Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

I am very glad to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, because, as she knows, I have a great deal of sympathy with her approach. We have a genuine dilemma here; there are several options before us, but the whole designation of MCZs will be so critical to the success of the Bill that there will be huge disappointment if we do not get this right. We have looked very hard at the various options, and we accept that Clause 114(7) is critical to this discussion. The options before us are simply to take it out, which is the noble Baroness’s suggestion, to strengthen it—the purport of Amendment A136—or to modify it quite dramatically by attempting a Sandford solution under Amendment A140A. Simply omitting the subsection will probably not be a successful solution to this problem, for the precise reason the noble Baroness indicated, because we are signalling an important aspect of the Bill. Simply taking the subsection out will not mean that the appropriate authorities ignore the economic and social consequences; they simply will not know how to rate them. Similarly, it would be going to the opposite extreme and quite ridiculous to strengthen this commitment to economic and social consequences by inflating from "may" to "must". I cannot support that. That is going in the wrong direction altogether. We are left with the other option, Amendment A140A, which attempts some sort of gradation, some sort of instruction to the appropriate authorities about how to take into account the prime objective of the zone designation process, which is in subsection (1), and put in as a secondary consideration, very firmly, the economic and social consequences. Whether that is bastardising Sandford or not, I think the noble Baroness would agree that it is an attempt to do just that. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, because he has attempted to do what many of us have wanted to do from the outset, which is to make sure that there is a sequence of priority and that that priority is firmly stated in subsection (1). Until the noble Baroness spoke, I was not aware of the Scottish comparison. It is important to us because if it is true that scientific conservation criteria will be the sole criteria north of the border, without any reference to economic and social considerations and consequences, that must be an important indicator for us now. However, simply removing them from the Bill by taking out subsection (7) altogether seems pretty drastic. I shall listen with great care to the Minister. At the moment, I believe that trying to find a Sandford order of priority, as in Amendment A140A, is the best solution to the important choice we have before us.