---

Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

I would like to be able to support the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, in his Amendment 28, as his aspiration is correct, but the Minister will remember from the report of the Select Committee in the other place, Investigating the Oceans, that the funding and progress of research have been extremely limited. The amount of seabed that has been mapped and the amount of resource to speed up that mapping—I am talking just about vessels, but the noble Lord referred to satellites, and even satellite time costs—are such that I do not think that we can include such an amendment in the Bill. The MMO will simply be unable to look for that evidence for several years yet. I ask the Minister whether the mapping of the seabed will be speeded up before designations of the marine conservation zones, for example. If not, it will be difficult for those zones to be designated at all. This area is one of my greatest concerns about the Bill. We have good aspirations but we simply do not know much about what is on the seabed or in the water column over the vast areas that we are talking about.