Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

My Lords, we meet this evening to look again at the Marine and Coastal Access Bill with a certain feeling of nostalgia. Nostalgia is a good thing only if it does not last very long. We shall be waving this Bill through on its way to becoming an Act very soon now with a great deal of support and without much ado. I have two points. First, I congratulate the Government on accepting the amendment. It was the only hostile amendment accepted during passage of the Bill, although we did persuade the Government to make many changes and improvements in all sorts of ways on the marine planning regions. We also persuaded them of the necessity and desirability of ensuring that marine planning covers the whole of an area once the marine planning statement is in place. The Government should be congratulated on seeing the sense of that and understanding that the amount of detail that the plans will cover, and the way in which they will cover different parts of the region, will vary enormously. Nevertheless, the principle of the planning system which will now apply to the marine environment is that it should be comprehensive. The Government deserve some congratulation on tidying it up to make sure that it is watertight—if that is the right word to use. My other comment is on the statement of public participation for the marine policy statement and the Government’s obvious intention and wish to get on with it as quickly as possible by bringing the deadline forward to the date of Royal Assent. On Monday, we had the first of the new national policy statements under the Planning Act 2008, and a Statement was repeated in this House about the publication of the draft policy statements for energy and the results of draft policy statements for ports. I want to refer briefly to the many debates we had during the passage of the marine and planning legislation about the way in which the national and marine policy statements will dovetail and have to be reconciled. The Statement made and the contents of the overarching national policy statement on energy leave quite a few worries that, in practice, the marine policy statement will follow on from those documents and will simply repeat in another document what they say. We are concerned that the publication of the marine policy statement will not be as robust and independent as we had hoped it would be. Those concerns are for the future however. As regards these amendments, we are very happy to support them.