Crown Estate Bill [HL]

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

3rd reading
Monday 18th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Lord Livermore) (Lab)]

My Lords, this Bill focused on modernising the Crown Estate by removing existing limitations that hamper its ability to compete and invest as a commercial business and to ensure it has a sustainable financial future for years to come. In doing so, it supports the Crown Estate to build on its strong track record of creating long-term shared prosperity for the nation.

I thank all noble Lords who have given their time and expertise to scrutinise the Bill during its passage through your Lordships’ House, genuinely strengthening the Bill in the process. Specifically, I formally thank the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, for her constructive engagement and scrutiny—in particular, on the partnership between the Crown Estate and Great British Energy and the disposal of national assets. On the latter, the Government are continuing to advance this in relation to the seabed with legal experts and will progress it in the other place if necessary. On pre-appointment scrutiny, which the noble Baroness also raised, my officials are continuing to engage with the Cabinet Office, as discussed at Report.

I sincerely thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, for her engagement on the Bill. She was instrumental in ensuring that this House had access to the draft memorandum of understanding, which improved the scrutiny we were able to give to the Bill. I also thank the noble Earl, Lord Russell, for the thoughtful scrutiny he provided throughout the debates.

On specific amendments, my thanks go to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, for her engagement on climate change, which resulted in a genuinely meaningful difference to the Bill; to the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, on the important issue of salmon farming, where I recognise the strength of feeling in this House; and to my noble friend Lord Hain, for his amendment on the Crown Estate commissioners, which will ensure the commissioners continue to act in the best interests of Wales. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, for his engagement around the law relating to ownerless land and the process of escheat.

Finally, I thank my Bill team, who behind the scenes put in a significant amount of time and effort—specifically, Sophie Gladman, James Watkinson, Ella Waters, David Fairbrother and Will Smith.

I am grateful for the engagement with the Bill and its broad support across all Benches, which will ensure that the Crown Estate can operate successfully for many more decades to come. I beg to move.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I intervene briefly to congratulate my noble friend on getting this Bill as far as he has. I was very pleased to see that His Majesty the King has given consent to a Bill which will make him many times richer over the course of the next decade or so—that is good. I ask why the Duke of Cornwall has not been included in this. We have been debating his involvement for some time and it would be good to know whether the Duchy approved this Bill or not.

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, I briefly thank the Minister and all his Bill team, and Members of the House who have taken part in the debates on this Bill and contributed to many worthwhile and positive changes to the draft legislation. From these Benches, I reiterate that we support this partnership with the Crown Estate and believe it is important as part of our energy transition.

My sincere belief is that the Bill leaves us in a stronger and better place than when it arrived. We have all worked constructively to make important amendments. I thank the Minister for his courteous engagement and positive response to the issues that noble Lords have raised with him.

The publication of the business case, largely thanks to my noble friend Lady Kramer, has meant that the memorandum of understanding has given confidence and a better understanding of the partnership with GB Energy and how it will operate in practice. That was a key element in the House’s understanding.

The Minister has spoken from the Dispatch Box on the cap on the level of borrowing. That was most welcome as there is no cap in the Bill.

I thank all those who raised the important issue of devolution of the Welsh Crown Estate. A compromise agreement from the noble Lord, Lord Hain, ensured that there were concessions and that all the commissions from the devolved regions have a place.

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and the Minister on working together to agree an environmental duty. I also thank the Minister for adding a duty to report on the relationship with Great British Energy. Taken together, it is extremely important that these duties are written into the Bill and included in the framework agreement, and that the Crown Estate needs to report on them. These are not constraints but real responsibilities for the Crown Estate, which will need to meet them. They are safeguards that will exist for evermore.

It was a pleasure to move the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Young, which might perhaps be taken up in the Commons. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, for her amendments. I am disappointed that her amendment on pre-appointment scrutiny for the chair of the Crown Estate board has not come back today, but that too may be taken up in the Commons.

Crown Estate Bill [HL]

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 5th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 2 and 14 in my name.

On Amendment 2, I am incredibly grateful to the Government for their engagement on the importance of pre-appointment scrutiny for the Crown Estate commissioners. However, I recognise that my initial amendment in Committee was a bit ambitious and have restricted the amendment before your Lordships’ House today on Report to the chair of the Crown Estate commissioners. It is important, as I mentioned in the first group, as there is a decrease in parliamentary oversight. It is not uncommon for the chairs of the boards, or equivalent, of such significant public sector bodies to at least have some form of questioning prior to taking up their role.

