Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

My Lords, we have had three short contributions, so one cannot be in any doubt about the importance of this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor, is concerned that the definition is not as tight as he would like and that it might be possible for a future Government to slip out of the kind of commitments that we believe are implicit and explicit in the legislation. The noble Lords, Lord Livsey and Lord Greenway, support the amendment. I have to say that we have a problem in accepting an amendment, which although extremely well meant, has drafting issues that are genuinely difficult to accept in the Bill. I hope that in saying that, I can convince noble Lords that there is no disagreement between us in principle, and that the Government have some ideas on how to reassure noble Lords on this point. The House has accepted the amendment in the previous group, which I set out and which seeks to ensure absolute clarity in the duty to designate. In having the duty to designate marine conservation zones, it is clearly necessary to set out as far as we can what constitutes the network. We have included within Clause 119(3) three core principles based on the definition of ecological coherence developed for the Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic—OSPAR. The conditions require that the network should contribute to the conservation of the marine environment, protect sites that represent a range of features present in the UK marine area and reflect the fact that conservation of a feature may require more than one site to be designated. We want to ensure that our network is based on the OSPAR principles that are right for the UK network. OSPAR ultimately provides a number of guiding principles for member state countries to use in determining what is best for their own waters and biodiversity. The problem is that OSPAR does not offer concrete outcomes that we can simply transpose into this Bill without our own research into how the UK ecologically coherent network should look. We must ensure that the network principles are right as they will underpin the entire success of the nature conservation provisions. The Bill must have the flexibility to allow us to provide the necessary levels of protection in the medium and long term. We cannot bind ourselves to terms that will evolve and could become out of date. Much though the marine environment is beloved of noble Lords who have taken part in our debates, no one could say with confidence that this is an area that we are likely to legislate on frequently. Inevitably, we are legislating for a long time ahead. I realise that there is tension there; in a sense, the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, is saying that because of that, he wants greater certainty now. My problem is that, if we tie this up too far, we will not have the flexibility to deal with evolving situations. That is why the Government think that Clause 119(3) as it now stands is as far as we can go in referencing the term "ecological coherence" in the Bill.