Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

As the noble Lord, Lord Greenway, has already said, Amendment A361, in my name, appears in this group, so this may be a convenient moment for me to speak to it. In so doing, I declare a tenuous interest as a pensioner of the P&O Group, which I left some 32 years ago. It is an unusual thing to do these days to resign from any large organisation, so that may have been foolish. Your Lordships will realise that my pension is not of great size, so it is not relevant; and I certainly have had no conversations with P&O or Dubai Ports on this subject. As the noble Lord, Lord Greenway, said, my Amendment A361 is narrower than his, its specific purpose being to add to the categories of excepted land in the CROW Act land which has been identified for future port development in port master plans. By its very nature, port infrastructure may be very long-lived. Asset lives of more than 30 years are very common, and a return on major investment takes many years, even decades, to be realised. The process for port development needs careful and detailed consideration, even before the formal planning process and the seeking of planning permission can start. Surely no one would want it any other way. We would not want port operators bringing forward expansion plans willy-nilly or in a haphazard way. Such a short-term and scatter-gun approach would lead to chaos, with no real benefits for the economy of the country. That is precisely why I commend the Government on the introduction of master plans for ports, which not only help the port operators to clarify their own strategic plans but also enable planning bodies and transport network providers to devise their own strategies, taking into account the port’s aspirations. The Bill before us gives us a real opportunity to enhance that planning process. It would be utter folly to encourage or require port operators to embark on producing their master plans without granting them protection from interference in the tracts of land that they might seek to develop at a later date. That is why I propose that land which has already been identified for future port expansion in port master plans is included as a category of land across which access to the coastline is not permitted. Perhaps I may draw the Minister’s attention to the guidelines from the Department for Transport to ports local authorities, issued on 18 December last year. They make for very interesting reading. They state: ""The main purposes of port master plans are to … clarify the port’s own strategic planning for the medium to long term … assist regional and local planning bodies, and transport network providers, in preparing and revising their own development strategies; and … inform port users, employees and local communities as to how they can expect to see the port develop over the coming years … It does this by setting out … how the port’s development plans integrate, support and inform the regional and local economic, transport and planning policy context as the result of close liaison with local and regional planning bodies during the production of the master plan"." There follows the coup de grace—perhaps the Minister who is replying might like to consult his colleagues in the Department for Transport—because paragraph 26 reads: ""In the future, a master plan could also usefully feed into the marine plans proposed under the Marine and Coastal Access Bill"." There we are. Those guidelines were issued in December. I therefore sincerely hope that the Government will not resist this very simple but extremely necessary amendment.