Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

My Lords, I do not envy the Minister having to respond to this debate, because, as usual in your Lordships’ House, not only has a great deal of expertise been displayed, but also a great deal of personal commitment. I share that, because the sea is somewhere in my blood. I suspect that it is in the blood of many Members of this House. I learnt to swim and sail soon after I learnt to talk and walk: fortunately, it was a bit later. More significantly, I spent 14 years representing Cornish constituencies, which have some of the most dramatic, fruitful and admired coastlines in the United Kingdom. Visitors from all over Europe and further afield come to the south-west to look at our coastline. I am also a frequent and enthusiastic walker on the South West Coast Path, to which reference has been made this afternoon—some 630 miles of coastal path, which, unlike in many other parts of the country, is well established, and indicates the scope of what one is talking about when one refers to the coastline of the United Kingdom. My wife and I were among the first to take part in a charity walk last year organised by the excellent regional newspaper the Western Morning News, which demonstrated the success of the product of the National Trust’s Enterprise Neptune, which was significantly and enthusiastically endorsed in 1965 and has rolled out since. I mentioned that to make a serious point: the South West Coast Path has a great many informal arrangements that work admirably because the local community bought into them. The community own it and feels it is theirs. We all welcome this legislation, but it is important that we are careful not to impose a new statutory regime that discourages people from thinking that it is their coastal path. I shall return to the access issue later. The Bill seeks to create a managed balance between potentially conflicting interests: short term versus long term; human interests versus the habitat for other species; visitors versus residents. It is an attempt at managed compromise. Noble Lords have asked where the socioeconomic issues come in to it. We must not forget them because we are dealing with people as well as the natural habitat. Coastal communities, and not just those in the south-west, suffer considerable problems from a surfeit of second homes and ghost villages in winter. They are not in the Bill, but they are relevant to the issues raised by the noble Lord, Lord Glentoran. If local working families cannot afford to live near the coast, they cannot provide the RNLI volunteers, the coastguard or the sort of people we will look to for the new regimes to run the new discipline that we are looking forward to in the Bill of trying to marry together the interests of the economy and the environment. There have been many references to the CROW Act, but we need to learn from experience with other legislation; for example, the Commons Act and the newly enacted Planning Act. There are difficult issues, and the interrelationship between pieces of legislation is as important as the legislation itself. In that respect, I draw particular attention to the contribution made by the Joint Committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Greenway. It did an enormous amount of valuable work. I have been going through the 96 recommendations, ticking off those where the Government have responded in the Bill and those that have been referred to by noble Lords but have not yet been dealt with. That will be an important checklist. Part 1 is the MMO section. As many noble Lords have said, there is concern about what sustainable development means in terms of this critical responsibility of the MMO. What is its duty and who will decide if it is delivering within that concept? Who is going to make sure that the robust policies that the MMO is going to have to pursue are being properly fulfilled? Where is the parliamentary scrutiny? That was another point made by the Joint Committee. The contributions of a number of noble Lords on that issue were particularly significant, but the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, put his finger on the difficulty, the complexity and the interrelationship of all the species that operate in sensitive ways in the ecosystem of our coastline and our sea immediately off the coast. A difficult responsibility will be laid on the MMO, and I worry about the extent that we, as parliamentarians, will be able to monitor what it is doing, particularly during the transitional phase, to which reference was made by a number of noble Lords. The noble Lord, Lord Greenway, said that he is not clear whether the MMO is to be a champion that will campaign or whether that is a ministerial role. That is not clear at the moment, and I hope the Minister will come back to that. The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, suggested that there will be a need for expertise on renewable energy within the MMO. That is a significant issue, and when it is added on, we move on to other areas of concern to do with climate change. I always learn something in a debate in your Lordships' House—that was not always my experience at the other end of the building—and I was fascinated to hear of the debate in 1853 about the Gulf Stream referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Chesterton—I must get the right Lord Hunt. That debate may not have examined the issue that I, living down in the far wild west of the United Kingdom, worry about because I have been told that the Gulf Stream may reverse so that global warming will make it colder to live in Cornwall. That is extremely worrying. If that was dealt with in 1853, that was well ahead of our current science. Considerable concern has been expressed about the timescale for marine policy statements. One noble Lord suggested that the Minister previously said that he expects them within two years. That will be quite an achievement. What will the process of consultation and monitoring be if it is to be as speedy as that? Until it is there, it will be extremely difficult to see how the marine plan new developments will take place and how they will be compatible with and march alongside the terrestrial planning development schemes coming forward from planning authorities and the IPC. That has been a familiar cause for concern this afternoon. Several noble Lords, including the noble Duke, the Duke of Montrose, in relation to Scotland, the noble Lord, Lord Glentoran, in the case of Northern Ireland and my noble friend Lord Livsey in the case of Wales, mentioned that the interrelationship of marine policy statement development and the devolved organisations and Assemblies will be extremely difficult to achieve in that timeframe, let alone the interrelationship with the Republic of Ireland, as the noble Lord, Lord Glentoran, said. I regard marine conservation zones as most critical in this part of the Bill. I hope the Minister will