Crown Estate Bill [HL]

Debate between Earl of Kinnoull and Earl of Caithness

Committee stage
Tuesday 22nd October 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register and in particular as a trustee of the Blair Charitable Trust. I will make two brief points, but generally I feel very supportive of both Amendments 37 and 37G.

The first point begins with the Defra food security statistics, as updated in October 2023, where it is noted that the production-to-supply ratio in the UK is 75%. That is essentially a measure of the number of calories that we produce on these islands that we need to eat. We need to import, therefore, a quarter of all the calories at least that we eat. In fact, it is more, because we export some of what we produce as well. No new land is being produced and we are chipping away at the existing farmland with forestry, development and a certain amount of rewilding, and the population is growing, so the number of calories is going up. Aquaculture is therefore a very obvious way of improving the situation and, while I fully accept all of the many problems that we heard about so powerfully from the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, earlier on, we are going to have to face up to the fact that aquaculture is something that we will need if we are going to try to narrow the gap of the production-to-supply ratio.

As the Minister said in his Second Reading speech— I am sorry that I was not there—the Crown Estate is very rarely here in this Chamber; it last came in 1961. So it is important to prep the Crown Estate and do some future-proofing of it, and much of the Bill is about getting on top of energy and prepping it for energy as well. Again, we are going to need to grapple with the issues that the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, raised, but on this visit to the House I think we must prep it for aquaculture as well. That means that we are going to have to have some amendments that are along the lines of Amendments 37 and 37G. I slightly prefer the width of Amendment 37G, but there are good things in both of them.

I move to my second point. There is a lot to learn from the experiences of Scotland in aquaculture, and English commissioners will certainly and inevitably face the problem faced by the trustees of the Blair Charitable Trust that a high financial offer for the use of something may come from a riskier and lower-quality bidder. The effect of Amendments 37 and 37G would be to give those commissioners an easier ability to turn down somebody who has offered a larger amount of money but has lower environmental standards and to say clearly, “No, your bid is not there, it is not in the overall interests of managing the land”—on behalf of all of us, I may say. That is a very important point.

A few years ago, I went to stay with some friends near Oban and they took us down to visit a bankrupt fish farm. I do not know whether anyone else has visited a bankrupt fish farm recently, and I know that “desert” is the wrong word when one is talking about a sea loch, but “desert” is quite a good word for describing what we saw. It was awful, and of course it goes a long way beyond all of the netting arrangements. It was dead and horrible and it smelled and there was waste everywhere and our friends told us of the great difficulty in working out who was going to clear it all up and who was going to pay for the clear-up, because Crown Estate Scotland had not put in place bonding arrangements —something those in construction would do because, if the construction company goes wrong, you can finish off the problem. It usually happens with shipbuilding, although not with Scottish ferries, but bonding arrangements are extremely important and they had not been put in place. I am glad to say that I went back a couple of years later and the area has improved, but it is not perfect. I therefore have direct experience of the horrors of things if you do not get it right, and I suspect there are many war stories—so if aquaculture comes, as I know it will, to England and Wales and Northern Ireland, people can learn from their Scottish cousins.

On my experience of charitable trustees worrying about potential land users, I went back and looked at some trustee board papers, and the process we actually follow in real life when we are considering letting land users on to the Blair Charitable Trust, which is quite big, is very similar to the two processes set out in Amendments 37 and 37G. That process has been going on for a long time on what is a very old-established plot of land. I therefore feel that these are tried and tested routes to something as well, and that they are very good. They have a long-term view built into them, as well as the fact that you must look to the whole environment, as we do at the Blair Charitable Trust. These amendments are therefore vital, and they will make the job of the Crown Estate commissioners much easier.

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, this has been a fascinating debate to listen to. I had not intended to partake in it, but I was prompted to do so by the last two speeches, by my noble kinsman Lord Thurso and by the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull. This is clearly a much bigger problem than just salmon. From listening to the debate, it seems that we all want the offshore energy—we need it—and, undoubtedly, as the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, said, we will need aquaculture in the future in a much more abundant way than we have it at the moment.

It strikes me that it is very odd that those who operate our farms and our energy on land face very different hurdles to those who operate at sea. Can the Minister, who has quite a lot to take away and think about from this well-informed debate, look at this whole question? This is a rare opportunity for us to try to get this right for future generations. We do not want to solve a problem now by creating a further problem for the future. Let us get this right so that we take a holistic view of development at sea, whether it be fish farming, agriculture or energy, so that the right environmental standards and precautions are put into place before and after an event. As the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, said, at the moment it is all too easy for fish farmers to put themselves into liquidation and leave a mess for others to clear up. That cannot be allowed to happen in the future.