016-26 had a goal of reducing accidental fatalities by 50 per cent by 2026 and reducing risks amongst key groups and communities. He said that in 2018 there were 263 accidental deaths in water and 220 suicides and added that the trend in accidental deaths was steadily decreasing whereas suicides were on the increase.

David then explained how the Forum was intending to align their activities and work with the LGA to try and reduce the number of deaths in local areas. This included:

•       Coordinating a response to the Camber Sands tragedy

•       Using a new national shared incident system

•       Creating a single national set of water safety messages

•       Increasing focus on suicide prevention plans

•       Providing support for local authorities and partnerships to introduce a risk-based water safety strategy.

•       Disseminating best practice through the LGA’s water safety toolkit.

Dominic Watkins introduced his review of legal responsibilities for

water safety , a piece of work that he was commissioned to do by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA)  following the inquest into the deaths at Camber Sands in 2016.

The intention of the review was to provide clarity on who has legal responsibility for ensuring water safety on our coastline. As part of the review Dominic looked at existing legislation and spoke to key stakeholders including the RNLI, the MCA, the LGA, RoSPA, various coastal local authorities and members of the NWSF.

Whilst the findings of the review have not been published, Dominic outlined some of the key recommendations. Including that; in the short term guidance for managing beach safety should be updated and consolidated; in the medium term that a new legal duty should be created to ensure beach safety and duties of the HM Coastguard be and;  consideration to be given to centralisation of funding and/or delivery of beach lifeguarding duty.

Dominic said that in his view, rather than just clarifying existing guidance or extending local authority by-laws and existing legislation, the most effective way of improving beach safety would be to introduce a specific piece of new legislation. He then went on to describe what this could look like and stressed that it should be risk-based and not create disproportionate or unsustainable duties on authorities.

Following David and Dominic’s presentations, members raised the following points:

·       Where did tidal estuaries, with scheduled main rivers, fit into this? Dominic said that the same issues applied as to beaches but that this was outside the scope of his review.

·       It was suggested that there needed to be a two-pronged approach incorporating risk assessment and prevention, rather than just implementing reactive measures in the aftermath of serious incidents. In this context it was questioned how best to get local authority buy-in to the process.

·       Concern was raised about introducing new legislation which could result in a new claims culture and undermine individual social responsibility.

The Chair thanked David and Dominic for their presentations.

Decision

Board members noted the report and presentations.