be able to indicate a timescale. As I understand it, by 2012 we will have all sorts of international obligations within the European Union and beyond, and therefore we need to have in place a pretty substantial network of MCZs by then. Building in the national visual experience to which the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, referred and the subsidiarity, the local input, during that process will be extremely difficult to achieve. I note that the CPRE suggests that the existing criteria for MCZs need to take into account a wider concept of the seascape—its word—of areas of sea and contiguous coastline and assorted land and tidal features on grounds of natural beauty and cultural, geological or archaeological heritage. The point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, about the heritage was very fair on that because it is difficult to divorce those kinds of issues from the natural heritage. For example, the Jurassic Coast of Devon and Cornwall, the national parks and the world heritage sites all have a human element. Indeed, on the coastline of Cornwall, we still have some amazing relics of our great industrial revolution, which was long before the English one. The English were dancing about in woad when we were getting on with the business of developing tin mining. There will be issues that go beyond the present scope of the Bill, and I would like reassurance that they will be dealt with. Renewable energy has come up constantly in this debate. It is extremely topical. Wave hubs—there is a wave hub experiment taking place off the coast of Cornwall—the Severn barrage or the reef project, which may be much more advantageous from an environmental point of view as well as from an economic point of view, and major offshore wind farms are being suggested. I took very seriously the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty—I am sorry he is not in his place—about the difficulties that might come from Part 6, which deals with inshore fisheries and conservation districts and authorities. There will be a tricky relationship—I think the noble Lord described it as a jurisdiction problem—in that context. It will be extremely important to make sure that there is good input from local fishing communities. Having represented them in the past, they are not usually backward in coming forward with their views. There must be the right machinery to make sure that their input is taken seriously by the new IFCAs. Just in passing, it may have been the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, who said that she thought the enforcement provisions in Part 8 did not look as substantial as they should be. We will learn from other legislation, particularly from experience in other forms of conservation and environmental legislation, what can be effective. Certainly, the reference to ““intentional”” damage sounds to me a bit weak. She suggested, in common with Natural England, that the word ““reckless”” would be a more effective way on which to base enforcement. There must be experience there that we can take advantage of. On Part 9, we now reach the vital issue of coastal access. I have not heard repeated in the House this afternoon, the extremely important point made by the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee of the other place, "““We are uneasy that the Bill places so much emphasis on simply trusting Natural England to ‘get it right’””—" in terms of determining the alignment of the route and extent of spreading room—and that, "““The lack of a formal appeal process is a fundamental weakness of the Bill””." I know from my experience of that place that they will not let go on that point, so we might as well try to get it right at this end of the Bill before goes there. Otherwise, with a Government majority on that Select Committee, they will be determined that that point is not lost. I hope the Minister will take that on board. There will be important roles to play for local, elected representatives. Again, a number of noble Lords this afternoon have referred to the fact that there is expertise in our local authorities, particularly in the top tier ones. Cornwall is now going to be a unitary authority. There are going to be people there, not only in touch with local opinion on these issues, but with a lot of experience. If we just sweep that away and say that the quangos will do the work, the legislation will not work. It will not be bought into by the local communities that are most affected. How soon can we expect definitive maps of the coastal access issues to be defined and agreed? Will there be government funding? We know from our experience from the CROW Act, and before that from the ways in which local authorities were given responsibility for public rights of way and bridleways, that they had a very significant responsibility but not the funds to fulfil that responsibility. That, too, seems to be an extremely important issue. Maintaining the coastal footpaths, as we have discovered with the South West Coast Path, can be an expensive business and needs to be constantly reviewed. At the tail of his contribution, the noble Lord, Lord Greenway, was talking about the advantages and disadvantages of taking the marine section away from the coastal access section. There are advantages and disadvantages. I think we have got to live with the fact that they are together. We have got to get on with it. There is some real advantage in taking a comprehensive view of what is happening along our coastline, from both a human point of view and from the point of view of those other species with which we share it. That, in a way, is the logic for this combined Bill. That this House is ideally placed rigorously to scrutinise a Bill of this sort, has been referred to. The devil will be in the detail. My noble friend Lord Greaves made that point at the outset. I like to think not of the devil being so much in the detail, but of sea monsters, like those who used to grace the medieval charts. There may well be unexpected conflicts. There will be some confusion. There are hidden threats in this Bill, where there are conflicts of interest. Simply because it does not raise great issues of political dogma does not mean that we need not take it very seriously indeed. As others will know, sometimes it is the Bills that do not have great political divides across this House or the other place that need even more attention; for example, the Child Support Agency was not controversial politically, but it has caused a great deal of problems since its introduction. As with the CROW Act, the Planning Act and the Commons Act, we must do our very best to identify these detailed problem areas and expose them to a full scrutiny in the way that your Lordships’ House does so well. Before the Bill finds its way down the corridor to the innocent, naïve mariners in the other place, who, lost without party dogma, may find it rather difficult to navigate this legislation.