Marine and Coastal Access Bill [Lords]

The hon. Gentleman makes a strong case, with which I wholeheartedly agree, that the best way to achieve a continuous path with sensible and reasonable exceptions has to be negotiation and discussion. The purpose of amendment 40 is to act on the basis of trust with a purpose. It is clear from our discussions in Committee that Natural England, landowners and various other people will need to get together to ensure that there is a voluntary agreement. That is important and I welcome it, but that is in the context of a Bill that states that as far as possible, there should be a continuous coastal path. We hope and believe that those negotiations will work, and I am reassured that most people have a clear understanding of what voluntary agreement means and what arrangements can be reached to ensure coastal access. However, if those negotiations do not work, the amendment says not that there should be top-down legislation but that the House ought to know about it. The House should know what has gone well and what has gone badly, which voluntary agreements have worked and which have not and whether there are serious shortcomings compared with the ambition behind the Bill and our discussions in Committee. If there are, the Secretary of State's report may need to point out what remedies are available. In some instances remedies may be available by order and, in others, more detailed remedies may be necessary, but I am not saying that an enormous 16-tonne weight should come down upon the heads of all those who have not conformed to the extent that we might like. Instead, a measured response and a consideration of how well we have done with voluntary agreements should be brought to the attention of the House, and there should be measured thought about what remedies are necessary. If the voluntary arrangements work as well as I hope and believe they will, the report may well be literally about three lines long. However, we must respect the ultimate aim of the Bill and consider how it should be achieved. I set out in amendment 40 a number of things on which the report might concentrate. The "voluntary inclusion of parkland", as we all know from the CROW Act 2000, is a difficult matter, because of the difficulty of easily conceding unimpeded access across any area of inland parkland to ramblers when that may cause a problem with a number of functions of that parkland. However, that is not an exact parallel with the question of coastal access, when access would necessarily be along the fringes of parkland. Provided one has a clear definition of privacy and proper safeguards for access, the problem should be resolvable. The Isle of Wight, which is not included in the arrangements, is accessed by ferry, which goes from the doorstep of my constituency on a regular and reliable basis all year round—people can get to the island without any problem at all. In previous years, there was, I believe, a party called the Vectis Nationalist party, which was in favour of independence for the Isle of Wight, but everyone else will agree that the island is very much an essential and beautiful part of the English coastline. The fact that it is an island accessible by ferries should make its inclusion by order in the provisions a reasonably straightforward thing to achieve. That leads to the question whether further islands that are accessible reliably and regularly by ferry ought to be included in the scope of the legislation and the question that my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hillsborough (Ms Smith) has already asked; namely, what happens when seasonal ferries do not run. Does plan B come into operation in that situation, or does plan A mean that access would be possible only during certain times of the year and not at others? Those issues can all be resolved within the overall aim of the legislation by negotiation, but I do not want to face, in several years' time, a similar situation to that in, for example, the New Forest, where the Solent way, parts of which are 6 miles from the coast, continues to be called a coastal path.