Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

My Lords, I declare an interest as president of the British Trust for Ornithology and of a wildlife trust and as vice-president of the RSPB and BirdLife International. I was delighted to hear the Minister do the vision thing on the marine environment. It is a whole new country that we have out there and it has been only lightly explored. It is full of diverse landscapes, constructions, species and habitats and it is rich in natural resources. I invite your Lordships for a moment to walk, wade or swim with me through that landscape. Those weeds that you see are its forests; those shoals are its soils, mountains and hills; and those fish are its cows and sheep. Some of challenges that we face in the marine environment are very similar to those that we have worked on for considerably longer on the land. There are pressures on natural resources and pressures for development. There is the impact on the environment: the noble Lord, Lord Moran, talked about the impact on fish stocks, for example. We have a lot of experience in balancing these competing demands in the terrestrial environment. We need perhaps to add to the welcome and long-awaited framework that the Marine and Coastal Access Bill provides by drawing from some of our experience on the land and by taking that 60, 70, 80 years’ worth of rather sophisticated legislation and case law into the Bill. Let us think what some of the issues might be that could be better informed by thinking about what has happened on land. I welcome marine conservation zones. The previous legislation on protected areas was absolutely hopeless and resulted in only one marine nature reserve in 27 years. We need to make sure that the marine conservation zone programme mirrors some of the protected area provisions that we already have on land. We need identification and designation of a series of sites that will be ecologically coherent and representative of those areas that are distinctive and deserve protection. They need to be well managed and they need to have an adequate level of defence and protection. At the moment, the Bill has some deficiencies in that respect. For example, site designation on land is purely on the basis of evidence of nature conservation criteria. Then, once a site has been designated, it is possible to take a view about socio-economic aspects, about development and about the needs of people, bearing in mind that that piece of land has been identified on good scientific evidence as being in need of protection, so that the social and economic issues can take full account of that. If the designation process as it is suggested in the Bill has to take socio-economic considerations into account before any designation even takes place, we will almost by definition be damaging some of the most important sites at sea. The Bill provides for a very welcome process for designation, but it does not give us much of a timescale or programme. The appropriate authority should have a duty to produce a programme for this coherent network of sites and a pretty swift timescale. We have been hanging around for quite a long time and, as the noble Lord pointed out, the pressures for use of the sea as a resource and for the development of alternative energy sources are becoming ever more pressing. We need to move rather fast. There is no mention of a timescale in the Bill. There needs to be a swift timescale. The authority needs to publish a programme for reaching the point where that coherent network has been created. There also need to be absolute timescales for decisions being made by the appropriate authority, so that when the first six-year review comes up we are not sitting here with very few designations having been made. That was the sort of programme that we saw for the Natura 2000 series in terrestrial habitats, and it worked perfectly well. I say with some pride that I was chairing English Nature at the time when we did it. That could perfectly well happen in respect of marine conservation zones. I mentioned that sites should be properly managed. The statutory conservation agencies should be required to set conservation objectives right at the start as part of the designation process and to have a role in co-ordinating the management schemes for each of the marine conservation zones. It is not simply the process of excluding; there will be competing demands within these zones and they will need management. This is the sort of process that currently happens on land with Natura 2000 sites and SSSIs. I am sure that we could replicate it at sea. We also need clearer powers of prevention of damage or destruction of designated features in a marine conservation zone and proper enforcement measures. We need to spread the very welcome general enforcement power for impact on designated features to include reckless damage and disturbance, as it is often difficult, as has been proven on land, to prove intent in damage. We need a slightly broader statement of that general power. The marine conservation zones will be the equivalent of our protected areas on land—our sites of special scientific interest or our habitats regulations sites. They will be the jewels in the crown and the most important part of that underwater new country. Noble Lords know how concerned we are on the terrestrial habitat about the wider countryside—some of the common habitats, species and landscapes that we see across the countryside. We need a similar mechanism for looking at the non-designated areas in the marine environment. That is where the marine planning system needs to be specifically tasked. It needs to cover the whole marine environment to make sure that, as the pressure on marine resources increases, areas are identified that are suitable or unsuitable for particular activities. Conflict can therefore be reduced as far as possible, development can go ahead in the right places and conservation can happen in the right places, much as the planning system over the past 60 years has worked on the land. I am proud of the planning system in this country, which has produced one of the most democratic local institutions. I believe that there are ways in which we can replicate that in the marine environment. We need to ensure that the planning system looks at the whole marine environment so that those competing uses can be allocated space in ways that prevent conflict. Conflict costs time and money. It creates winners and losers, whereas we want everyone to win. Ministers can draw up a marine policy statement and marine plans. This should be a requirement, as it is on land, not a discretion. The statutory nature conservation agencies, including Natural England, should be asked not just to monitor the condition of the marine conservation zones but to monitor and report on the condition of the whole marine environment, much as they do on the whole of the natural environment on the land. We can learn from long experience in terrestrial conservation and bring that experience in to strengthen this Bill. Turning to my other major preoccupation, I was amazed that I did not get a single briefing from anybody banging on about access and nature conservation. I do not know what to draw from that. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, talked about survivors of the Countryside and Rights of Way Bill and I bear that badge with pride. There must be something cyclical about this. The last night of the CROW Bill was, if I remember, the US presidential election and here we are again. There must be a link between choosing US Presidents and access Bills in this country. I feel like the Ghost of Christmas Past because it appears that almost everybody has now been mollified—although I note that the noble Lord, Lord Moran, expressed concern about disturbance to wildlife—about the impact of coastal access provisions on wildlife. Reading the accompanying documents and particularly the Natural England draft scheme, we see strong assurances both in that scheme and in supporting legislation about appropriate assessment of habitats regulations sites, about proper assessment of the environmental impacts of proposals and about appropriate monitoring to ensure that damage is not taking place. I am still have concerned, however, because the scientific evidence is increasing that linear access through narrow corridors—such as there will be, even with the elbow-room, or spreading-room, provision—has a disproportionately disturbing impact on breeding and foraging birds. It may not be gross; it may not be that you will not see birds there ever again. It may mean, however, that regular disturbance will decrease their feeding and breeding success and that there will be a gradual decline over a period of years. We will have to watch like hawks the operation of the Natural England draft scheme to ensure that a proper baseline is established for some of these sensitive species and that the scheme is rigorously applied in assessing the environmental impacts. The understandable wish to get near-universal access to the coast around this country should not be at the expense of the long-term viability of some of those populations of species, particularly coastal wading birds, which are the most internationally distinctive feature of biodiversity in this country. So watch this space. I am not sure that much can be done in the Bill to strengthen that; I simply want to put on record my belief that careful implementation of the access provisions in the Bill will be important. Other issues will no doubt be mentioned by other speakers, such as the need to study the remit of the Marine Management Organisation and of the inshore fisheries and conservation authorities to ensure that stewardship of marine resources is absolutely at the heart of those bodies. We need to toughen the Bill to ensure that the statutory conservation bodies are statutory consultees across all the Bill’s provisions rather than just some of them. Stronger environmental safeguards and wider consultation are needed on all the marine licensing provisions. Other smaller issues will arise. As many noble Lords have said, and will no doubt repeat, this is a long-awaited, much worked-over Bill. It is much better than it was initially but it can still be improved.