Environmental Targets (Marine Protected Areas) Regulations 2022

Baroness Parminter Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2023 Grand Committee

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Benyon) (Con)]

My Lords, I beg to move that the statutory instrument, which sets a target for the recovery of features in marine protected areas, be approved.

MPAs are one of the most important tools we have for protecting the wide range of precious and sensitive habitats and species in our waters. In England, we have established a comprehensive MPA network covering 40% of English waters. Establishing this network is an important step in achieving our goal of conserving our protected species and habitats. Now that they have been designated, we need to increase the protections for these valuable marine environments to help them recover, which is why we are setting this target.

The regulations create a legally binding target that requires at least 70% of protected features in MPAs to be in a favourable condition by 31 December 2042, with the remaining features to be in a recovering condition. This target will set, for the first time, a time-bound target for the recovery of protected features. Currently, only 44% of protected features in MPAs are assessed as being in a favourable condition.

Protected features include the different marine habitats and species, geological and geomorphological features and assemblages that are specified for protection within our MPAs. “Favourable condition” means that the features are in a good and healthy state and align with the conservation objectives of the relevant MPAs. We will assess “recovering condition” by checking whether damaging activities have been appropriately managed. This will identify exactly what rapid remedial action is required by regulators to ensure that our MPAs are being properly protected. Managing MPAs effectively and in line with their conservation objectives will secure the achievement of this target.

The purpose of this instrument is to set a time-bound target for protected features to reach a favourable condition and for the remaining features to be in a recovering condition. This instrument defines the relevant terminology, such as “favourable” and “recovering condition”. It sets a date for reporting the achievement of the target and lists all the features in MPAs subject to the target. It also sets a date by which the Secretary of State for Environment must report on whether the target is achieved and allows the Secretary of State to request advice from Natural England and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee relating to the target.

To achieve the target, the Marine Management Organisation and the Association of Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authorities are rolling out an ambitious programme to introduce necessary management measures in MPAs for the most damaging fishing activity, such as bottom trawling, by 2024. Fisheries by-laws have already been introduced in nearly 60% of England’s MPAs, challenging the criticism that MPAs are “paper parks”. By-laws are implemented following public consultation on a site-by-site basis. Once damaging activities have stopped, protected features will begin their recovery. For some of them this will be immediate, but some will take a very long time. Coral gardens, for example, can take decades to recover, which is why the 2042 date is appropriate.

In conclusion, the measures in these regulations are crucial for the improvement of our marine biodiversity. I hope noble Lords will support these measures and their objectives and approve these draft regulations. I beg to move.

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

My Lords, we welcome the target of 70% for the protection of marine protected areas by 2042. Given that the figure at the moment is 44%, 70% is a strong target. For us, the issue with this particular statutory instrument is the monitoring and how we will be clear that we are achieving these targets.

The original consultation said that protection would be monitored by additional reporting on the changes in individual feature conditions. That was then removed from the final targets that we have before us. The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee asked about this and got a bit of a non-answer from the Minister as to why there was this change and the removal of the monitoring of the individual sites. However, I was very grateful that, at the Minister’s meeting with me and colleagues last week, the Bill team were very clear that individual monitoring had been removed because of cost. Ship-based monitoring is clearly a very costly matter. Therefore, the targets today will be monitored by checking the pressures and vulnerabilities of the marine protected areas in general, so there will not be on-ship monitoring.

That is a disappointment, first, because when the OEP last week reviewed how the Government have been doing on achieving their 25-year environment plan, there were a number of areas where the OEP could not assess the level of success because the monitoring was not strong enough. In this area, we are again at risk that the monitoring being set in place to see whether the targets will be met will not, because of the cost, be sufficient to see whether the laudable target will be met. The Minister will be aware of this concern. The EIP to be published at the end of the month is proposing to set interim targets for meeting all the environmental targets that are set. Can the Minister say whether there will be a review of whether the monitoring arrangements for marine protected areas will be sufficient to see whether the targets can be met? Targets without effective monitoring are frankly meaningless.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

I apologise for being two minutes 34 seconds late. I was following the Whips’ Today’s Lists, which said 4.15 pm, so thank goodness I came early. Anyway, my apologies for being late.

Reading these targets, I believe that nobody in the Government understands the ocean. It is crucial to our well-being, and these targets are utterly insufficient. The report published last year by the APPG on the Ocean, which I recommend to the Minister and his colleagues, gave excellent advice. The chair of the APPG is a Conservative. It is a good report with masses of recommendations that the Government could take. I hope that the Minister has perhaps already read it and that his team have absorbed it—that would be wonderful—but, looking at these targets, I rather think they have not.

If this Government are going to refuse to stop or even slow down our use of fossil fuels, the ocean and the marine protected areas are crucial because, as we all know, they are a carbon sink that we cannot do without. It is always fine to talk about techno fixes, but let us face it: they do not yet exist. They are wonderful, and it will be great when they happen, but they are, at the moment, science fiction. All marine ecosystems are valuable. For example, seagrass is a wonderful gobbler-up of carbon, but we have depleted our areas of seagrass because of pollution and all sorts of other factors. However, our Link briefing points out that there is no central driver towards such marine habitats and there is insufficient monitoring. This goes against the joint fisheries statement and the marine spatial prioritisation programme, both of which talk about protecting and restoring habitats that store blue carbon. They include seagrasses, mangroves, salt marshes and even algae and macroalgae.

I thank Claire Evans of the National Oceanography Centre, who helpfully pointed out that there is a legislative target that is not being met. As a signatory to the Convention on Biological Diversity, the UK failed to reach its target of restoring at least 15% of degraded ecosystems by 2020. It was adopted by the UK as part of target 2 of the EU’s biodiversity strategy, and the lack of progress is most pronounced in the marine and costal environment, where habitat degradation continues and restoration remains in its relative infancy. I recommend that the Government not only look at this report from the APPG for the Ocean but talk to the scientists, because they can probably direct the Government in the best way to do exactly what the Government say they want to do.