Commons Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 135:"Page 14, line 39, at end insert—" ““(   )   A commons association shall, where the common abuts a marine area, be regarded as a statutory consultee on matters of flood defence, managed retreat and other marine matters that affect the common.”” The noble Baroness said: The purpose of the amendment is to draw attention to the issues surrounding all the commons that abut marine areas. I thank the officials in the department for furnishing me with information about the extent and scale of the problem. They have, as far as they are able, defined that there are some 129 commons of which some part is below mean high water, and of those 110 have an area below mean high water of less than a hectare. There are 39 commons with an area below mean high water of over a hectare, and that totals 2,734 hectares below mean high water, so we are not talking about a very small problem here. It is not just the size of those commons that is a problem, which include foreshores and saltings and places that you would expect to be below mean high water, but they have other particular issues. As we understand from scientists and geographers, the east of England is sinking and I am thinking now of the saltings around Norfolk that feature largely on the Defra list. In the west of England, we are faced with rising sea levels, as is everywhere, but also more particularly tidal surges because of the more extreme weather conditions. That means that those commons that exist now as bits of land may well cease to do so in the future. I should declare an interest, because I live in the parish of Northam in Devon, which has an extensive area, Northam Burrows, which abuts the marine area. It was while walking there and thinking about the Bill that I began to ponder the problem. Those burrows are protected from the sea by the pebble ridge. It is putting back the pebbles on the pebble ridge that has given rise to the term ““potwalloping””, which the noble Lord will remember I referred to at Second Reading. Were that pebble ridge no longer to be maintained, the area of common would be entirely lost. I am aware of discussions that Defra and English Nature are having all around Britain, and there will be times when managed retreat is seen as a sensible alternative to maintaining flood defences. If managed retreat is the option taken—that is when the sea defences are no longer maintained and the land effectively becomes salt marsh again—those areas which at the moment do not face encroachment by the sea will start to face encroachment, and that will include common land. Some commoners may well lose their rights or their rights may be substantially changed, and there would not be the opportunity that we discussed earlier to offer them contiguous land, because the problem may affect the entire coast until we arrive at more substantial cliff areas. The purpose of the amendment is to probe Government thinking about the issues surrounding commons that are within spitting distance of the sea and which will have their own particular problems. They are not referred to anywhere in the Bill or in the regulatory impact assessment as a discrete body of commons, and yet when we consider things such as works that we will get on to later, again the sorts of things that they may need to address may be very different from commons either in uplands or inland areas. I beg to move.