Crown Estate Bill [HL]

Earl of Leicester Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 22nd October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, I also support my noble friend, who recently sponsored an important debate in the Moses Room on this very subject. I inform noble Lords, if they had not spotted it already, that this is a very modest measure. It is not instructing the Scottish Environment Protection Agency or the local planning authority; it is simply instructing the commissioners of the Crown Estate and asking them to be more responsible in terms of outlook to the environment and, in particular, to the obvious evidence that is accumulating about the damage being done to salmon and sea-trout.

I want to reinforce what I hope the Minister is going to say by giving him what I think it is the really important example of the River Lochy on the west coast of Scotland near Fort William. That was once a very important salmon river with a prolific angling catch of well over 1,500. It has gone downhill quite catastrophically: the numbers have decreased; the number of staff employed as ghillies on the river has gone right down; and the impact of tourism on the economy has been very badly affected.

About seven years ago, the two fish farms in Loch Linnhe were both fallowed for a year. The following year, the number of grilse coming into the river went up very sharply and the angling catch went up by a factor of three and a half. That seems to me to be quite compelling and overwhelming evidence of the damage that is being done, which my noble friend described so eloquently. I hope the Minister will accept this amendment because it is a modest amendment and, as I say, it is not actually affecting any government or local government organisation; it is simply affecting the commissioners and giving them this extra duty. I support my noble friend.

[The Earl of Leicester (Con)]

My Lords, I declare interests as a trustee of the Burnham Overy Harbour Trust and president of the Wells-next-the-Sea RNLI station—I say that only because they both go out to sea. I apologise that I was not here at Second Reading on 2 September; I was in the Netherlands on business also relating to the environment. Like my noble friend Lord Trenchard, I agree that the main purpose of the Bill is to allow the Crown Estate to borrow and leverage against its assets and manage them in a way becoming of the 21st century.

I am astounded that the Crown Estate is not required to undertake the same level of environmental impact assessment that we do on the mainland. Amendment 37F is incredibly straightforward. It seeks to install in law a requirement for the Crown Estate to undertake an EIA, just like any other business on the mainland planning to undertake large-scale engineering works.

In preparation for this amendment, I spoke to a number of people in my local community on the coast of North Norfolk: Andy Frary of the Wells & District Inshore Fishermen’s Association; Bob Smith, the Wells-next-the-Sea harbourmaster; Leo Hambro, founder of Tidal Transit; and Professor Jenny Gill of the School of Biological Sciences at UEA—she is not really in my community any more, because she has just moved to Fife.

As the harbourmaster and I discussed, obviously the Crown Estate wants the rent, but this EIA needs to be rather more rigorous. If we insist that the Crown Estate will be required to undertake detailed environmental impact assessments, who will monitor that? Will it be the MMO? Bob Smith’s view is that the MMO is vastly removed from the coalfaces; it gives out the licences but has inexperienced staff and does not really understand local communities.

The fishermen I spoke to, the harbourmaster and I are very much for wind farms out to sea. We have marine protected areas and, ironically, once a wind farm is established, it becomes a sort of natural marine protected area. Rock armour is placed around the base of the wind turbines to protect them from big tides and scarring, et cetera. It then quickly attracts crustaceans—lobsters and crabs—and fish and there is a 50-metre “no fishing” rule for fishermen, who cannot get close to them. It is almost a sanctuary for all these crustacea. As they develop and thrive, they move out and the fishermen can then catch them.

There was also concern that giving licences to different companies for different wind farms was rather disjointed; they should be liaising on where their cables can come together out to sea so that they hit the land in one place. That has happened to an extent in North Norfolk, where they come ashore at Weybourne.

Professor Jenny Gill looks at this from an environmental point of view. The location of these wind farms is the most important thing. We need to avoid putting them where birds are—they are easier to monitor than fish and sea mammals. The concern is bird strike out to sea. Organisations such as the BTO and the RSPB have done a lot of work on flight heights of migratory birds and sea birds in relation to rotor speed and on whether bird strike is a big threat. Bob Smith surveys boats going out from Wells-next-the-Sea; maybe they are lucky and the wind farm they have been surveying is in the right place, but they come back and say, “We saw four birds today”. That damage is not happening.

