Investigating the Oceans

I agree with my hon. Friend. I hope that the Marine and Coastal Access Bill will overcome some of those difficulties when it is enacted. The science could at least have been provided up front, but it has not been, and that, I think, is his point. Back in 1986, the House of Lord's report flagged up not only the lack of co-ordination in marine science policy but the shortage of money for research. Oceans 2025 is a NERC-funded research programme, which aims to deliver not only key strategic scientific goals in marine science research, but stability in the long-term monitoring of the oceans. NERC, DEFRA, the fisheries laboratories, other agencies and conservation groups fund 370 programmes that monitor and observe changes in our oceans. The UK is also involved internationally in the Scientific Committee on Ocean Research, the Partnership for Observation of the Global Oceans, the global ocean ecosystem dynamics programme, the international geosphere-biosphere programme and the Argo project, which our Chairman mentioned. The Argo project is responsible for a global array of 3,000 free-floating profiling floats that measure the real-time temperature, salinity and upper-surface velocity of the oceans. Satellites have made a huge contribution to the observation of the earth and the sea. They can, for example, measure wave heights quite accurately and they can keep ships out of trouble. If we had had such satellites when the Derbyshire was sailing the seven seas, it probably would not have sunk in a hurricane. A significant number of ships have been sunk because they took on green water in hurricane-like conditions or were overwhelmed and capsized by freak waves, the formation of which is still not properly understood. Satellite monitoring of the polar caps in the north and the south is also extremely important for monitoring global warming. Tide gauges around the world help us to measure coastal sea levels. As part of my studies on this policy area, I visited the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory in Liverpool—it is on the university of Liverpool site, but independent of the university. I was surprised to hear that Scotland is lifting ever so slightly out of the sea, while the south of the United Kingdom, and particularly the south-east, is dipping into the sea. Such tectonic plate shifts can be measured only by tidal gauge records. The Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory is also engaged in the long-term monitoring of the oceans worldwide and measures sea levels, coastal erosion and deposits of sediments. In addition, it works with the Met Office on flood forecasting. The problem with the monitoring and observing the oceans is that they are very long term, and they do not involve basic research either. The question therefore arises as to who should be responsible for funding such work and interpreting the results. There is also the question, as our Chairman said, of where the records should be kept. Funding for that kind of longitudinal study can be intermittent, and there are gaps in some of the records as a consequence. The UK provides £500 million per annum for terrestrial monitoring but only £36 million for marine monitoring. Argo funding, which the Met Office leads on, for example, is not secure. The marine agency that our report proposed, which was mentioned by the Chairman, could have been responsible for all such work. There have also been problems in accessing some of the data collected through that observation and monitoring. The national facility is the British Oceanographic Data Centre, which is in the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory in Liverpool. The UK Marine Data and Information Partnership was formed in 2005 to build a framework that would allow data collected by any organisation worldwide to be available and managed in such a way that others can access it for their research purposes. Unfortunately, some organisations are reluctant to part with their data to be stored in that way and made readily available, because they keep going by selling the data they collect. Barriers are particularly high if researchers want to get access to data from the Ministry of Defence and, incidentally, the Crown estate, which stores a lot of data. It is obvious from the breadth of my remarks, and particularly the number of national and international organisations and projects that I have mentioned, that this policy area is extremely complex, and in the opinion of the Select Committee, it is not working as effectively as it should be. That is why we recommended establishing the marine agency, to organise better all that work across the marine and maritime policy areas and to bring the many collaborations together in one place. I was interested to read about the new committee that will review organisations, committees and other bodies co-ordinating marine-related activities, with the aim of reducing the number of co-ordinating bodies. There are just too many, and we have not mentioned them all this afternoon. There is a plethora of organisations, and they are in silos and do not interact as well as they should. Britain is ahead of the game in marine science and investigation. We have a proud record. The records of sea levels collected by the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory by means of the tidal gauges that I mentioned are some of the oldest in the world, so that is somewhere people can go for such data. We must carry on collecting that information for use by future generations, so that they can see how the natural environment is changing, because we, who live in the natural environment, must adapt to those changes.