Crown Estate Bill [HL]

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 2nd September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as chair of Peers for the Planet and as a director of the associated company. I, like others, congratulate the Minister both on his appointment and the clarity with which he introduced the Bill. I was grateful for the opportunity to discuss some aspects of the Bill with him last week.

Tempting though it is, I will not follow the argument of the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Rising, with which I did not agree. I look forward to the Minister taking on that challenge. I will—as the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, predicted—address my remarks to the environmental, energy and biodiversity aspects of the Bill. I believe it is an important step on the road of turning aspirations in this area into delivery, and it is delivery we are going to need in the years taking us up to 2030 and beyond.

Despite that focus, I was extremely interested in the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, on governance, and by the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, on the basis of the sovereign grant. I look forward both to the Minister’s response and, perhaps, to discussing those issues in Committee.

The King’s Speech briefing promised:

“This Bill will modernise The Crown Estate by removing outdated restrictions on its activities, widening its investment powers and giving it the powers to borrow in order to invest at a faster pace”.


Alongside that, the Crown Estate’s own strategic objectives make clear its mission of

“supporting the UK towards a net zero carbon and energy-secure future”

and

“stewarding the UK’s natural environment and biodiversity”.

So this Bill gives us the opportunity to look at the reforms in the context of the UK’s progress towards net zero and the part that the Crown Estate can play in helping with the delivery of the Government’s wider net-zero policies and aspirations—which are clearly already the aspirations and policies of the commissioners themselves.

If we are to achieve those aspirations, as has been said many times, we need to have cross-cutting measures that span and interconnect a wide variety of sectors and bodies that need to work positively together to achieve our statutory obligations and the progress that we want to see. There is a complicated jigsaw to put together here, and the Crown Estate is a critical and important part of that wider net-zero jigsaw.

As others have said, the Crown Estate is also an organisation that makes a not insignificant contribution to the government purse and whose investment firepower has the potential to make a difference in tackling the dual climate and nature crisis, which the Government have recognised as

“the greatest long-term global challenge that we face”.

To rise to that challenge, we need not only to integrate the work of all government departments—which, frankly, is difficult enough in itself—but to recognise the potential contributions and responsibilities of all UK organisations with a public role and that discharge important public responsibilities, which clearly includes the Crown Estate. I hope that in Committee we can explore how we can combine the rightly valued independence of the Crown Estate and its commissioners with ensuring that the legislative proposals contained in the Bill contribute to what the Crown Estate itself acknowledges is at the core of its strategic activities. It underlines the need

“to make a positive impact for net zero, nature and communities while creating financial value for the UK”.

Both the Crown Estate and the Government are clearly on the same page on this, yet the fundamental duties of the Crown Estate have not been updated over the last 60 years. I hope that there will be opportunity to discuss how we can acknowledge the shared understanding that we need not only to drive up renewable power generation but to better mitigate and adapt to climate change while creating space for nature-based solutions and natural capital. Those points have already been clearly made.

As a number of others have also made clear, the new borrowing and investing powers that the Bill gives to the Crown Estate clearly have the potential to contribute to the delivery of a low-cost, secure and flexible renewables-led energy system. However, it is important also to recognise, as the Climate Change Committee has said, that there are advantages to protecting the UK’s marine and coastal environments, given that they

“represent potentially very large natural carbon stores and may provide extremely efficient carbon removal”.

If we are imaginative and committed, we can ensure that the aims of generating renewable energy can go hand in hand with other aims, particularly in respect of our responsibilities to the natural environment and nature-based solutions for both the seabed and land. With a joined-up strategic approach, there are major opportunities for achieving both.

However, there will inevitably be times when these priorities may be perceived to be in competition with one another and times when it will then be important that we make decisions, and that we do so in a transparent way. This need not impinge in any way on the independence of the commissioners’ decision-making. Indeed, the provisions on the Crown Estate’s independence, set out in the 1961 Act, are extremely robust and will remain in place. Rather, it is a clearer and better articulation of what value and good management mean in the long term.

We are now getting to the stage where the detail of how we deliver the transition to clean energy really matters, and the Bill is a positive opportunity to link how the Crown Estate will achieve both delivering more renewable energy and infrastructure, while at the same time navigating the best ways to protect and enhance our natural environment. Drawing these different aspects together clearly in the context of the Bill would ensure transparency to the Government, the public, developers and wider stakeholders around how different considerations are being factored into decisions when the inevitable arguments arise about, for example, where to site projects, the need to preserve views of the countryside and to protect wildlife species, and how to balance those views against the opportunities for more clean energy, job creation and green growth—and, of course, the ever-present need to provide value for money for the taxpayer.

Both our nature and our energy aspirations need to be in the context of other broader issues: most obviously, as has been described by others, the interface and interaction with the urgent work on upgrading the transmission grid and securing our skills pipeline, so that the 20 gigawatts to 30 gigawatts of offshore wind the Crown Estate believes it can unlock is connected up to the places it needs to power.

So, I am afraid that it is not a simple jigsaw puzzle to fit together. However, the Bill gives us a chance to review the Crown Estate’s role in the context of not only enabling more offshore wind as an end in itself but rather as part of the whole landscape of net zero and environmental solutions that we will need to deliver in order to achieve our own environmental and climate targets and to lead from the front on the global challenges we face.

We are taking important and necessary steps with the Bill but we could make a major leap forward if we commit and understand that contributing towards the delivery of climate and environment targets is secured within the remit of all our institutions with a public function, and especially those with substantial investment muscle to generate public value, and that includes the Crown Estate.