Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

My Lords, this feels a bit like Groundhog Day again; we have debated the socio-economic requirement in the designation of marine conservation zones on several previous occasions. I must confess that I tabled my amendment at a time when I predicted that there would be another amendment which would strengthen the requirement so that it would not just say that in designating marine conservation zones, account "could be taken" of the socio-economic issues, but that account "must be" taken of the socio-economic conditions. So I tabled my amendment in order to counteract that opposing tendency and to toughen up the need to take the socio-economic conditions into account, but I have been rather wrong-footed by the fact that no such amendment is now on the Marshalled List. Nevertheless, needless to say, in the spirit of soldiering on in a lost cause, I shall continue to make the point. First, I thank the Minister for all the additional information that we have had in the last few days about the designation, the draft strategy for marine protected areas, the quaintly-noted "Note 1" draft guidance on selection and designation of marine conservation zones and indeed the briefing note on Part 5 of the Bill. I quote from that briefing note, because it goes some way towards reassuring me that socio-economic factors are indeed, as it says, optional, secondary considerations. It says that it is implicit that the appropriate authority must make such a decision—that is, the decision to designate a particular area as a marine conservation zone—based primarily on scientific evidence; it would not otherwise be exercising its duty in a reasonable way. It goes on to say: ""We believe this underlying scientific foundation is the correct approach … The consideration of social and economic factors should be an option open to the appropriate authority and not a compulsory part of the process"." I suppose that the least that I might get tonight is for the Minister to say that he does indeed endorse his own briefing note, and have that in Hansard for perpetuity as opposed to on a piece of paper that has been circulated to us and which nobody will remember existed in a year’s time. I thank the Minister for those statements in the guidance. I hope he will endorse it and that the briefing note is indeed right. I should briefly state why I would prefer it if the socio-economic requirement were stated in a completely different way; that is, that it was not possible to reduce the power of the scientific evidence that ought to underpin marine conservation zones by tempering it in the initial stages with socio-economic issues. The evidence is exactly as I stated in Committee and at Second Reading. We have been struggling for 25 years to get protected areas in the marine environment but we have hardly any at all. We have three small sites, mainly because every other site that was ever raised fell foul of socio-economic pressures. There are other mechanisms in the Bill and assurances from the Government about the pace of creating a network and the need to create an ecologically coherent network, and other issues that we will discuss under other amendments. In a way, perhaps the Government have nowhere to hide on this. We cannot face another 25 years of socio-economic conditions getting in the way of the designation of marine conservation zones, or at least I hope so. On several successive occasions I have raised another argument about the fact that socio-economic conditions should not be taken into account in the initial designation. It has not been an impediment with the terrestrial environment, where socio-economic conditions have not been taken into account in European legislation on protected areas under the European Natura 2000 network or in the selection of sites of special scientific interest. They are designated entirely on the basis of the intrinsic merits of their importance to nature conservation, which is how it should be. Anyway, having now made the same points for the third time, in a Groundhog Day sort of way, I will give up because I know that I have no general support from other Benches. Nevertheless, before I sit down and ask the Minister to endorse his own briefing note, I will comment on Amendment 113ZA, which is grouped with my amendment. I look forward to hearing the intention of the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, in this amendment. I must admit that I was a bit bemused by his definition of "science", which included "opinions". Not being a scientist myself, I could not definitively say that science cannot include opinions; but I suspect that if other noble Lords who were steeped in science were in the Chamber, they may well think that "opinions" is perhaps pushing the boundary of science slightly too far.