I note that, in his letter yesterday, the Minister said:

“The Government has not tabled an amendment on this matter because there is already an established process by which roles such as this are added to the Cabinet Office’s pre-appointment scrutiny list. The Treasury will work with the Cabinet Office to progress this matter”.


I am grateful to the Government for their assurance that the chair of the Crown Estate commissioners could be added to the Cabinet Office’s pre-appointment scrutiny list; we will be holding the Government to account as this is progressed.

Amendment 14 is, again, related to the importance of the assets for which the Crown Estate is responsible. It has the stewardship of billions of pounds-worth of very important assets for the benefit of the nation. Some of these assets are on land, some make up the seabed, some are incredibly important thoroughfares in our main urban centres, and others might be important agricultural land across the nation. I can see very few guardrails to prevent the Crown Estate commissioners deciding to sell those assets. Indeed, there have been quite significant asset sales over recent years, and I was not really able to find any information as to what has been sold.

We made this argument in Committee, and I am grateful to the Government for their assurance that they will bring forward an amendment or some sort of process by which the seabed might be protected. However, my understanding is that the law in this area is very complicated, so I am somewhat concerned that a process could not be found that is seabed-specific. Nevertheless, I welcome the Government’s engagement and their recognition that selling off elements of our seabed in perpetuity would not be wise and should not be done without some form of transparency.

However, as I said previously, it is not just about the seabed; I also remain concerned about other important assets owned by the Crown Estate. My Amendment 14 simply proposes that, should the Crown Estate sell more than £10 million-worth of assets—I am happy to look at a different figure—there would be some form of transparency to Parliament, such that noble Lords and colleagues in the other place could see the assets being disposed of and make at least some assessment of whether that is the right course of action for the Crown Estate.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I wish to speak to Amendment 15 in my name, which is in this group. I tabled the same amendment that we debated in Committee because my noble friend had not yet been able to respond in his promised letter; but, of course, he has now responded, and I presume all noble Lords have seen the letter. I found it very helpful, and I thank him for it. However, my amendment provides an opportunity to debate what is in that letter and issues that affect quite a lot of people—not only in the Isles of Scilly but in some of the other places related to the ownership of the Duchies or the Crown Estate. There are a few principles I would like to discuss and see where we get to.

What I found most interesting was that my noble friend’s letter was quite clear that both Duchies are private estates—I do not think there is any debate about that now. The Duchy has been saying this for a long time, and it is in his letter from the Treasury. I am also grateful for the explanations about the finance and the involvement, or not, of the Public Accounts Committee in the other place, the National Audit Office, et cetera. But then we get into rather more interesting and difficult territory. In his letter, my noble friend says:

“Crown bodies … are not bound by the enfranchisement legislation”


that your Lordships’ House debated over many months earlier this year. I question how a private estate cannot be bound by legislation such as that—why should the Duchy be exempt?

We then get into an even deeper mystery about what are called “excepted” areas. There is a distinct lack of transparency here. I will not go into great detail about the problems faced by the tenants on the Isles of Scilly because noble Lords can read material from the previous year or two. During the legislation at the end of the last Parliament, the then Chief Whip, the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, read out a parliamentary undertaking that attempted to differentiate between what they call “non-excepted” and “excepted” areas. So my first question to my noble friend the Minister is: what is an excepted area, and who decides? Is it Parliament, the Government or the landowner—in this case the Duke of Cornwall—who decides what should or should not be included in legislation? That is interesting for a private sector company, and it needs debating.

Given that, last weekend, there was a lot of publicity in the media, including the Sunday Times, you start wondering what “private” means in this context. Presumably, all private bodies should pay tax—that is pretty fundamental to our life here—including income tax. The Duchy and His Majesty say that they pay tax, but it is voluntary. I would love to pay voluntary tax and to decide how much it was, as I am sure many other noble Lords would, but that is not what it is all about. They do not pay corporation tax, capital gains tax or inheritance tax. They get all that rental income, which noble Lords may have read about in the Sunday Times, from ambulances parking on their land, with the National Health Service being charged and paying the Duchy of Cornwall, I think it was. This seems to be a bit of a recycling of the cash that the Duchy claims it needs to charge people. This comes back to the Duchy claiming credit—I see this on the Isles of Scilly—for allowing bodies to use its land and charging them for it.

