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Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

The many government amendments in this group are of a technical nature, and Amendment 101 is in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Greenway. We have reached Part 4, a significant milestone. This part essentially consolidates a number of Acts into one and modernises marine licensing, bringing it up to modern standards of transparency, fairness and proportionality, as well as—importantly—reducing the number of processes that applications for developments will have to go through. Clause 63 lists the activities that will require a marine licence. The Bill also provides more effective enforcement of marine licensing legislation. In preparing the Bill we have already made a number of responses in relation to the pre-legislative scrutiny. In replying to a number of the responses we received to the consultation we have tabled government amendments to amend the test of the severity of harm or interference for the issue of remediation notices from ““serious harm”” or ““serious interference”” to simply ““harm”” or ““interference””. We believe that harm caused by the commission of an offence should not have to be serious before the person who caused the harm should have to make amends. That is consistent with the ““polluter pays”” principle. We have included Clause 70 in response to recommendation 20 of the Joint Committee’s report which recommends a clear mechanism for appealing licensing decisions of the appropriate licensing authority. We have agreed with Delegated Powers Committee’s recommendations and introduced government amendments, or added my name to opposition amendments, to change some of the procedures for orders made under this part of the Bill from the negative procedure to the affirmative one. Part 4 is technical and complex and this group of amendments—as with group 20, which I hope we will debate later—includes a number of government amendments. The amendments in group 20 relate to the new enforcement tools being set up in this part. My minor and technical amendments were identified after a careful run-through of the complex Part 4 provisions to ensure that they work and are legally sound. I beg to move.