Draft United Kingdom Marine Policy Statement

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Wednesday 15th December 2010 Grand Committee

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

First, I welcome this draft marine policy statement as a concept. I also welcome the fact that it is a draft, and the reasons for that will become apparent as I continue with my comments. I particularly welcome the opportunity for a plan-led approach to marine areas. The Minister quite rightly said that the marine policy statement is a landmark. I hope that my noble friend will not take the quite critical remarks that I am about to make as criticism of the effort to move forward in this area; they are meant to be constructive criticism, because we are at a draft stage.

The marine policy statement is of course a follow-up, as the Minister said, from the Marine and Coastal Access Act, which itself followed the draft Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Greenway, who will speak later, chaired the Joint Committee on the Draft Marine Bill with such skill. In both the Joint Committee and the subsequent discussion in both Houses, there was a very in-depth discussion on what was needed in marine areas and where the conflicts lay. There are conflicts in the environmental, social and economic demands for dredging, spawning grounds and so on. However, the draft marine policy statement does not really reflect the depth of our discussion but starts almost from a point before any of those debates took place.

In my view, a policy document should lay out the choices that need to be made and should then say which one the Government are likely to choose. The point of having a consultation on a draft policy is that people can react to the choices that are likely to be made. A policy document is, if you like, a route map that gets you from A to B by a chosen route, but it allows others to argue that a different route would be better. The draft marine policy statement is more a description of the landscape than a route map and it is quite hard to discern a firm policy in it. The Minister gave a clue as to why that might be when he talked about across-Whitehall work. I fear that, where the departments started out with a very firm view, the need to arrive at a consensus has meant that those views were watered down until we are left with, in many cases, a series of platitudes.

Only when we get to the summary of the appraisal of sustainability do some of the options start to be laid out—or even an example of what the options would be—such as in alternative proposal 6 on page 86, where the option of multiple uses is discussed. That is my first problem with the draft marine policy statement. It would be good if the Government asked departments to decide which policy would take preference. The Minister may say that that is for the more detailed marine plans, but I believe that the marine policy statement is meant to be an overarching policy document so those details should appear in the MPS.

For example, the marine policy statement talks about the integration of marine planning with terrestrial planning regimes. That integration will need to be considerable because the marine plans will apply up to mean high water, which in many cases is right up river estuaries and into some of the busiest areas of use. Therefore, shipping might need to be balanced with environmental demands such as migrating birds as well as with recreational activities and so on. The draft policy statement says:

“marine planning systems will sit alongside and interact with existing planning regimes … both systems may adapt and evolve over time”.

That is an example of a platitude. The statement needs to specify who will resolve any disagreement where those plans sit alongside but come into conflict. Will it be for the Minister to resolve the conflicts that will undoubtedly arise?

Another example might be a marina development, which may be highly desirable socially and economically but possibly undesirable in environmental terms. The terrestrial planning system—which has the biggest vote, if you like—may be vociferous while the environmental side may have much less of a voice. What happens when the two regimes cannot agree?

To take another example, a wind farm at sea might be said to concern only the marine planning system, but the amount of terrestrial servicing that such wind farms need is substantial, so the effect on terrestrial planning could be considerable. Integrated coastal zone management is a very good idea and has been a good start, but integrated coastal zone management has no powers and no resources so it will not bail us out.

Box 1 in chapter 2, which deals with the vision, lists the “high level marine objectives”, which the Minister went through. I do not know whether his order was random or particular because he started by referring to the economic and the social objectives. Does the marine policy statement have to stick with the high-level objectives as laid out in box 1, or is there room for manoeuvre? Let us remember that a lot of the drive for the marine Act came from the environmental sector and from the fact that entire species and ecosystems were being wiped out. Besides the need for a planning system for marine areas, the drive for a marine Act was to preserve and to recover a network of coherently viable ecosystems in the seas around our coast. That ambition is not realised at all in the high-level marine objectives, although Chapter 3 suggests that that issue is an important objective. I do not find much synergy between those two chapters and I wonder which takes priority.

Paragraph 2.5, “Economic and social considerations”, tries to be all things to all people. It talks about,

“building strong local communities and improving access to, and enjoyment of, their marine areas … marine planning will contribute to securing sustainable economic growth both in regeneration areas and areas that already benefit from strong local economies, by enabling the sustainable use of marine resources”.

That sounds wonderful. My problem is that those things will often come into conflict. That paragraph is one example of the starting point that I mentioned before the Act went through, which was before we came to understand that the policy could not be all things to all people. Very hard choices will have to be made.

Noble Lords who speak today will no doubt talk about some of those hard choices, but one that concerns me is marine protected areas. In any consideration of areas that represent something valuable in ecological terms—we are trying to create a network of ecologically coherent zones—some activities will have to be banned. That will not be economically or socially desirable, but it will be necessary if we are to recover the ecosystems at sea.

The other side of the argument is that we are a busy shipping nation and there are pinch-points for shipping. Something not mentioned in the document is the great intensity of shipping in the Channel, where—this is a fact, I think, that I picked up from somewhere—there are more serious accidents than anywhere else in the world. Clearly, shipping is incredibly important to this nation, so it may be that a designated environmentally protected area occasionally has to give way to shipping interests. That is the type of thing that should be laid out in a proper policy statement, which would state that, in those cases—although it would be a hard choice—a plan should come down on the side of the argument that, for example, we depend on international shipping.

I wish to make a couple of other points of detail. As regards ports and shipping, safe marine navigation is incredibly important, as I have said.

One of the best sections in the document is paragraph 3.5, “Marine aggregates”, which contains the surprising statement:

“In addition there are no practicable alternative sources to marine aggregate for the maintenance of coastal defences required for climate change adaptation”.

That sweeping statement assumes that we will continue to maintain hard coastal defences, whereas I thought that, in many cases, we are now more interested in managed retreat. The document also lists a number of potential impacts of dredging and aggregate extraction, which include,

“loss of seabed habitat; impacts on fisheries”.

However, the comprehensive list that is given does not refer to the fact that the process of extraction may by its very nature threaten coastal defences. The document states that it “may alter coastal processes”, but that is very unspecific. That may seem a small detail, but it is important, given that we are spending more and more money on coastal defences. We need to ensure that we are not defending areas on the one hand while adversely affecting them on the other.

A great deal could be said about fisheries, which I hope other noble Lords will speak about. I hope that the Minister will address my fear that the draft marine policy statement does not contain hard choices and that the problem will be rectified in the final—as opposed to the draft—statement.