Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

Following the noble Lord’s introduction to Amendment A237, I should say that we do not propose to move our two amendments in the group. The noble Lord, Lord Livsey, has brought up some important concerns about the effect of devolution on the effective management of inshore fisheries outside the control of the Secretary of State. The control given to Welsh Ministers means that they could pursue completely different and possibly contradictory policies in their inshore fisheries. Since the whole purpose of this Bill is to ensure a co-ordinated and consistent approach to the sustainable development of the marine environment, it is not surprising that we have spent so long debating its provisions that call the success of that objective into question. In some ways, part of the answer to the noble Lord’s question is bound to concern what powers are expected to be used by or available to the Welsh Assembly in producing its own measures for conducting marine management within the Welsh area. Of course, we may not be able to know in detail, but we would be interested if the Minister could throw any light on that question. As the noble Lord’s Amendment A237 highlights, co-ordination is of course important where the responsibilities meet, but also critical and unfortunately not so likely to happen automatically at a higher level. The marine environment is, of course, an interrelated whole, and increasing the number and complexity of bodies exercising control on it makes maintaining that overall consistency much harder. The noble Lord’s amendments address that concern quite neatly—even down to his last point about whether the Welsh Assembly would be required to produce a report—while still accepting the reality of devolution by ensuring consistency of duty, rather than of implementation, and proper transparency. We therefore support the amendments.