Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

There is a difference in relation to getting consistency between the marine policy statement and the national policy statement. My perception of the two statements is that they can probably coexist at quite a high level of generality; the nub of the question comes when you start to make individual planning decisions. It is quite conceivable that you could have two policy statements that seemed compatible whereas at the same time there was a requirement, as the result of an individual planning application, to decide whether the economic significance, climate-change significance, or whatever other significance of an offshore energy proposition, for example—and offshore energy is not the only issue, there are many other issues to do with marine resources in general—was more important than the impact on the marine environment which the MMO and the marine policy statement are aimed at protecting. A distinction need to be made between the measures which the Minister has put forward to get compatibility between these two policy statements and clarification of who can call the shots in each individual application. You could do it either way. We could say that the Infrastructure Planning Commission should be the power on land and at sea for the issues that it covers. Personally, having argued for the creation of marine policy and the MMO because successive planning decisions and successive resource-extraction decisions in the marine environment had over time depleted its value, I think that we were at risk of dribbling away one of our most precious resources as an island through a series of individual planning decisions. Giving the Infrastructure Planning Commission predominance in these decisions would continue to do that on a piecemeal basis. Unless we grip the issue and say that the marine policy statement and the decisions of the MMO at least have parity in terms of the importance of the marine policy statement—and preferably the MMO is the boss in the marine setting—we are missing yet again the benefit that this Bill should be bringing to the marine environment.