My Lords, I support much, though not all, of what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, has said. My only slight worry is the issue of double devolution and whether the amendment is competent, but that is not to say that the debate is unimportant. We in the Highlands are sick of the centralisation that has been happening in Scotland—I certainly am.
To allow the management of the Crown Estate to be taken over by the northern islands councils and the Western Isles Council would be a good step forward, because migration has always been a particular problem in the northern and Western Isles.
I recently visited the Isle of Lewis and the school I used to go to as a child when my father was principal lighthouse keeper in Lewis. It has closed, as have a number of other junior and secondary schools because of falling school populations. We need to bring some wealth back into that part of the world. There are always difficulties about the yard at Arnish, which was involved and perhaps still may be in manufacturing for wind farms. There has been a fall-away in fishing, which used to be the mainstay of that island, the potential, as we have heard, aquaculture and wind energy, and the difficulties with the interconnector to the Western Isles. Therefore we need something to bring some certainty to these islands. They are so much forgotten about in Edinburgh; historically, the highlands have always been the poor relation of Edinburgh, and many highlanders like me always tended to think that we did better out of Westminster than Edinburgh.
There is now a Government in Edinburgh who have the opportunity to devolve the management of the Crown Estate to the Northern and Western Isles. I am suspicious of the Scottish National Party’s plans here—I agree with the noble and learned Lord that there is no certainty whatever that anything other than the net proceeds will be given to these islands. I hope that this debate will at least help to put pressure on those who will have the ability in the future to further devolve, as the Smith commission said.