Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

This has been an extremely interesting and wide-ranging debate. I wondered how the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, would get food security in, but she managed it just at the end of her contribution. On the one hand, as the noble Lord, Lord Greenway, suggested, perhaps many of the offshore renewable developments might not fall within the remit of the MMO but will go over the threshold and be considered by the Infrastructure Planning Commission. None the less, the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, has done us a great service by introducing some of the considerations that inevitably lie within the marine planning environment, albeit that they are not the only considerations, which is the essential point of the argument. In terms of commercial certainty, I agree that we require a huge amount of investment in energy over the next 10 or 20 years. We are talking about tens of billions of pounds. As much stability and certainty as possible is conducive to that investment. The Government have provided a good framework and certainty for companies to invest, through recent planning legislation and the Energy Act. It is also clear that we need a lot of renewable energy. The provisional European target for this country is 15 per cent of energy by 2020, which equates to about 30 or 33 per cent of electricity generation. The figure at the moment is that about 5 per cent of electricity is generated through renewables, so we must see a huge expansion, in which offshore has a major contribution to make, as I hope will marine energy, if we can take advantage of the technological lead that the UK has at present. Many lessons can be learnt from previous situations in which the UK has had a technological lead but has not translated it into major development with a positive impact on jobs, skills and future investment. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, that the Climate Change Act, with our commitment to an 80 per cent reduction of greenhouse gases by 2050, sets out this country’s determination to play our part in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, in mitigating climate change and in giving international leadership, particularly as we move towards the critical talks in Copenhagen. On the question raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, nuclear has a major role to play in the future, but I do not see it as a substitution for what we hope to achieve in renewables. We wish to see a balance.