Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

I have the terrible feeling that I am about to make a Second Reading speech, which is rather sad at this hour, but we are at the heart of what this Bill is all about, so such a speech is deserved. I am sure that the Government have great ambition for the Marine Management Organisation. If they had not, they would not have gone to the lengths that they have to devise a hefty Bill, to go through a draft Bill stage and have pre-legislative scrutiny, and so on, but you would not guess that from the way in which the organisation’s general objective is described. I was imagining myself trying to sell that general objective to a group of disparate staff from across a wide range of organisations coming together to form the Marine Management Organisation. To be frank, the way in which the general objective is described is a distinctly unthrilling. It would be very difficult to get staff fired up to it. The basic misunderstanding was touched on by the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer. For many years now, the environment and conservation movement in this country has been campaigning for a marine Bill, which it regards as its marine Bill. The marine Bill was put together to meet a real need: the increasing degradation of the marine environment and the fact that we have no instruments similar to those already used in the terrestrial environment. That is what the marine Bill was intended to be. Somewhere along the road, we have got a bit lost and have ended up with, as the general objective shows, a loosely glued set of functions to be carried out, under paragraph (a), in a co-ordinated way and, under paragraph (b), in a way that makes some wishy-washy and indeterminate contribution towards sustainable development. That is not what the Government need or indeed the marine situation requires. Therefore, as a very minimum, given that the Bill is where it is, the amendments that would require the sustainable duty to be more positive and proactive should be supported. heard with sadness what the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, said about my cherished Amendment 28A, which says that, ““in the event of an irreconcilable conflict arising from the delivery of this objective the natural environment must take precedence””. I shall try to justify that and see whether I can change the noble Lord’s mind, and perhaps that of other noble Lords. The Marine Management Organisation will sit in a position of strong conflict. It will be surrounded by competing claims for the use of the sea for the natural resource extraction of both fish and marine aggregates, for coping with climate change in the form of new kinds of renewable generation, and for conservation of the marine environment. It will have a pretty difficult job and it will be more than just a referee; the Minister has already assured us of that tonight. It should have a much more positive role, first of all in the three arms of sustainable development. However, even given the sustainable development principles, we should remember that at the very genesis of the words ““sustainable development”” at the Rio summit there was also the invention of the precautionary principle that if you do not know how much this will screw up the environment, do not do it until you do—those are the technical terms. It is therefore not unreasonable to suggest that if the Marine Management Organisation, in carrying out this disparate range of grouped-together functions, concludes that one cannot achieve a truly sustainable solution to a particular question—in other words, one that delivers equally for the environment, for the economy and for social welfare—it will need to make up its mind as to which one will get pre-eminence and which other two will necessarily take a slightly less prominent place. The natural environment is the only one that can be the default outcome for a whole variety of reasons, one being that healthy ecosystems in the marine environment are a hugely important foundation of economic and social success anyway. If we screw up the environment, it will be difficult to have marine activities that can be either economically or socially beneficial. Fishing is one prime example of that. However, this is not just about whether we preserve marine species, because as well as seeing huge declines in some marine species—again, fisheries are an example—we are seeing increasing evidence of seabed habitat destruction by mechanical means, of water quality degradation and of the offshore eutrophication of the marine environment. There are clearly big system issues, which are demonstrating that the environment is already in trouble, as the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, said. Therefore, the Marine Management Organisation needs to be able to say with some legitimacy, ““We are very sorry. In this particular circumstance, this cannot be done without damage to the environment. Therefore the environment must take precedence, because it is already in trouble””. The reality is that, once we have damaged irretrievably some elements in the marine environment, they do not recover. We know that from other places in the world where that has happened. We have seen the collapse of marine ecosystems, and all the benefits that people want to gain from those systems have collapsed with them. There is a precedent for having a kind of irretrievable breakdown of marriage clause where sustainable development is concerned, although, when it was first introduced in the case of national parks, it was not recognised as such. Those who are old enough to remember the old national parks legislation will know that it was very much about sustainable development. It was about conserving and enhancing natural beauty, promoting understanding and enjoyment, and economic and social well-being. It was about environment, economy and social principles, but in the early days of the national parks it became clear that on many occasions it could not deliver all three. Natural beauty and the conservation of the countryside had to come first because the whole point of the parks’ existence was to make sure that that resource was available for future generations. Although that was recognised in the early 1970s, it was not until the Environment Act 1995 that the Sandford principle—the default principle that says that, if you cannot do everything, you have to at least ensure the basic stock of preserving the environment—went into law. In legal terms, that is a comparatively recent development. If it is right for national parks, I believe that it is right for the Marine Management Organisation. On the vast majority of occasions, we should encourage the MMO to seek that truly sustainable solution that combines environment, economy and social principles. However, when it cannot do that, the bit that will not come back if you hit it is the environment. Perhaps I may encourage the Minister to consider this as a principle. I recognise that I may not yet have persuaded the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, but if we considered this principle we would have done something significant today for the marine environment, which was our primary objective 15 years ago when we first tried to introduce such a Bill.