Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

My Lords, we are now leaving Part 3, on planning, and moving on to Part 4, on licensing, so we are making some progress on the Bill. I pay tribute and give my thanks to my noble friend Lady Hamwee for the tremendous work she did, with her great expertise in terrestrial planning, on the planning parts of the Bill. It has been a great help to me and to our party and I believe that it has helped the House. The Government’s positive response on planning issues and some of the government amendments has also been very helpful indeed. I thank them for that. We move on to licensing. The purpose of this amendment is specifically to insert principal local authorities as consultees on marine licensing applications. In Committee I moved a rather complex amendment setting out what principal local authorities were and so on. We all know what they are; they are county councils, district and borough councils and unitary authorities. The Government said in Committee that they did not want lists to appear in this part of the Bill. I have specifically tabled this amendment so that it is not a list but a specific reference to local authorities. In a moment I shall explain why it should be in the Bill. This amendment is not as wide as the amendments I moved in Committee, which concerned a general duty to consult local authorities about everything. The Government not unreasonably said that that was too wide and that specific local authorities that were specifically relevant to particular applications would obviously be consulted. The amendment would apply to relevant applications in the area of a local authority or adjacent to it. We return to the relationship of the MMO and the new marine regulatory system with territorial decision-makers, with coastal communities—which we discussed in some detail last time—and, particularly, with local authorities. It has been said that we do not want to put any further administrative burdens on the MMO. I do not believe that we are doing that at all by putting local authorities on the face of the Bill if the Government are saying that the relevant authorities will get consulted in practice anyhow. I suspect that that is what the Minister is about to tell me. The marine licensing functions include planning functions and a range of other functions that could impact on what I would call local authority interests—the decision-making processes of local authorities representing their local communities. I had another look at this interesting document called A Strategy for Promoting an Integrated Approach to the Management of Coastal Areas in England, which we received some time ago, just to see what the involvement of local authorities is within that strategy. I have to say that I was disappointed. Under "Marine Licensing" there is a little flow chart, a simple one that I can understand, with "Licensing decisions" in the middle. The feed-in to that is "Marine Policy Statement", "National Policy Statements"—which I find slightly interesting but will not pursue now—"Marine Plan" and "Stakeholders", which has now forced me to say that word. I assume that local authorities are simply included among the stakeholders. I think that that is very unsatisfactory. As for marine licensing, as far as I can see, there is no other specific reference in this document to "local authorities", which seems to be a mistake. On page 25 of the document there is an interesting panel setting out what it calls a "desk study" to explore the practical implications of proposals for marine planning licensing and the Marine Management Organisation in coastal areas. The word "licensing" does not appear here but the word "planning" appears several times. It says: ""A number of key messages emerged from both case studies"—" there was one in the Thames estuary and one in south-west England, or relating to those places— ""including stakeholder engagement across all levels from as early as possible was very important"." Fair enough. One assumes that local authorities might be included there. The third bullet point says that, ""participants believed that marine planning would improve integration between decision-making bodies on land and at sea, and could provide coastal decision makers with the certainty they needed to make more informed decisions"." In a further flow chart it defines local authorities as being decision-makers—so there is something there. Then, it says that, ""the planning process should be set out clearly, be transparent and democratically accountable"." I am not quite sure what "democratically accountable" means for the marine environment and the issuing of marine licences, including those on planning matters, unless it includes the democratic representatives of the coastal areas; in other words, the principal local authorities. On page 26, we have an astonishingly complicated flow diagram which I have great difficulty understanding. I could not work out whether it reminded me of one of those integrated circuit boards that I never understood or whether it is a complicated version of the tube map. It has 23 different types of organisations, statements or whatever in it, with arrows going in all sorts of directions. It includes one blob labelled "Local authority", with an asterisk on it saying that this "indicates decision-making organisation". However, the local authority and the local strategic partnership and one or two things connected with it seem to be in a little whirlpool—or perhaps it is an eddy—at the bottom of the chart, and not really related to its main functions. "Coastal stakeholders" all appear completely isolated at the bottom and only relate to the marine policy statement and plan and national policy statements. I do not quite understand how that works. The impression I get from looking at that is that local authorities are not regarded as the very special and rather different bodies which I believe that they are. They are special and different for two reasons. First, they have a lot of statutory responsibilities which interact and overlap with those of the Marine Management Organisation. That is particularly the case in the inshore areas, especially along the foreshore and the coast itself. They include fairly obvious ones such as planning, plan-making, development control; economic development functions, which are ever more important among local authorities; highways and transport, tourism and recreation functions, which are crucial on the coast; and environmental responsibilities whether environmental health, food hygiene or litter, and other such amenity issues. There are other responsibilities which noble Lords will readily bring to mind. As they have these important statutory responsibilities which will be affected by the MMO’s decisions, the Bill should state that local authorities are at the very least statutory consultees. The second reason why local authorities are different is that they are democratically elected bodies representing the people who live along the coast. For that reason alone they ought to be set aside as something different from all the other consultees. It seems fairly clear to me that acceptable wording could be arrived at to do what I am asking to do. I ask the Government, at this late stage of the Bill in this House, nevertheless to consider this again. I beg to move.