Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

My Amendment A362AE is in this group. Unlike the other amendments in this group, which have led to an interesting debate so far, my amendment is an attempt to relax the provisions in Schedule 1 to the CROW Act, to delete parks. Some of the debate we have just had has been interesting and there are some good points that will have to be answered, but some of the rest started to take us back to the debates we had eight or nine years ago under the CROW Act that got a bit surreal. I have a vision of all the tourists, walkers and people who want to play on the beach being driven off by hordes of illegal immigrants who will land on these beaches because they are now access land. Previously, they would not have gone there because it was not access land. I think the noble Duke had his tongue in his cheek towards the end of his speech. Illegal people do not obey the laws; that is one of the difficulties. We are dealing here with access for people who will obey the laws—at least we hope they will. The only one of the previous amendments that I want to comment on is the one to exclude salt marshes and mud flats. I would make the same point as I made previously about cliffs. If there are exceptions, they should not be by means of excepted land and removed altogether, they should be by means of exclusions and restrictions which can be imposed sensitively according to local circumstances and used when they are needed and relaxed when they are not needed. The principal of the CROW legislation generally is that if a permanent exclusion is not required, temporary exclusions and restrictions should be used. I want to talk about parks. The pre-legislative scrutiny committee discussed this at some length and, as the report said, did not reach a unanimous conclusion but did reach a majority conclusion. Recommendation 93 reads: ""We support the need to ensure that individuals’ property rights and privacy are protected. The majority of us"—" of whom I was one— ""felt that the Government should give careful thought to what is included in the ‘parks and gardens’ exemption, but this was not the view of all; some welcomed the exemption as it stands. This is clearly an issue to which Parliament will wish to return when the Bill is introduced"." The amendment is the first occasion for Parliament to revisit this matter. There are two fundamental issues. The first is that if there are large areas of parkland, however it may be defined in the coastal situation, which block the route of the coastal path, and if an agreement cannot be reached, the coastal route will have to make a diversion inland. It may be large, it may be small, but there will have to be a diversion inland. If it is a large park, there will be a large diversion. It will obstruct the route. Is that reasonable? The second is whether there is a difference between parkland as defined in the CROW Act with reference to mountain, moor, heath and down in relation to the coast. I would argue that there is. It has already been agreed by the Government that ordinary farmland will not be excepted land in exactly the same way as it is in the CROW Act. In other words, the coastal route might have to cross farmland or take a strip of land on the edge of farmland which would be better than crossing it. That will have to happen if the coastal route is going to take place sensibly in some areas. If that is the case for farmland, why is it different for parkland, golf courses or other similar large areas of land that might block the path? When we excluded parkland—with misgivings from some of us—when we debated the CROW Bill, it was on the basis that the vegetation within parkland is usually different from the surrounding vegetation. It is usually improved or managed in some way which is different from the mountain, moor, heath and down that surrounds it. That was the justification for excluding it. Gardens, particularly small gardens, are different. Nobody wants to see people marching through people's gardens as a general rule. But when we are talking about parkland, which can be large areas of land, it is different. The reason it was excluded under the traditional CROW Act access land is because the nature of the land is usually different. That is not necessarily the case along the coast, because access land will not be defined on the basis of the vegetation categories of mountain, moor, heath and down. It will be defined on the basis of whether it is coastal land. I am interested to see how the Government will define that—in particular, whether it will be defined flexibly and sensibly according to the situation in the area. The other argument about why it should not apply on the coast is if the coastal path can go along the edge of the parkland or other land such as a golf course, that is not really any different from the situation on ordinary CROW access land. If a park is surrounded on three sides by CROW-access land, you can walk its perimeter. The edge on the coast is the coast. The argument is that there is no reason why, under those circumstances, the coastal route cannot go along the seaward edge of the park if that is physically, sensibly possible. I am grateful to the Ramblers’ Association for a briefing on this; I am not going to read it all out by any means.