Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

I shall make one last attempt. The process of designation happens at a single point in time. It will happen once and then the site will be designated for many years, one assumes. At that point, the Minister will be expected to take into account socio-economic issues as they currently exist, whatever the propositions are to use the site for extraction, fishing, power generation, or whatever. The designation will last for however long. I do not know how old the SSSIs are, but they may be 30 or 40 years old, and there are economic propositions coming up that we could not have had any inkling of at the time of designation. If you take the socio-economic conditions into account at designation time, you will be forced to try to project forward and anticipate the economic needs that are unthought-of at the time of designation. That is why it is quite dangerous to take socio-economic conditions into account at the point of designation. Yes, it can be done at the point of deciding what kind of management is going to be permitted and, yes, it can be done whenever a planning application comes up. It is perfectly possible for the Minister to make such balanced decisions in that regard—but the point of designation is absolutely the wrong time for socio-economic conditions to be taken into account. That is why to some extent either my amendment or something close to it needs to be brought in, along with amendments later in the Bill that make it clear that MCZs are not no-go zones.