Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

I wish to speak to my Amendments 87B and 88A. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, for endorsing much of what I had planned to say. This is a sort of twin-track set of amendments; one is to get the marine planning authorities to make some plans, which seems fairly basic, as the noble Lord said, and the other is to make sure that there is comprehensive coverage of the whole UK marine area within a reasonable timeframe. My two amendments propose that an authority must have a duty to make plans within a reasonable time and that, if it has not completed the coverage of marine plans, there should be an annual report that describes what still needs to be done and ponders somewhat on the reasons why there is delay. I hope that the Minister will recognise that the amendments have support across the House. They are pretty reasonable, because I recognise what the Government have said in response to the Joint Committee, which said that it was more important to get marine planning and plans right rather than meet a deadline. Amendment 87B does not have a deadline, but simply has gentle encouragement and provides for public exposure when planning authorities are not quite hacking it fast enough. I know that the Minister is somewhat reluctant to take comparisons between terrestrial experience and marine experience, but there is no doubt that in some of the earlier decades of the terrestrial planning process there were inordinate delays in preparing plans. That created either huge planning blight or uncoordinated development problems. We really should as a civilised nation perhaps learn from the past 60 years of the terrestrial planning process and let it inform our approach to marine planning. The comprehensive planned coverage of the marine area is important. The Marine Management Organisation cannot make consistent and defensible decisions about licences, for example, if it only has partial coverage of plans. You could see a sort of Klondike effect in areas where there was no adequate plan, whereby anyone who wanted to do anything despoiling immediately rushed towards them—““Over here, boys, there’s no plan here””. We could see kind of sink areas whereby activities that are not allowed in areas covered by plans suddenly pop up in areas that have no plans yet written for them. There is also a risk, as the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, said, that everyone pays attention to the busy areas close to the coasts, where there is lots of interest, but difficult and tricky conservation and exploitation issues are likely to come up in some of the most far-flung and extreme edges of the marine area, which otherwise might be neglected. They will be the most difficult areas to gather evidence for. Therefore, it is more important to get started on some of those areas early, so that the evidence base for what sensible decisions would look like can be gathered first. If we do not get pretty comprehensive coverage in a reasonable timeframe, we will have some difficulty in reaching the deadlines of the European marine strategy framework directive, which requires that strategies are produced for all the seas, and marine planning is the mechanism by which that happens in practice. The Government need to apply their mind to the fact that the marine strategy framework would be very hard to achieve without comprehensive coverage of plans. I know that the Minister will give assurances that everyone will press on with plans, but in some of the previous debates about the devolved Administrations I was not sure that he had any confidence that he could make anything happen in them. The overreliance on good will in this Bill is becoming a bit thin.