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Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

I am happy to ensure that we consider what has been said today. It would be particularly helpful because we are still in the middle of the consultation process. I am very happy to give that commitment. The noble Earl is right that under option 2—the creation of six IFC districts aligned to local authority boundaries—if there were 16 local authorities in the southern and western IFCA, that would tend to suggest that the entire membership would be about 48. That would be a large number. On the other hand, under option 1, which I think the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, favoured—perhaps it is fairer to say that he veered towards it—Devon and southern would end up with nine local authorities. This is not easy. These proposals reduce local authority involvement from roughly 50 per cent to roughly a third. There is clearly a reduced proportion of local authorities, but I would be very wary of going below the one-third level, which preconditions the numbers that we end up with on an IFCA. That is why, under that option, you would end up with a large body in that part of the country. We cannot have it all ways. Either we have an organisation that does as much as possible and has all the right interests around the table or we do not, and sometimes that means that we will have a larger body. The Marine Management Organisation will appoint the other people to be on the committee. The MMO is in a very good position, guided by the excellent guidance to be issued by my department, to ensure the right balance. As we have heard, we want the fishing communities to be represented, but we also want to make sure that people with a concern for conservation and the marine environment will have a place on the committee. This debate sounds like our debate on Clause 2, if Members of the Committee can remember that far back in history, when we discussed the meaning of sustainable development. In a sense, we are still reflecting that balance and the tension that is coming through in many parts of this Bill. In the end, we think that the construct of one-third local authority membership, the three statutory bodies each having an automatic place and the Marine Management Organisation making balanced appointments subject to guidance will probably get it about right.