Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

My Lords, it strikes me that under the Bill, we—or perhaps more properly the Government and their administrators, who put these matters before us—are sitting behind our desks and drawing lines on the map for areas for which we have only the sketchiest detail, in much the same way as the old colonial Administrations used to do for parts of Africa and North America. That was underlined by my noble friend Lord Kingsland who, with much more authority than I can bring, told us that we know only about 3 per cent of the area for which we are legislating. I am sure that the colonial administrators also thought that they were dealing with areas in which nobody resided and which would not cause any problems. Of course, at this stage we are not causing disruption to any resident populations of humans or administrative boundaries of communities. However, as our knowledge of detail expands and as the structures we place on the marine conservation zones become more rigorously enforced, we may find that these boundaries are causing unnecessary complications. That might then be overcome by redrawing the boundary in a way that would appear to be logical, although currently we have no access to the logic that might be available to future generations. I find it of some interest that the mechanism used in subsection (4) in designating the different devolved areas is an Order in Council. Some kind advice that the Minister offered me is that Section 14 of the Interpretation Act 1978, if applied, would imply a power for amending or modifying an Order in Council. What strikes me is that what we are looking at here predates the coming of devolution while not predating our acceptance of some European legislation. The issue might not be as clear as it once was. Let us suppose it became necessary to move the boundary between the English and Scottish offshore areas, or, heaven forbid, a new Administration in Scotland decided that they were not going to participate in the marine policy statement, but would insist that an Order in Council was not just any order and could not be overturned. Perhaps they would be able to argue that under some abstruse European statute, Orders in Council came under the aegis of their Administration. A clause such as the one I have proposed might serve to clarify any doubt there would be on the point. I beg to move.