One example is that the farmers on the Isles of Scilly want an abattoir built so that they do not have to transport animals to the mainland, which I think is a good idea. The Duchy said, “You can have the land”. Many of us think that it does not own the land anyway, but, leaving that to one side, if it allocates land to an abattoir, it will then charge the farmers for using it. Is that right, when the land does not really belong to it and it is not contributing to the cost? That is another debate that we need to have on this.

Perhaps what is wrong is that the Duchy needs the money, but given what is in the rest of the Bill, it will result in His Majesty and other members of the family getting quite a lot more. One could surmise that they do not need the money and that it might be better if they paid their taxes and invested properly in an estate, like many large estate owners in this country already do. Noble Lords will have heard me speak about the appalling transport services between the Isles of Scilly and the mainland, where a single fare by ship or plane usually costs the best part of £100. The Duchy could contribute to that—it would just be small change.

Crown Estate Bill [HL]

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 22nd October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)]

My Lords, Amendment 41 in my name is included in this group of amendments and is supported by my noble friend Lord Wigley. This amendment would require the publication of an agreed fiscal framework between the Treasury and the Crown Estate before commencement of the Act.

During day one of Committee there were strong arguments made in support of the second group of amendments—a number of them seeking to write a fiscal framework. I believe that there is a shared view from around the Chamber that such a framework should have been drafted and published before Second Reading of this Bill. I am therefore grateful that the Minister, in his response to the second group of amendments, committed to publishing the framework before Report. If that is the case, I will not need to push for an amendment of this kind on Report.

However, I will take this opportunity to highlight some concerns regarding the possible content of the fiscal framework. I am concerned by the possibility of no hard cap on borrowing. I am led to believe that the framework will instead impose a loan-to-value ratio of 25%, which, as the Minister has already noted, would currently be around £3 billion and could go beyond that. To put this into perspective, the Welsh Government fiscal framework has a cap of £l billion on capital expenditure, with an annual borrowing limit of £150 million, which it can borrow from the National Loans Fund or a commercial bank. I ask the Minister: would the passing of this Bill as it stands, alongside a fiscal framework of a loan-to-value ratio of 25%, give the Crown Estate more or less borrowing power than the devolved Government of Wales?

I share the view expressed by the noble baroness, Lady Kramer, that the Crown Estate is no “cuddly” organisation. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response to my question on how the proposed borrowing powers will compare to the current fiscal powers of the devolved Governments, particularly the Welsh Government.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 42 in this group. It is another attempt at putting a condition on the Government in bringing this Bill into effect, until the Crown Estate in my case has fulfilled the undertakings given on Report of the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act: specifically, the commitment that it would publish its lease extension policy. I got an answer from the Minister’s colleague in July when I asked when this was going to happen. The answer was very interesting. It was that the Crown would act in accordance with the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 and the statutes it amended, subject to specific specified conditions—I do not know what specific unspecified conditions are, but we will leave that out—set out in the undertaking, and the expectation was that the Crown bodies would work with the tenants as they developed these policies.

The problem is of course that the specific specifying conditions referred to refer to the Isles of Scilly and the tenants there—about whom I have spoken to your Lordships many times—are suffering significantly due to their inability to negotiate leases of a reasonable length of time which would be allowed under the new Act.

I was told subsequently that this Crown statement cannot be made in advance of the relevant regulations under the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act being tabled, because that is the way it always is. But the worry I have is also that the Duchy of Cornwall and Crown Estate may publish them and there will be no opportunity for debating them and offering and suggesting changes to them. This gets back to my question last time we raised this: who is in charge? I was very pleased to get a response from Dr John Kirkhope, an expert on Duchy things, explaining that this is all because of the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall (Accounts) Act 1838. It is because the two Duchies got their revenue from George I and George IV and, before that, from being Electors of Hanover rather than Kings or Queens of England

I am told that, under Salic law, a female could not be elector of Hanover, so Queen Victoria suddenly thought that she was going to lose all this money. She persuaded the Parliament of the time to bring in this Bill, which became the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall (Accounts) Act 1838. I can read out the whole Act—it is not that long—but I think noble Lords would probably prefer that I did not. It required the two duchies to submit accounts to the Government every year for Parliament to approve.

When I tried to put down a Question to ask for how many years this had taken place, who could tell me which years those were and where the accounts were, I was told by the clerks that it was a bit unclear who was in charge. Was it Parliament, the Government or the Crown? I do not think it would be the Crown, because that would mean the Crown being in charge of itself, which is probably not very desirable and probably not true. I would be grateful if my noble friend the Minister could tell me over how many years these two duchies have submitted accounts and over how many years, if any, they have been debated in either House of Parliament.

