Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

We have four amendments in this group, to which I shall speak briefly in due course. I do not blame the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, for saying a few general words as we come to this first group of amendments on coastal access. Her amendments are appropriate and I congratulate her on getting them in first, as it were. In many ways this part of the Bill is what I might call the daughter of CROW. It originated most recently in Section 3 of CROW as an aspiration for the future, and here we are, some eight or nine years later, discussing it. A small number of us are survivors of the CROW debates; I was a new Member of your Lordships’ House and the noble Baroness was lording it on the Conservative Front Bench as its spokesman. I look forward to locking horns with her again and to looking for areas of agreement. It has been a long, winding road to get to this stage—although I should perhaps find a maritime metaphor—and this is a historic moment. We on these Benches give our general full support to Part 9 of the Bill but that does not mean that there are not many details to be discussed. The important point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, is that this has to work; it must be right. Whether we will all agree on exactly what is right I do not know, but whatever comes out of this has to work. The worst thing possible would be to pass legislation which does not work in practice. This part of the Bill has longer antecedents than the CROW Act. I have here some extracts from the famous Hobhouse report of 1947, which was the forerunner to the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949. Paragraph 201 refers to beach, shore and inland waters and states: ""In our proposals for new legislation we recommended that beach and shore should be included in the definition of uncultivated land which it would be the duty of the planning authority to designate for public access"." Paragraph 202 becomes quite lyrical and states: ""The love of open air is nowhere more clearly shown than in the use which is made of the coasts of this country. For countless thousands the seaside is almost synonymous with the annual summer holiday"." That has changed a bit but many people still go to the seaside. The paragraph continues: ""Every week-end and bank holiday still larger numbers travel with the coast as their goal, whether they move on foot or by cycle, car, bus or train. It is a curious anomaly that, for the most part, members of the public possess no legal right of access to the shores which they so freely use"." Paragraph 208 states: ""Since it is evident that a general right of roaming over the foreshore and the land immediately behind is a right unknown in law"—" that is arguable, but even so— ""we recommend that this land, referred to as beach and shore, should be subject to access designation"." That was in 1947. Some 62 years later, we are now finally getting round to it and we welcome that. We also support the concepts behind this part of the Bill: the concept of the long-distance route, which will go around as much as possible of the English coast, and the concept of the associated coastal access land—referred to in the discussions prior to the Bill as "spreading room", and now in the Bill as the "coastal margin"—and the interesting concept that the route itself will consist of access land. I do not know who dreamt up that last one, but it is the breakthrough that allows the legislation to be put forward as it is now; the route will not be a right of way under highways legislation unless it happens to follow an existing right of way. It will be access land as such. The downside of this part of the Bill is its complexity and the way in which the three different parts relate. There is the Bill itself, which talks about principles and the overall scheme. There is the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949, now 60 years old, a famous and iconic Act that set up the national parks and created access to the countryside in many places but that went only a certain distance—certainly not as far as the Hobhouse vision would have had it. That Act is now rather battered and hollowed out, but nevertheless still contains the section about long-distance routes. Then there is the CROW Act, which some of us here remember discussing in 2000. In retrospect, it was a missed opportunity to take the long-distance-route part of the 1949 Act and re-enact it in a modern form. There is a complex relationship between those three different Acts, which not only makes it difficult for us to understand now and will lead to complexities in the legislation, but will lead to great difficulty for people in understanding it when the Bill is, as we hope, enacted. Nevertheless, that relationship is what we are presented with and, despite its complexity, it ought to work. Amendments A266 and A267 in our names are to probe the suggestion in the early part of this part of the Bill as to whether we are talking about one route or several routes. The Government talk about a coastal route around the coast of England, yet the Bill itself refers to whether it can be one or more routes and what their status will be. Will the result of each report that comes from Natural England on each part of the coast be a separate route legally, or will it all join up eventually into one? Amendment A269 refers to the timescale that the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, referred to. This is an attempt to turn the aspiration of the Government and Natural England into rather more of a commitment in the Bill and to test how serious the Government are about doing it within 10 years. Amendment A321 extends the "must" from carrying out the duty as a whole to the specific production of the reports. That is already implied but the amendment is, again, to get a commitment from the Government that it is not just the scheme that is a "must" but the whole 10-year programme on the English coastal path. Amendment A267ZA—we are back to Zs again—refers to the issue that the noble Baroness referred to: the status of the path and the status of the rights that people will have on it. I agree that "enabled" is a slightly strange word. I would describe it as a new Labour word—enabling people to do this, that and the other. In the context of walking along the coast, people are "enabled"; I would simply delete that and put "may" so that it is something that they are allowed to do and that they have a right to. I am not too sure about the word "allowed" in legislation; it sounds a little like, "You can be allowed, but we might disallow you in future". It is a slightly odd word. The noble Baroness said that her amendments were probing, and I accept them in that spirit. However, because they would remove the access land—the coastal margin land, the spreading room—and because the path will be over such land, they would tear the heart out of the legislation. I am sure that that was not her aim, but that is technically what her amendments would do. Like her and other Members of the Committee, I look forward to the Minister’s reply.