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Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

My Lords, my name is attached to this amendment. First I declare the interests that I declared in Committee: I am a member of various wildlife trusts, a member of the North Devon Yacht Club and vice-president of the Campaign for National Parks. My husband is a member of the Devon sea fisheries committee and a member of the Environment Agency coastal management group for the Bristol Channel area. I support what my noble friend said. Having reread the debate in Committee, I think there is a principle that the Government still need to put into the Bill; perhaps the Minister will tell me differently. The inshore sea area that the MMO will be responsible for—I think the far offshore area will be far less contentious—can be likened to common land. Some people have an economic interest in it, while some have an environmental interest and there is no owner, except that the Crown Estate owns the seabed. However, those coastal communities have, in many cases, worked over years to find a way forward. I am thinking, as the Minister knows, of estuary forums, where competing interests have had to be dealt with, some of which we discussed in Committee, such as recreational interests, say, and shellfish interests. Unless this is recognised in the Bill, all the positive work that coastal communities have done in balancing those different interests in the marine area will be lost. Unless the MMO is brought into that work very fundamentally, in statute, it will be an enormous backward step and those interests could start to compete with each other again. That will send different views to the MMO, making its life much more difficult. That is why I feel strongly that we should recognise the importance not of the statutory bodies, which we will talk about later—my noble friend Lady Hamwee will talk, for example, about the role of statutory local authorities—but of the more ephemeral idea of coastal communities, to which this amendment refers.