My question to my noble friend is: when will the Government publish these Crown Estate policies? Do they have to wait until they have published secondary legislation on leasehold reform? When these special conditions are published, will the Government provide an opportunity for debate? I can see the Crown saying that it is in charge and that nobody can tell it what to do, and so we cannot debate them. The conditions applicable to the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act will be modified to the extent that the people of the Isles of Scilly, who suffer quite a lot, not just from rents but from transport and a few other things, will not have an opportunity to debate this and see whether the duchies are playing fair. I look forward to my noble friend’s response.

Crown Estate Bill [HL]

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 14th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)]

My Lords, as a follow-on to what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, said in relation to Wales, if the Crown Estate is devolved to Scotland, why should it not be devolved to Northern Ireland? The Crown Estate plays a critical role in the stewardship of our seas and terrestrial environment. As well as large landholdings, the estate manages the seabed around England, Wales and Northern Ireland, along with 50% of our coastline, and it will support the tripling of the electricity sector’s capacity, with the deployment of 125 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2050.

During Second Reading, I pointed out that, in the Northern Ireland context, the electricity industry is managed on an all-island basis, north-south, through the all-Ireland electricity market. I received a very helpful response from the Minister, my noble friend Lord Livermore, in relation to this issue. Could he give some thought to the devolution of the Crown Estate to Northern Ireland, in the context of the electricity market and how the electricity supply is managed? Can he say whether there will be a connection and co-operation with the Irish Government on the Great British energy market and the all-Ireland energy market and the Irish Sea?

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, briefly, I support these amendments. I get involved, along with many other noble Lords, in offshore energy issues, particularly in Cornwall. I can see a time coming when there will be enormous pressure on central government as to where these great big tanks—the floating windmills or whatever you want to call them—are manufactured, where they are located, from where they are serviced and, probably most important of all, where the power lines come ashore. There has already been lots of talk about Port Talbot as the only possible place for their manufacture for the south-west. There is lots of flat land there and it is probably very good, but, living in Cornwall, I would like to make sure that some benefits come to the ports in Cornwall from some of those issues.

It would seem, from what many noble Lords have said, that there is a strong argument for drawing a line down the Bristol Channel out to the medium and sticking to it, then using that line for any kind of debate or discussion that takes place on offshore oil or offshore wind, or anything else like that. If not, we are going to have this kind of debate every time: “How much does Wales get?”, “How much does Cornwall get?”, “How much does Devon get?”. It would be much better if it was agreed—I am not sure by whom, but there has to be someone in this Government—where this line was and everything that leads from there.

While I am on my feet, I would like to ask my noble friend the Minister where the Duchy of Cornwall and its offshore or beach interests come into this, if at all. The Duchy of Cornwall has the right to treasure trove if treasure is found in Cornwall, and that goes into the coffers of the Duke of Cornwall—as opposed to in the rest of the country, where it would go into the coffers of the Government. Again, it would be nice to know where the boundaries are. It would be much easier to have a good debate about them if we knew where the start and finish were.

--- Later in debate ---

In effect, the Crown Estate is seeking to make a profit on the backs of leaseholders, who are being offered the freehold at a far higher price than they would have had to pay had their freeholder not disappeared. That is what the Crown Estate believes, but what does the Minister think? How does he begin to defend what I have just said? In his Written Answer to me, published today, the Minister confirms that we will have a new “draft Memorandum of Understanding” between his department and the Crown Estate. The solution is for that document to make it clear that the Acts of Parliament apply when the Crown disposes of freeholds under the process of escheat. I look forward to his reply and to the views of others who had the patience to listen to what I have just said. I make it clear that I will come back to this on Report if there is no satisfactory resolution before then.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise to add a little extra interest to the statements made by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham. We discussed this at Second Reading and my Amendment 42, which will come at the end of tomorrow night if we ever get that far, is about the same issue. I go back to the statement made by the Chief Whip of the previous Government, who basically said that the Crown will comply with the legislation if it chooses to; that is a summary. The way it chooses to do it will be published at some time, which is relevant to my amendment.

The reason I am speaking now is because the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Young, beg the question: who is in charge? Is it the Government or the Crown Estate or, in my case, the Duchy of Cornwall? Each one blames the other and says that they are not in charge, but they actually probably are. They then refuse to have correspondence. I am pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Young, got a letter.

