Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

I thank my noble friend Lord Greaves for his support. He is absolutely right that terrestrial planning has strategic planning and local development frameworks, that below them you can have parish plans, and that they all nest together. I am slightly hopeful about the Minister’s words. I shall carefully read in Hansard his comments on how the plan’s detail will depend on the complexity of the issues addressed. I want to see exactly what he said because it was a key statement. I am concerned that in areas with greater pressure—those areas nearer the coast facing the more complex issues we have mentioned—there will need to be more than just compatibility with the terrestrial plans. That point is still being lost in this debate, but we will come back to it. The Minister thinks that there can be a marine plan and terrestrial plans and the two will sit side by side in parallel, but, in fact, they will need to be integrated. The only way to integrate them is to legislate for that in the Bill. Defra has done a lot of work on an integrated coastal management scheme and its strategy for promoting that is a good one. The only weakness in the whole thing is that it thinks, as the Minister repeated, that you can have two planning systems running in parallel and it will produce an integrated coastal planning system. It will not. If you want to integrate things you have to make a mechanism whereby they can be integrated. At the moment, that is what the Bill lacks. As I say, we will come back to it. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 86J withdrawn. Clause 47 agreed. Clause 48 agreed.