In seeking this EIA, I am encouraging the Government to involve nature conservation organisations at an early stage so that they can be part of the planning process. Professor Gill mentioned that this is getting quite complicated. Beth Scott, professor in marine ecology at Aberdeen University, has worked on how tides work in open sea and form around tidal nodes and on whether putting static turbines on the ground changes the way tides work and the spatial way in which they move.

The big thing is making the planning process more transparent and getting conservation organisations at the table. They do not want to be adversarial; they are all at the green end of the scale and want to see a lot more of this renewable energy.

I had a very interesting conversation with Leo Hambro, of Tidal Transit. He operates crew transfer boats. I talked to him about the construction phase of these wind farms. He said that there have been improvements of late, in the last few years, including air bubble rings that are placed around the piling system which let out bubbles to reduce the sonic boom—which of course carries a long way underwater—therefore, we hope, mitigating damage to mammals. However, that has happened only recently.

When trenching, that is done either through some sort of underground machine that pulls a plough through the sand or, more often, through a large ship pulling a plough which turns over a trench a metre deep, into which the big cable is placed and then sand is placed back over it. If necessary, a few more rocks are placed on top of it. However, there really ought to be an EIA to decide which route these cables take. I suspect they probably take the shortest and cheapest route, but do they avoid mussel lays? They must avoid sunken ships, but off the coast of north Norfolk, in Cromer, we have a very important chalk reef, and it is important that that is protected.

To go back to crew transfer boats, Leo Hambro has seven of them. In fact, there are 200 around the UK and 700 around the world. Some 80% of them are in the UK and Europe because of the large-scale wind farms we have out to sea. To explain, these boats go out every day and take engineers to maintain and man the wind farms. The average stat for the industry is to use 1,500 litres of red diesel a day. In reality, he said they could use 2,500 to 4,000 litres a day, particularly if they are servicing a wind farm which is 45 miles away. He has to service East Anglia ONE from Lowestoft. These boats are going at 20 knots, so they are burning a lot of diesel.

It is not the case that when they get out there they switch their engines off. They have to spend up to two hours pushing against the turbine to make a safe platform for workers, transferring kit on and off the boat, et cetera. When they are then waiting for another three hours or so for the engineers to do their work, they have to stand off, but they do not drop an anchor and switch off; they have to run their engines to maintain generators and such on-board.

Leo Hambro is operating boats out of Wick, Grimsby, Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft. An interesting point to which I hope the Minister pays attention is that one of his boats is being converted to run on pure electric. That is being done in Great Yarmouth and should be ready for May 2025, thanks to DfT UK SHORE funding. It also includes offshore and onshore charging infrastructure, which I will come to in a second. The reason I mention these boats is that, for 200 boats using 2,500 litres of red diesel a day on average, five days a week, 50 days a year, that is 125 million litres of diesel.

That takes me to exhausts. AdBlue is added to the exhaust to reduce toxins, including nitrous oxide and sulphur oxide, and diesel particulates. AdBlue is made of synthetic ammonia—

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

Watch the time.

[The Earl of Leicester (Con)]

Am I not allowed 15 minutes?

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

No.

[The Earl of Leicester (Con)]

My apologies—this is it. AdBlue is not made from green ammonia. All these marine exhausts omit their fumes below the water to keep the exhausts cool. AdBlue is depositing heavy metal poisoning into the sea. I will stop there.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to all noble Lords for the points raised during this debate and for powerfully highlighting such important issues. I will respond to the amendments tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Forsyth and Lord Douglas-Miller—who was the Minister for Animal Health and Welfare in the previous Government—and the noble Earl, Lord Leicester, which all touch on environmental and animal welfare protections.

