Commons Bill [HL]

I would not presume or dare to talk about Wales in these circumstances. In England, the administration and operation of the new system of setting up commons associations will be the responsibility of Natural England. The value of the amendment proposed by my noble friend Lord Tyler is that it allows us to probe the Minister on what will happen in a proactive sort of way once the legislation is passed. What initiatives will be taken to encourage the setting-up of commons associations? Clearly, the new situation will exist, the regulations will be produced, and people will be able to operate in a bottom-up way, as the Minister talked about at Second Reading. If it is simply left to independent, spontaneous, bottom-up initiatives, the Government will not achieve what they appear to want to achieve. How do the Government see that working? The word ““targeting”” was used in the previous debate. Are the Government going to encourage the targeting of different parts of England to go ahead before others? Will they look at somewhere such as Dartmoor, or the Lake District, or North York Moors, or areas of the Pennines where there are lots of commons, to encourage setting up commons associations there? If so, how will they do it? If they start taking initiatives to encourage the new system to come into operation, inevitably people will give advice. Will they start giving advice on the size, the nature of the commons that might be grouped together, or the degree of contiguity that will be required? In areas such as the Pennines where there are lots of commons but they are not contiguous, what sort of advice will be given? The Minister suggested previously that funding might be available to assist in setting up commons associations. If funding is available, there is bound to be advice, because there will have to be a decision on priorities on where that funding goes, because it will not be open-ended. We have to ask the Minister these questions to get some flavour of what will happen in practice when this legislation comes into effect.