My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, for allowing him to put my name beneath his on this very cleverly drafted and interesting amendment. As I mentioned in Committee, I have a particular interest in and a special love for those assets that make up the Crown Estate today. I am very worried about the Crown Estate, and feel that it needs to go into hands that will look after it. I am therefore extremely attracted by this amendment, because the local councils concerned will fulfil my test of looking after things.
I was most interested in what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, had to say about net income versus management. I thought I had to find one example of why it was important to send things down to the local level and I found one by talking to a householder outside Oban. He reflected that in the area outside Oban there are a number of fish farms, one of which had gone bust—of course, they need to have an arrangement with the Crown Estate—and no moneys were available to clear up the fish farm, which then created a pollution problem which affected a number of neighbouring fish farms. These businesses are quite small, but they employ significant percentages of people in the area around Oban. The solution was of course to get hold of the Crown Estate and ask it to take some simple decisions—essentially, to pay someone to clear up the mess. It took a very long time, because
no one in London quite understood the urgency of the fact that pollution was killing off the fish. The householder told me that they were jolly glad that the Crown Estate would move to be more local. It was interesting that the same householder knew exactly what was taking place—I am using “double devolution” but I do not think it is that—and that in future, if a similar thing happened, it would be possible for someone to go directly to the appropriate person, because they would know the individual within the council who would look after it and could have the matter sorted out so that it would not cause the economic damage to the community which it did.
There is also of course the extraordinary thing we have been hearing today about the holy status of the Smith commission agreement document. However, in fact of course we have two holy documents, because it turns out that the Scotland Bill itself has a holy status. There is a conflict of holiness—