These amendments would require the Crown commissioners to assess, on an ongoing basis, the environmental impact and animal welfare standards of, respectively, salmon farms, offshore energy installation and generation and aquacultural practices on the Crown Estate. Where that assessment determines that a salmon farm, a relevant offshore energy installation and generation, or relevant aquaculture is causing environmental damage or has significant animal welfare issues, the Crown Estate would be required to revoke the relevant licence. The commissioners would also be required to make the same assessment of any applications for new licences for salmon farms or the installation and generation of offshore energy on the estate. Where the commissioners determine that an application may cause environmental damage or raises significant animal welfare concerns, the Crown Estate must refuse the application.

The Government wholeheartedly support the objectives behind these amendments. It might help noble Lords if I set out the protections that currently exist in regulations and legislation, which apply regardless of the landlord. All aquaculture activity in England, including salmon farming, is regulated with the intention of ensuring that it is carried out in a responsible manner that respects the environment and protects consumer health and animal welfare, although I appreciate from the powerful speech by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, that this intent is not currently being achieved. At present, virtually all salmon aquaculture in the UK takes place in Scotland. As has been observed, the management of the Crown Estate in Scotland is a devolved matter.

The Government’s starting point is that these amendments may duplicate existing protections that already exist in legislation or protections that are required by regulators as part of the licensing process for aquaculture and offshore energy installations. Specifically, the Animal Welfare Act 2006 makes it an offence to cause unnecessary suffering to any protected animal. The assimilated Council Regulation No. 1099/2009 on the protection of animals at the time of killing requires that farmed fish are spared avoidable pain, distress or suffering during their killing and related operations. The Aquatic Animal Health (England and Wales) Regulations 2009 contain provisions to protect farmed fish from serious disease by introducing a system of authorisation for businesses involved in aquaculture.

To address a point on environmental impacts made by the noble Earl, Lord Leicester, the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017 require the competent authority—in this context, the Crown Estate —to determine whether a plan or project is likely to have a significant effect on a European marine site. If so, it is then subject to an appropriate assessment. If that assessment shows that the plan or project could have an adverse impact on the integrity of the site that cannot be mitigated, authorisation of the activity must be refused unless specific derogations apply. For marine areas that are designated as a marine conservation zone under the Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009, a marine conservation zone assessment is carried out by the public authority to test activities that may hinder the achievement of the conservation objectives of the specific zone and decide from the assessments whether the application for an activity can be authorised.

The Crown Estate seeks to supports the regulators through the inclusion of necessary requirements on any leases and requires all practitioners to comply fully with all legal obligations, including animal welfare practices. When developing or managing its assets, especially in areas such as offshore wind farms, coastal management and urban redevelopment, the Crown Estate must comply with regulations that require environmental impact assessments. An example of this happening in practice was in February 2017, when the Crown Estate launched an opportunity for existing wind farms to apply for project extensions. Following a habitats regulations assessment, the Crown Estate confirmed that seven of these extension application projects would progress to the award of development rights.

The Crown Estate also received an application for an extension project where the majority of the site of the proposed extension sat within the Inner Dowsing, Race Bank and North Ridge special area of conservation. The plan-level habitats regulations assessment determined that it would not be possible to rule out an adverse effect on the integrity of the special area of conservation. Therefore, the Crown Estate decided that this extension project would not progress to the award of leasing rights as part of the 2017 extensions round.

On the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, about looking at impacts holistically, that is exactly what this Bill seeks, by enabling the Crown Estate to map the whole seabed and therefore improve the understanding of how to ensure benefits for nature for the long term.

I would be interested to know in due course whether noble Lords consider that these existing regulations and the legislation are inadequate or are currently being inadequately applied. I hope that, for now, the noble Lords, Lord Forsyth and Lord Douglas-Miller, and the noble Earl, Lord Leicester, feel able not to press their amendments.

[The Earl of Leicester (Con)]

Is the Minister able to address the issue of pollution from all these crew transfer boats? I mentioned 125 million litres of diesel every year. If we are to have many more wind farms out to sea, that amount of diesel may get very large. Can he comment on converting these boats to electric?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I am afraid that is not something I know about, but I am happy to write to the noble Earl.