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Tankers (Lyme Bay)

I am grateful to the hon. Lady, and a little envious that the headquarters of the Dorset Wildlife Trust is in her constituency. I must make a mental note to encourage that admirable organisation to move to my constituency. I accept entirely that she and I are actuated by the same concern to advance the ecological interests of Dorset as a whole, Bournemouth and Poole and a large part of Devon, as we are talking about a pretty widespread area. If the Minister's letter was in good faith and accurate, which I am sure it was, and if he will tell us today that he has no powers to do anything about the matter, then I agree with the hon. Lady that what is required is the taking of powers to do something about the situation, or some administrative action that would make it unnecessary to have those powers by achieving a result. That is exactly the burden of my tale. I am not an administrative lawyer, so I do not know whether the Minister has powers to deal with the problem, but I take it at face value that he does not. I do know, however, that it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever for the UK to have a huge array of environmental and ecological legislation and yet be unable to stop large objects containing large amounts of highly toxic material parking in an area where, in bad weather conditions, for instance, there might be a catastrophe and a spillage—we hope that that will not happen—the ecological significance of which would be colossal. Clearly, we must be able to stop that. It makes no sense for a UK Minister to be unable to stop that happening. I was therefore surprised and disappointed to discover not that the Minister did not have the powers, though such things can happen, nor that he is concerned, which is a fine thing, but that there was no sense of urgency about doing something about the situation. We need a sense of urgency; something needs to be done. If you, Mr. Bayley, and I were both in the next Parliament, as I hope I shall be—[Interruption.] I say that only to avoid any suggestion that I am talking down the Conservative party. If we were to find ourselves again in this Chamber discussing this subject, but what we were discussing in those circumstances was an ecological catastrophe as a result of the very thing that I am talking about—a weather condition leading to a spillage disaster—it would be impossible for whoever would then be the Minister to explain why action had not been taken to prevent it when so clearly it was possible to envisage that it might happen. Thinking oneself into that position, I do not see how a Minister could possibly stand up in good faith at that stage and say, "We were warned, we knew that this could happen, we watched the ships sit there but didn't do anything about it, they did spill, and now we're very sorry." That would be an impossible position to be in. The Minister would have to say, "This is a catastrophe. I'm off." The time to take action is now, before anything happens, and I do not see any reason to delay. The time to start taking action is today; in fact, the time to take action was some weeks back when the matter first came to light. The last thing I want to say is that I shall not in any way try to engage in the naive action of specifying from the outside what the Minister needs to do. I am perfectly aware that he has what I do not: a Department full of people who are expert about these matters, who are intelligent, who are knowledgeable about the kind of administrative action that could be taken, and who, I hope and believe, know the actors involved. I am not in that position; I am just trying to represent my constituents. I am making a point that seems to be irrefutable: we ought not to be bearing this risk. If the Government were properly in control of the ecological agenda, they would deal with it, and I am asking the Minister to deal with it. Whether he deals with it by negotiating positions—by going out there and trying to use the considerable leverage of the UK Government to persuade the owners of the tankers to do something different with them—as the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) suggested, whether he discovers some recess of the law that allows him to engage in further regulation that would give him powers that he could use as leverage or directly impose, or whether he needs to engage in legislation, whatever it is that he needs to do, he needs to do it; and it is him, not me, who needs to decide what it is. My point is simply that it needs to be done.