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Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

I thought that the last sentence of the Minister’s speech was completely opposite to everything else he said, but I will read it very carefully in Hansard. I thank him very much for the care he has taken going into this issue. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor, said that the Isle of Wight did not need to be there. He could apply the same argument to much of the south-west and just miss it out of the Bill. It seems to me that the case for the Isle of Wight is overwhelming. It is a large, free-standing island which by and large possesses the same characteristics as a large part of the English coast and the hinterland of that coast. There is no reason why the Isle of Wight should not be included. I was grateful for what the Minister said about that island. The answer we need from the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, is why it should not be included. The mainland coast is going to be there, whatever its present condition and access provision, so why should the Isle of Wight not be there? Obviously, Lundy Island is a very different place from the Isle of Wight, and the reason why those two islands have been mentioned is that they are the two obvious examples of large, free-standing islands in England—apart from the Scilly Isles, which are referred to in a completely different section of the Bill, for reasons that people say are "all the usual reasons", which I do not understand. I am told by people who know the Scilly Isles that I do not really want to understand. So there we go. It is too complicated. I do not want to see every small island included, and that is not what my amendment suggests in any shape or form. What I had hoped was that the Government would give us some idea of the criteria which they will apply. Apart from the Isle of Wight, I do not think that I got a single useful comment from the Minister on that. He was very good at disguising the fact that he was not going to give me an answer to that, and certainly was not going to give me a list of names of islands that might be included. But we will have to live with that for a short time. Finally, I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Carnegy, that what the Minister says about Lundy is absolutely correct. You can walk anywhere on Lundy. I have walked around the coast of Lundy, I have climbed on the cliffs, and I have gone down perilous, steep, grassy slopes to the beaches and back again. It is a great, fun place to be, so in a sense it does not need to be included. The real danger of not including places, though, is the old danger that if they are not included, some people will come along and say, "It is not included. Therefore at some future stage we will start to introduce restrictions which are not there at the moment". That is the argument used by horse riders, for example. It is an argument which has been used on CROW land all the way. There is an issue there. Regardless of whether it is needed in a utilitarian way immediately, if it ought to be in, it ought to be in. At this stage, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment A307 withdrawn. Amendments A308 to A312 not moved. Clause 290 agreed. Clause 291 : River estuaries Amendments A313 to A316 had been withdrawn from the Marshalled List.