Crown Estate Bill [HL]

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 2nd September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I too welcome the Bill and the opportunity that it gives for the Crown Estate to make a greater contribution to net zero, but the Crown Estate is a big thing—it has 200,000 acres of land, 12,000 kilometres of coast and a seabed area that is bigger than the combined landmass of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It is the third biggest landowner in the UK, yet I bet that the vast majority of people in this country have only a very woolly concept of what the Crown Estate does. It keeps its light well hidden under a bushel, which I suspect is a tactic.

We need to recognise that the Crown Estate owns more land than the entire landmass of Luxembourg, and it is particularly important land, because it is marine land, which is clearly hugely important for net zero; it is coastal land—likewise; and it is urban land. So the Crown Estate has even more opportunities to do good for the nation in a multifactorial way than the Bill outlines, and I would like to ask the Minister for further commitments from the Crown Estate in return for these new powers.

I am sure that others will dwell on a number of issues connected with the core purpose of the Bill, particularly how the relationship between the Crown Estate and Great British Energy will deliver the pace and extent of offshore wind, carbon capture and storage, and other net-zero developments that we need to achieve our net-zero targets.

The one I would like to focus on in this area is joining up to the grid. The process of revamping the grid in this country and changing the way in which join-up to the grid happens needs to be fundamentally reformed to become much more agile. It continues to drag behind the pace we need in order to meet the net-zero commitments and to develop a new, more distributed system to join up with the renewables pattern that we are seeing emerging. We cannot be behind the pace on that particularly important item.

We also need to understand how the new powers that the Crown Estate will have will increase investment, not just in seabed leasing partnerships, which have been its stock in trade primarily in the marine area so far, but in technological development, innovation, port development and the development of provisioning systems. Can the Government give us some assurances on all those things and on how the Crown Estate will use its improved investment powers to take them forward?

I shall also focus on beyond the net-zero objectives of the Bill, because the Crown Estate has other strategic objectives. One is the promotion of the natural environment and biodiversity, and one is about communities and urban centres. The Crown Estate briefing on this Bill says that it will unblock investments for nature recovery across its portfolio as a result of the provisions of the Bill, but the Bill and the Explanatory Notes are remarkably silent on how investment for nature recovery will be unblocked. Can the Minister fill us in on this and on how it will happen? The Crown Estate, as a major landowner, would be a hugely powerful player in biodiversity recovery.

Associated with that, and connected to it, is the role that the Crown Estate is playing in the development of the strategic spatial energy plan. Noble Lords who have heard me bang on about a land use framework will recognise that I am just about to bang on about a land use framework. That strategic spatial energy plan needs to be nested in an overarching land use framework that will allow energy needs for land to be considered alongside the multitude of other land use needs and requirements, such as housing and development, biodiversity, food resilience, flood risk management, other climate change and adaptation needs, timber, trees, green space infrastructure, to name but a few.

The Conservative Government endlessly promised a land use framework but failed to deliver it. The new Government have also committed to such a framework, and I am very grateful for that, but I received an Answer to a Written Question during the Summer Recess that rather disappointed me, and I had no Minister to be able to rant to immediately, because it was very non-specific on dates and seemed to focus primarily on land use issues as defined by Defra and a few CLG issues rather than including energy, transport and other infrastructure needs for land.

Can the Minister tell the House when we might expect the much awaited land use framework, how the Crown Estate and its enhanced powers will be a key player in delivering a land use framework, and how the Government’s very welcome commitment to join up policy across government departments will work in this particular area of land use to ensure that we see the needs of all factors in UK public life across all departments in a multifunctional way brought together in a land use framework?

A further principal strategic objective of the Crown Estate is the promotion of communities and urban centres. The Crown Estate is a major urban landowner, as I said. Can the Minister tell the House what requirements will be laid upon the Crown Estate to use its assets of land, buildings and powers, both old and new, to ensure that it helps the nation to turn the corner in delivering not just houses to pace but the right sort of houses? The current speculative developer-dominated system in this country is broken. We do not build enough genuinely affordable houses with a range of tenures. Instead, volume housebuilders wriggle out of commitments to deliver affordable houses using the viability challenge.

The houses we now build in this country are the smallest and meanest in Europe—that has happened over the last 15 years—and they have inadequate environmental standards. Can the Minister assure us that the Crown Estate will be required to play a key role in promoting housing management and building that is affordable, well designed and environmentally progressive, rather than expensive, spatially inadequate and environmentally lacking? I was encouraged by the noble Lord’s mention of the work already done by the Crown Estate to make its own estate more environmentally sound and appropriate for future needs. We want to see more of that, both in the Crown Estate’s existing estate and in the future development that the Bill will enable it to undertake.

I will make one last point. The Crown Estate is a key player in climate change mitigation but, as a major landowner and property owner, it also has a great opportunity to promote a better way forward in adaptation to the very real impacts of climate change that we are already seeing. I am talking about increased flooding and heatwaves—especially urban heat—as well as challenges to water supply and quality, and increased storminess.

The Crown Estate is a major property owner and developer. It can do much to make land and property more resilient in the face of climate change challenges. The noble Baroness, Lady Brown, who is chair of the Adaptation Sub-Committee of the Climate Change Committee, has reported very critically in successive reports on the lack of progress being made across the board in improving the resilience of this country in the face of climate change impacts. The time has now come to start taking seriously this Cinderella/poor relation on the climate change spectrum. We are simply not making progress on adaptation and we need to do so because the effects are not something that will happen in the future; they are happening now. It is only a matter of time before we will see a serious flood risk incident where lives will be lost—and we will have been asleep at the wheel.

Can the Minister tell us how the Government will ensure that the Crown Estate will step up to the mark and drive forward the big difference it can make, in its roles, to climate resilience in the UK? The Minister very kindly had a conversation with me and other noble Lords. I am sure he will say that this is a modest Bill but, in reality, the Crown Estate is a big opportunity and I hope that we will hear big assurances from the Minister today.