Foulness Island passing of the Ministry of Defence Act 1946 and the subsequent rationalisation of five agencies in 1971, ownership of the island passed from the War Office to the Ministry of Defence. In 2003, a contract to manage the testing of munitions was awarded to the defence contractors QinetiQ, and they also control access to the island. In the 1850s, the South Essex Estuary and Reclamation Company proposed a grand scheme to reclaim around of land on the Essex coast, which would have included most of Foulness Sands and Maplin Sands. The civil engineer Sir John Rennie produced the plans, and
County of Fraser County of Fraser The County of Fraser is one of 322 counties (a cadastral division) of Queensland, Australia, in the Wide Bay–Burnett region, which consists Fraser Island and some satellite islands off its southwestern coast. It was established on 7 March 1901 under the "Land Act 1897", and borders County of March, which lies mainly on the Queensland mainland, but also includes Big Woody Island and other islands in the northern Great Sandy Strait. Fraser is divided into six parishes, listed as follows, from North to South: Some nearshore islands off the southern west coast and thus in the Great