I have a good friend, Dr John Kirkhope, who advises on many issues around the Duchy of Cornwall, which is not much different to the Crown Estate. He tried to get a freedom of information decision on whether he could seek copies of correspondence between the Duchy and the Government—I think that includes the Crown Estate, the Duchy and the Government—on matters of policy. The answer was no. He went back and said, “Here you have an unelected body apparently advising government on matters of policy and that does not seem very right to me”.

Paragraph 16 of the eight-page response from the Information Commissioner’s Office on whether any information should be disclosed says:

“The Commissioner considers that the following factors will be key indicators of the formulation or the development of government policy”.


There are then three bullet points.

“the final decision will be made either by the Cabinet or the relevant minister; … the government intends to achieve a particular outcome or change in the real world; and … the consequences of the decision will be wide-ranging”.

The Crown Estate therefore

“advised that it considered direct correspondence as well as correspondence where the Crown Estate and the Duchy of Cornwall had been copied into”

and decided that it is reasonable to withhold information.

It looks as if the Crown Estate and the Duchy of Cornwall—we never mention the Duchy of Lancaster, but I think it is rather less difficult—seem to be a Government of their own. This is back to the feudal system, where Ministers, whom we elect and appoint, are unable to effect any legislation regarding the Crown Estate or the Duchy because they are not so important. It is back to the feudal system, and I shall come back to this on Amendment 42.

I hope my noble friend will give the noble Lord, Lord Young, a pretty strong response, because this is something that will go on and on—whether it is escheat or something else. The people affected are getting pretty fed up with the Duchy and Crown Estate playing them and not coming back with a decent response.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I would like to be helpful to the noble Lord. I am told that the memorandum of understanding deals exclusively with borrowing powers, so it may not be the most appropriate vehicle to insert that into.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

Before the Minister sits down, I have a very simple question to ask him. We have had a very interesting debate, and I have understood much of it, but who does the Crown Estate—and therefore the Duchy of Cornwall—report to? Is it the Government or Parliament? Who controls them, or are they a law unto themselves? In spite of the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, I do not think the King comes into it.

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

It is a very good question, and I shall endeavour to find the answer and write to my noble friend.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. I congratulate him on the work that he is doing in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.

I support these amendments for two reasons. First, earlier this year the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, and I discovered that Defra’s JNCC had produced a report advising the Government not to drill for oil in MPAs. We had a debate about it and the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, basically said, “Drilling for oil is more important than protecting the environment”. I do not know what has happened to that. Perhaps my noble friend the Minister could come back to me at some point and say, but that was a very low point. The reports were very good, and I do not think that the oil demand for this country needed to have particular oil wells. I might be wrong, but I think it was in the 33rd oil and gas licensing round. We must be pretty careful about this. As the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said, there is a balance to be drawn.

I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, has talked to the fishermen’s association in Cornwall. I have been talking to it, at its request, and it is concerned. It is a reasonable concern, because he is quite right about some of the methods used in fishing at the moment, which are pretty unacceptable. On the other hand, those fishermen are frightened that, when we get these wonderful floating windmills in the south-west or anywhere else, they will be told that they cannot finish within several miles of the installation. I do not know whether that applies to the supply cables and everything else like that, but there needs to be a proper consultation about who needs what, how big these areas of protection are and, if necessary, where the fishermen can fish instead.

I am told that there is a report from Defra that was commissioned a year ago, entitled “Working on the Marine Special Protection Project”. I do not know whether the Minister knows about this. It has not been published but it would be a very good contribution to the debate if it could be and discussed with the fishing industry and the other people involved in offshore, and maybe a proper conclusion—

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

As we are in Committee, I would just like to answer one of those questions. I do speak to the Cornish Fish Producers’ Organisation and absolutely commend Chris Ranford, who operates it, for his great work in that area. The noble Lord is right. One thing that needs to come out of these planning areas is the fishing industry having the right spaces to fulfil what it wants to do in economic growth and the good things that happen to the local and coastal economies. This is important and I am thankful to him for mentioning it.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord. We both need to have another discussion with Chris and his colleagues, as does the Minister, to make sure we can come up with something that works for everyone. I end by congratulating the noble Lord on his appointment; I look forward to working with him.

Crown Estate Bill [HL]

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 2nd September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend for his introduction to this Bill. I congratulate him. He has a challenge. He said that the Bill will bring the Crown Estate into the 21st century; he has some way to go, as many of the speeches that noble Lords have made have shown, but it is a good start. My remarks will include comments about the Duchy of Cornwall and the Duchy of Lancaster, because they all come under the Crown. I have a number of questions which I would be very grateful if my noble friend could answer at some stage, either tonight or later.

