Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

I shall contribute briefly, not least because I wanted to congratulate my noble friend Lady Hamwee on spending her birthday in your Lordships’ House, which shows great self-sacrifice. I have no particular interest to declare, although if under one of our later amendments we add the Youth Hostel Association to one of the schedules, I will. At this stage, however, I come to the matter dispassionately, without any special interest, except that for a number of years I represented the most beautiful coastal constituency in the United Kingdom. These are probing amendments, as my noble friend Lord Greaves said, but they are none the less significant. The nature of the MMO lies not just in how we describe it and the semantics that we discussed under the previous sets of amendments, but in the type of people whom we expect to go on its board. I have served on a number of public bodies and have advised a number of others and I take seriously the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone. It is difficult to think of any organisation with as wide a remit as this legislation gives to the MMO that would be able to cope with all those responsibilities and have that wide range of perspectives to which my noble friends have referred with a maximum of perhaps only nine members—eight members and the chairman. On a practical point, after my experience of the organisations that I have served and advised, I think that having such a low ceiling on the number, simply with regard to retaining a quorum when you have a lot of business to deal with, seems ill advised to say the least. The range of expertise to which my noble friends Lord Greaves and Lady Hamwee have referred is itself a significant pointer to what we should be doing, but there are simple practicalities. The dynamic of an organisation as small as might be supposed from the text of the Bill would lead to an unfortunate type of body, which would not be seen by the public whom it is serving to represent them sufficiently It is also essential that we pass Amendment 9. I think that there is unanimity across the Chamber that that measure should be firmly in the Bill. I hope that the Minister will respond positively to our amendment on that. Finally, on payment, I had not spotted the discrepancies with other legislation that has gone through your Lordships’ House in recent months, a matter to which my noble friend Lady Hamwee referred. It is odd to have this curious ““may”” popped in when surely it will be a matter of ““shall””. Why do we not start at the outset, as my noble friend Lord Greaves said, trying to get the ““may”” and the ““shall”” sorted? We might save ourselves a great deal of time later in Committee.