Crown Estate Bill [HL]

Debate between Earl of Leicester and Lord Bellingham

Committee stage
Tuesday 22nd October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, I also support my noble friend, who recently sponsored an important debate in the Moses Room on this very subject. I inform noble Lords, if they had not spotted it already, that this is a very modest measure. It is not instructing the Scottish Environment Protection Agency or the local planning authority; it is simply instructing the commissioners of the Crown Estate and asking them to be more responsible in terms of outlook to the environment and, in particular, to the obvious evidence that is accumulating about the damage being done to salmon and sea-trout.

I want to reinforce what I hope the Minister is going to say by giving him what I think it is the really important example of the River Lochy on the west coast of Scotland near Fort William. That was once a very important salmon river with a prolific angling catch of well over 1,500. It has gone downhill quite catastrophically: the numbers have decreased; the number of staff employed as ghillies on the river has gone right down; and the impact of tourism on the economy has been very badly affected.

About seven years ago, the two fish farms in Loch Linnhe were both fallowed for a year. The following year, the number of grilse coming into the river went up very sharply and the angling catch went up by a factor of three and a half. That seems to me to be quite compelling and overwhelming evidence of the damage that is being done, which my noble friend described so eloquently. I hope the Minister will accept this amendment because it is a modest amendment and, as I say, it is not actually affecting any government or local government organisation; it is simply affecting the commissioners and giving them this extra duty. I support my noble friend.

[The Earl of Leicester (Con)]

My Lords, I declare interests as a trustee of the Burnham Overy Harbour Trust and president of the Wells-next-the-Sea RNLI station—I say that only because they both go out to sea. I apologise that I was not here at Second Reading on 2 September; I was in the Netherlands on business also relating to the environment. Like my noble friend Lord Trenchard, I agree that the main purpose of the Bill is to allow the Crown Estate to borrow and leverage against its assets and manage them in a way becoming of the 21st century.

I am astounded that the Crown Estate is not required to undertake the same level of environmental impact assessment that we do on the mainland. Amendment 37F is incredibly straightforward. It seeks to install in law a requirement for the Crown Estate to undertake an EIA, just like any other business on the mainland planning to undertake large-scale engineering works.

In preparation for this amendment, I spoke to a number of people in my local community on the coast of North Norfolk: Andy Frary of the Wells & District Inshore Fishermen’s Association; Bob Smith, the Wells-next-the-Sea harbourmaster; Leo Hambro, founder of Tidal Transit; and Professor Jenny Gill of the School of Biological Sciences at UEA—she is not really in my community any more, because she has just moved to Fife.

As the harbourmaster and I discussed, obviously the Crown Estate wants the rent, but this EIA needs to be rather more rigorous. If we insist that the Crown Estate will be required to undertake detailed environmental impact assessments, who will monitor that? Will it be the MMO? Bob Smith’s view is that the MMO is vastly removed from the coalfaces; it gives out the licences but has inexperienced staff and does not really understand local communities.

The fishermen I spoke to, the harbourmaster and I are very much for wind farms out to sea. We have marine protected areas and, ironically, once a wind farm is established, it becomes a sort of natural marine protected area. Rock armour is placed around the base of the wind turbines to protect them from big tides and scarring, et cetera. It then quickly attracts crustaceans—lobsters and crabs—and fish and there is a 50-metre “no fishing” rule for fishermen, who cannot get close to them. It is almost a sanctuary for all these crustacea. As they develop and thrive, they move out and the fishermen can then catch them.

There was also concern that giving licences to different companies for different wind farms was rather disjointed; they should be liaising on where their cables can come together out to sea so that they hit the land in one place. That has happened to an extent in North Norfolk, where they come ashore at Weybourne.

Professor Jenny Gill looks at this from an environmental point of view. The location of these wind farms is the most important thing. We need to avoid putting them where birds are—they are easier to monitor than fish and sea mammals. The concern is bird strike out to sea. Organisations such as the BTO and the RSPB have done a lot of work on flight heights of migratory birds and sea birds in relation to rotor speed and on whether bird strike is a big threat. Bob Smith surveys boats going out from Wells-next-the-Sea; maybe they are lucky and the wind farm they have been surveying is in the right place, but they come back and say, “We saw four birds today”. That damage is not happening.

In seeking this EIA, I am encouraging the Government to involve nature conservation organisations at an early stage so that they can be part of the planning process. Professor Gill mentioned that this is getting quite complicated. Beth Scott, professor in marine ecology at Aberdeen University, has worked on how tides work in open sea and form around tidal nodes and on whether putting static turbines on the ground changes the way tides work and the spatial way in which they move.

The big thing is making the planning process more transparent and getting conservation organisations at the table. They do not want to be adversarial; they are all at the green end of the scale and want to see a lot more of this renewable energy.

I had a very interesting conversation with Leo Hambro, of Tidal Transit. He operates crew transfer boats. I talked to him about the construction phase of these wind farms. He said that there have been improvements of late, in the last few years, including air bubble rings that are placed around the piling system which let out bubbles to reduce the sonic boom—which of course carries a long way underwater—therefore, we hope, mitigating damage to mammals. However, that has happened only recently.

When trenching, that is done either through some sort of underground machine that pulls a plough through the sand or, more often, through a large ship pulling a plough which turns over a trench a metre deep, into which the big cable is placed and then sand is placed back over it. If necessary, a few more rocks are placed on top of it. However, there really ought to be an EIA to decide which route these cables take. I suspect they probably take the shortest and cheapest route, but do they avoid mussel lays? They must avoid sunken ships, but off the coast of north Norfolk, in Cromer, we have a very important chalk reef, and it is important that that is protected.

To go back to crew transfer boats, Leo Hambro has seven of them. In fact, there are 200 around the UK and 700 around the world. Some 80% of them are in the UK and Europe because of the large-scale wind farms we have out to sea. To explain, these boats go out every day and take engineers to maintain and man the wind farms. The average stat for the industry is to use 1,500 litres of red diesel a day. In reality, he said they could use 2,500 to 4,000 litres a day, particularly if they are servicing a wind farm which is 45 miles away. He has to service East Anglia ONE from Lowestoft. These boats are going at 20 knots, so they are burning a lot of diesel.

It is not the case that when they get out there they switch their engines off. They have to spend up to two hours pushing against the turbine to make a safe platform for workers, transferring kit on and off the boat, et cetera. When they are then waiting for another three hours or so for the engineers to do their work, they have to stand off, but they do not drop an anchor and switch off; they have to run their engines to maintain generators and such on-board.

Leo Hambro is operating boats out of Wick, Grimsby, Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft. An interesting point to which I hope the Minister pays attention is that one of his boats is being converted to run on pure electric. That is being done in Great Yarmouth and should be ready for May 2025, thanks to DfT UK SHORE funding. It also includes offshore and onshore charging infrastructure, which I will come to in a second. The reason I mention these boats is that, for 200 boats using 2,500 litres of red diesel a day on average, five days a week, 50 days a year, that is 125 million litres of diesel.

That takes me to exhausts. AdBlue is added to the exhaust to reduce toxins, including nitrous oxide and sulphur oxide, and diesel particulates. AdBlue is made of synthetic ammonia—