Crown Estate Bill [HL]

Lord Teverson Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 2nd September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chair of Aldustria Ltd, a very modest battery storage company which is plugging into the grid, as that is around a grid connection as well. As the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, said, some good work got done over the last year, in terms of not just grid connections but setting up the National Energy System Operator; it might be publicly owned, but I think National Grid still has responsibility for it. I would be interested to hear from the Minister about when the national energy system operator will operate from; it was due to be this summer, but I do not think it is quite going yet.

I thank the Minister for his time talking about the Bill at the end of last week. I think I welcome the Bill. I absolutely welcomed it to begin with but, as with all Bills, the more you get into it, the more you understand its limitations and perhaps some of the questions that arise.

The first subject I want to talk about is geography. I am afraid that I am going to talk about not Wales—I will come to Wales later, maybe—and not even Cornwall, but Scotland. It seems slightly strange that quite a large proportion of future offshore wind, which a lot of the Bill is about, is going to be in Scottish waters, and, as I understand it, GB Energy is going to be a Scottish company not an English one. There seems to me a disjointedness about the Bill ignoring Scotland—although it says that it includes Scotland, but not the Scottish Crown Estate—and the fact that GB Energy and a lot of future development will be north of the border.

My question to the Minister is: what discussions have taken place with the Scottish Government about extending the same freedoms to the Scottish Crown Estate? I specifically ask whether the option of using a legislative Consent Motion to allow amendments to the Bill to deliver that parity of treatment have been considered. Something like that seems necessary to bring the aspiration, which I think we all welcome, about offshore wind and its contribution to the renewable energy targets into the future—and by 2030 in particular.

The other area I want to talk about is the financial side—with some trepidation, as I am sure that my noble friend Lady Kramer will probably put me right after this debate. I come back to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Howard: the reality is that the Crown Estate is just a wholly owned subsidiary of the Treasury. It is nothing to do with the Crown. Even the proportion that then goes to the Royal Family to do what it needs to can be altered each year—the percentage does not always stay the same. It is an animal of the Treasury, and we should see it as that.

One of the questions that struck me when going through the Bill about re-energising investment through the Crown Estate is that the money it spends, whether investment or current expenditure, is part of the public sector borrowing requirement, so what is the need to do this? Anything the Crown Estate needs to do, you might as well do through a government department anyway. It does not seem to me to make any difference so far as public expenditure.

There is, then, an issue—it comes back to some of the things that other noble Lords have spoken about—about transparency. The Crown Estate is not as transparent as many government departments, even the Treasury itself. Does this in itself become an issue? On finance, even on investment, as we have seen over the last one or two years, the amount that the Crown Estate can retain has been changed, for the capital account, from 9% to 27% to get around existing issues. Why cannot we just do that in future, so that the Crown Estate can benefit from its own cash flow, in terms of the capital account? In some ways, this seems to be complicated financial engineering that may not be necessary, but that is not a fundamental point.

The responsibilities of the Crown Estate—the Minister talked about them—are set out very well in its annual report, around net zero, natural resources and community. Perhaps we could look at some of those. On net zero, I really welcome the Government’s aspiration to bring forward investment, particularly in offshore wind, by preparing the case—environmental studies and all the rest of it that needs to be done beforehand. I was going to say that the Government will make it “oven-ready”, but that is rather a discredited phrase these days. Other European nations have done that. It must take a lot of effort, risk and timescale out of actually delivering those projects, so I very much welcome that.

I also welcome what is I think an aspiration—the Minister can put me right if not—around making licensing and obtaining the finance, bringing together the Crown Estate and the Low Carbon Contracts Company. Perhaps the Government can say whether that is one of their aspirations.

I welcome that ports in the supply chain will be invested in. However, much of the development will be in the other area which we were talking about, the Celtic Sea and the west coast. In the North Sea, a key issue has developed over time: a spaghetti of underwater cables. The EU is trying—we have now been included in the conversation—to make a grid and interconnectors, as has been mentioned already in this debate. It is incredibly important that we do not replicate that in the Irish Sea and the Celtic Sea. We should co-operate very strongly with the Republic of Ireland to ensure that is not the case. What has been forgotten—I almost expected the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, to bring it up—is that the Crown Estate has a lot of terrestrial resources. Therefore, is it going to promote onshore wind as well, now that the Government, quite rightly, are liberating the planning conditions for onshore wind?

I will move on briefly to natural resources and biodiversity, raised by the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayman and Lady Young of Old Scone. In Cornwall at the moment, there are a large number of applications for seaweed farms. This is part of the Crown Estate trying to be more commercial, yet I do not believe that it is doing that within a context of understanding the ecology of the territorial waters or any of that side. It concerns me that it needs to understand the biodiversity issues around some of the commercialisations that it is looking at. More importantly, perhaps, it always strikes me that, as we know, the Crown Estate owns the territorial waters out to 12 miles. It has a slightly different relationship in our EEZ beyond that.

The 1961 Act imposes that the Crown Estate should maintain the value and condition of its investments. What it has never done, as I understand it, is intervene regarding fishing techniques such as bottom trawling or scallop dredging. It has the ability—that is its property—of pushing forward those vital marine and oceanic conditions where we keep biodiversity. Also, on net zero, whether it is seagrass, maerl or other forms of seabed vegetation, it is not a proper custodian of those resources. Only some 2% of marine protected areas are protected in terms of bottom trawling. That is absolutely not right on biodiversity and our net-zero gains.

Lastly, on community, all I will say follows the debate that we have had on Wales. Where there is offshore development—for example, the Celtic Sea and the Irish Sea—why is there not the equivalent, as there was in Shetland, of a regional wealth fund or a feeding back from those developments to regional communities? That is one of the things that I think will be demanded of this expansion of energy that we require. Through all this, we can have a better ecology, we can get closer to net zero and we can have a community that comes along with this legislation.