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Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, for giving us an opportunity to debate this important matter. When I first read the Bill, I put great big lines down against this clause as I thought that we could argue about it all night. I am not proposing to do that, as I am sure that the Committee would not welcome it, but this is a very important area. I disagree with some of what the noble Baroness is suggesting, as she wants to restrict the extent of the area defined as the UK marine area to low water, thereby restricting not only the remit of the MMO but the area in which consideration should be paid to the marine environment specifically under this legislation. I would have had more sympathy for an amendment that extended rather than restricted the remit. In the previous debate, the Minister said how important it was to have clearly defined physical boundaries, but there needs to be a clear definition of where one organisation’s remit starts and another’s ends. As these debates are showing, this is—even if we debated it all night—an extraordinarily complicated issue. Influences on the marine environment do not end neatly at one point on the map. Indeed, events just above the high tide mark impact much more on the marine environment than vice versa. Rivers flow into the sea and, although fish indeed swim up rivers, provision has already been made for the Environment Agency to retain control of the licensing of freshwater fish. I would much prefer to leave this part of the Bill as it is with the MMO dealing with marine issues and involving itself in areas that might not always be covered in salt water but which common sense would identify as being part of the marine area and which certainly impact on the wider marine environment. My amendment in this group is a simple, probing one to clarify subsection (4)(a), which, with its accompanying Explanatory Notes, suggests that the UK marine area incorporates areas that would be under the sea were it not for the tide being deliberately kept out of that area. That would seem to include many areas where no precise delineation is possible. More important—I speak from a purely selfish interest—large tracts of reclaimed land are arguably not under the sea because of a great deal of drainage work and so on. Many noble Lords will know of my farming interests. My farm and my home—indeed, all the Fenland region—would be described as being marine under this provision. Sluices, dykes, seabanks, riverbanks and the artificial exclusion of the tide are the only ways in which the area can be kept dry. I hope that the Minister will accept that that definition needs a bit of fine-tuning if it is not to extend the marine area to those parts of the country that, although they may have the word ““beach”” in their name, are not particularly adjacent to the sea now. Presumably it is not the intention to reclassify land as marine that has been reclaimed from the sea for many years—centuries in some cases. Paragraphs (b) and (c) of subsection (4) also appear to extend the UK marine area limit a little further than subsection (3) would suggest. The mean high water spring tide is not the highest mark that spring tides get to, but these paragraphs imply that we should be talking about the furthest that seawater gets to ““from time to time””—or does the wording imply, as in paragraph (a), that it is only where the seawater is allowed to get to? It would benefit the Bill if we could define some of these things more accurately. I return to the point that I made in the beginning, which is that the marine area should include the land and the sea between the low and high water marks.