Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

I was not planning to intervene, because until the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, illuminated what he intended by substituting ““agency”” for ““organisation””, I thought that this might be a debate about semantics, but having heard the discussion I should like to make two contributions from my experience. I declare an interest as a former chairman of Natural England’s predecessor, English Nature, and a former chief executive of the Environment Agency. First, there was all hell to pay in the early stages of the Environment Agency to establish a role for it as a commentator on policy. If an organisation is carrying on regulatory, scientific, research and other functions on behalf of government, it is vital that the practical experience, knowledge and skills developed as a result are brought forward to comment on policy so that government and everyone else may learn from that. Does the Minister see this as a key role for the MMO, because it is a fairly fundamental one? It is crazy to invest huge amounts of money in staff, skills and programmes if you are not willing for the organisation to say things about policy from time to time. The minute you start saying things about policy from time to time, questions begin to be raised about the role of the organisation. I intervene partly because the Minister used the word ““referee””. If you are refereeing a football game, which I hope I never have to do, between—to show the depths of my ignorance about football—Manchester United and Chelsea, because they are the only two teams apart from Tottenham and maybe Arsenal that I know, you are not expected to have a pretty strong feel for what is right and what is wrong; you are expected to be totally dispassionate towards the two teams and to referee simply on the ground of the rules. I press the Minister to illuminate us on whether the Marine Management Organisation is entitled to have a view, based on all this knowledge, research and expertise. If it has a view, what is the purpose of it having a view? Who is it standing up for? Who is it championing? It may simply be a very dispassionate organisation—a planning authority is one model—or it may be an agency like the Environment Agency or Natural England, which is a very different model in that the organisation is charged with a set of outcomes and purposes that it wants to achieve. In my view—one of my amendments later in the list focuses on this issue again—we really must task this organisation with some very strong outcomes that we want to see delivered on behalf of the marine environment and the nation. We cannot allow it to be simply an implementer of the rules. I am keen to hear what the Minister has to say about this.