Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

I am very glad that the noble Lord, Lord Eden, has said what he has just said. I have a great deal of sympathy for the case which the noble Baroness, Lady Young, argued very moderately. When we are debating issues of this kind—I am sorry if I have said this before, but I feel it very powerfully—I always feel that the observation that we live in an age that knows the price of everything but the value of very little becomes appropriate. My experience of dealing with environmental matters of this kind—in another setting, I sit in a meeting almost every month to consider planning applications in very special parts of our countryside and the rest—tells me that what the noble Lord has just said is very true; the forces of rationalisation for the economic case are always powerfully there, and we need very special provision in our legislation to protect what is special and what could too easily be eroded. I therefore congratulate the noble Baroness on having tabled her amendment, because what she said and what the amendment proposes, together with what the noble Lord has just said, will help to strengthen the resolve of my noble friends, who I believe are on the right side of the argument on this issue. Another point always worries me in this kind of deliberation. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor, and the noble Earl, Lord Cathcart, are decent civilised men—none of us in this Committee would argue otherwise—but I am always intrigued by what doors we are opening to the future. There will not always be people who share our values in places of responsibility. We could move into an age when we have some pretty soulless charlatans at the helm, and we might inadvertently have opened the door to the destruction of what we all take very seriously: the protection of the very special elements of our heritage. When we consider legislation of this kind, I always think someone should think about that. Even long ago, in my days in the Government, it seemed to me that every Cabinet needed a special Cabinet Minister whose job was, in every debate, to say, "Well, that is all very well, but I am speaking for the next generation and the generation after that. And, excuse me, these are the possible implications for them". We need to button up these things as tightly as we can, so that we do not inadvertently open the door to the erosion of what we hold dear. What the noble Baroness has said is very important and I am glad that she is getting support from all sides of the Committee. I hope that the Minister will take what she said in the spirit in which she argued it and will determine that we will not open ourselves up to quite sinister dangers.