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Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

The noble Duke has caught me on the hop, as I do not have the piece of paper describing the Sandford principle. However, it is a long way from the view that there should be ““no development here””, about which he is so apprehensive. In fact, it is a tie-breaker principle that says that the national parks have a series of objectives—I think that there are three or four—the first of which is nature conservation and landscape protection. The others relate to access, recreation, education and economic development. It says that the aim of the national park system should be to deliver all those objectives but, if push comes to shove and at the end of the day there is a landscape or natural environment issue that is not a run-of-the-mill resource but an important national resource, that should take precedence if there is no way of finding a solution that combines all the objectives. Therefore, it really is a principle of last resort and not a ““don’t come here”” proposition, which we do not want to see in the marine environment. The marine environment is incredibly important for a whole variety of social, environmental and economic purposes, and we want to see the Marine Management Organisation focus on those in such a way that they are all delivered. However, we have to give it a bit of help by saying that, if it gets absolutely stuck and cannot find a way of doing all of them, ultimately one must have pre-eminence. Alas, the noble Duke has given the Minister adequate and valuable time to stop being outraged at the word ““flabby””—I was hoping that he might explode on that.