Huw Irranca-Davies (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Marine and Natural Environment), Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Ogmore, Labour)

I will try to deal with three different issues, two of which overlap slightly. In another part of the Bill, when we look at marine plans, we will deal in detail with joint or cross-border work in, for example, the Severn, Deeside and Solway firth areas. In the marine planning environment, the Bill provides a number of obligations and incentives to ensure that marine plan authorities co-operate and work together seamlessly. We are actively considering other mechanisms. My hon. Friend the Member for Carmarthen, West and South Pembrokeshire will know from his time as a Wales Office Minister that much of the work that was done between Westminster and Wales was underpinned by concordats and memorandums of understanding, and I fully anticipate that those are probably the sort of mechanisms that will underpin the working relationship between the different Administrations.

With marine conservation zones—a slightly different area to marine planning—there is an obligation on the different areas bringing forward cross-border zones to work together. There cannot be an ecologically coherent network of marine conservation zones in which one area impacts negatively on another. Proposals cannot be introduced in one area that lead to the displacement of activity into another, for example, proposals for the south-west that are to the great benefit of that area but to the great detriment of Cardigan bay, or vice versa. The areas have to work together and the MMO has a role in overseeing, as the projects bringing the marine conservation zones forward are introduced, that they synchronise properly. That is important, and it has to work around the UK. One of the big benefits of the Bill is that it is a UK-wide approach. Even if individual areas introduce marine conservation zones, what we do in Cornwall and Devon has to relate to what is going on in Wales. What we are doing on Deeside and in the north-west has to relate to what we are doing in north Wales, and so on, all around the coast.

I am not sure whether the hon. Member for Clwyd, West was referring to the marking of zones on the water.

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