Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

My Lords, I was about to blush that I had it completely wrong just then, but I am very grateful to hear from the Lord Speaker that I was right—for once. We are grateful that the Government have looked again at the whole question of remediation, and for the briefing that they sent us. In an interesting discussion of this in Committee, two different considerations were put forward that, in a sense, pulled in opposite directions. One was that the Bill was too prescriptive and needed more flexibility, which is the compensation point; on the other hand, it was suggested that the Bill did not clearly set out the powers to do what is sensible in a particular situation. Quite clearly, there will be situations where complete restoration is the right thing to do, situations—quite small-scale, perhaps—where compensation is the sensible thing, and other circumstances where prevention is required. In many cases, if it is a large and complex site, there might be a mixture of those; the ability to carry out work on a different part of the seabed, as opposed to the ruined part, is also valuable. The problem, of course, is that that will all depend on what happens in practice and the decisions being made. The enforcing authorities may, in future, be too stringent—probably not, in the view of some of us, yet other people might think that—but in other cases they may let people off lightly. All that we can do is to put forward sensible legislation for a framework that allows what is sensible to take place, then hope that the enforcing authorities do the right thing in each case. There is no way that we can tie up in legislation every situation that will occur; we have to set the framework and urge that what is right is carried out. My specific question is: although it is not set out in the legislation, will the Government think of giving some kind of guidance to the enforcing authorities, particularly the MMO, on how to carry out that work? It is very important that this is done effectively and quite rigorously, right from the beginning. Having said that, I welcome these government amendments.