I suppose I start with geography. Many noble Lords have talked about the seabed, but where is the boundary between what is sea and what is land? Is it high water or low water? Other noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, and the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, mentioned what you can do on those bits of water. I have one small example from the Helford river in Cornwall, where the Duchy of Cornwall, which claims to own it, introduced Japanese oysters, which had the rather stupid result not only of those oysters dying but of killing all the other native oysters on the river. One of my neighbours took the Duchy to court and said, “You haven’t done an environmental study on the effect that Japanese oysters might have on the other things in the water and everywhere else”. The secretary of the Duchy of Cornwall, who has now retired, made the classic remark to the tribunal, “To all intents and purposes, we believe that we are above the law”. I call that arrogant, and I shall come back to it later.

We had another problem with what the Crown Estate should, could or could not do in our discussions on the Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill, on 23 April. A number of noble Lords were not very happy that the Minister tried to allow offshore oil drilling to take place in marine protected areas—that is at col. 496. The noble Lord, Lord Callanan, who is not in his place, basically said that drilling for oil was really much more important than the advice from the JNCC—the statutory committee from Defra—which said that we should not do it. I wonder how the Crown Estate and the Government would look on that in the future: is drilling for oil more important than protecting the marine environment? What criteria should one use?

We have not discussed so much the sideline of how much money the Royal Family gets from the Crown Estate to perform its duties. We have talked about percentages—15% for the King and an extra 10% for doing up Buckingham Palace—but then, of course, the Duchy of Lancaster also gives the Royal Family £20 million and the Duchy of Cornwall £24 million. I compare that—which I think comes to about £132 million and goes to keeping the Royal Family in the state that we presumably think is appropriate—with the equivalent £49 million for the Dutch royal family, and the same for the Norwegian royal family. Figures for other royal families go down from there. Who decides what the percentage should be or how it should be allocated? Should not Parliament decide?

The noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, was very kind about a previous speech that I made about the problems of the freehold, which is next on my shopping list and still uncertain, because none of the Crown bodies has yet published how they intend to deal with the freeholds on properties that they own. It makes me wonder why it is that, hundreds of years after George III did a deal with the Treasury where he gave Crown land in return for a yearly stipend, the Duchy of Cornwall was not included in that. It must be the only organisation that receives a blank cheque without doing anything at all. I will not repeat what the noble Lord said, because we will probably have to discuss that on another occasion.

I cannot see how this behaviour justifies the sort of largesse that is given by the state—which is us—to its constitutional monarchy. The Crown is clearly not going to treat its tenants as other landlords have agreed to do by the passing of the Bill. It may publish its own rules on tenancy when it feels like it. It is uncertain whether the other landlords will behave in the same way, but I expect that the Duke of Westminster, the Duke of Northumberland and all the other big landowners will comply, because that is what the law says. But there is no debate with the Duchy of Cornwall or the Crown Estate, and there is no appeal, and Ministers often seem frightened of engaging. On this side of the House, we are members of the Labour Party, and parliamentary democracy should mean that we take this very seriously and try to deal with it in a way that means everybody is treated equally.

I have some suggestions that could simplify things. I suspect they will be rejected by my noble friend, but it is worth outlining them because, at the end of today’s debate, many noble Lords will wonder, with so many things going on, what can be done—especially as we all want the Bill to go through.

One suggestion would be to incorporate the Duchy of Cornwall and the Duchy of Lancaster into the Crown Estate and remove all the exemptions; in other words, everybody would have to behave in the same way, with no special terms. The relationship between the Crown Estate, the Duchies, the Treasury and Parliament needs clarity, and the ability to debate, challenge and reach agreement. We cannot do that at the moment. The system is, frankly, medieval and feudal. Nobody dares to challenge the Duchy of Cornwall or the Crown Estate, but I think that we should.

My last suggestion is probably even more radical. I have listened to some wonderful speeches this afternoon. It would not take much to nationalise the Crown Estate or to include the Duchy of Cornwall and the Duchy of Lancaster in a nationalised body that owns the seabed and a few other things. Noble Lords will find that in many other countries the seabed is owned by the state. There is no reason why ours should not be. Parliament could allocate an annual grant to the King to cover all his royal expenses. It might stop us pussyfooting around. We do not want to upset anybody, but we want answers. I have a horrible feeling that Ministers may shy away from confronting what needs to be confronted. More power to my noble friend’s elbow if he takes this forward.