National Policy Statement for Ports

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Tuesday 14th October 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise to speak briefly in the gap. Unlike many noble Lords, I very much welcome this document. The Government have done pretty well in getting this far, because it is incredibly complicated, but I have a few questions, which I hope my noble friend the Minister will be able to answer.

The first issue—it is pretty obvious, I suppose—is how far this policy applies to Scotland and Wales. My noble friend the Minister mentioned Scotland briefly but, as we all know, there are some very big ports in Scotland. Wales has a large number of ports as well; some of them are pretty large and some of them think that they will get even bigger when the new offshore wind farms are built somewhere in the Celtic Sea. It would be nice to know about the scope of this document in those two countries.

Along with that, I would be interested to know who will be in charge. This week, I was a bit surprised to see a press release saying that the lower Thames tideway tunnel is going to be built not by the Department for Transport, because it is not capable, but by the Government. I thought that the Department for Transport was government. It is a good department, but this is an odd way of saying who will be in charge of the budget, or who will be in charge when things do or do not go well.

On my other worry, most of the discussion in this debate has been about energy; the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, started it. Energy is a terribly important element of input/output, et cetera. I am involved in a hydro scheme—or whatever it is—for passenger services between the Isles of Scilly and the mainland, which is entirely electric. It is charged at each end, and it has enough power to get across the 25 miles of rough sea in the middle. There are many other ones that could continue like this, and I hope that the Government will continue to encourage them.

My worry is that the document does not appear to include many energy projects; as I understand it, those have been left to the energy NPS. For ports, they cover everything, as noble Lords have said. However, it is difficult to get things through the so-called planning approval process for ports. You have all kinds of people saying, “You can’t do this because of that, and you cannot do that because of the other”. We had this off the coast of Penzance last year, when somebody said that you could not run a ferry over the sea because there was eel grass underneath it. It was 10 metres down—how serious can the grass get? Years ago, the Environment Agency told me that one could not run new services into the Isles of Scilly because they were entirely covered by a local environmental protection order. I asked, “Are people going to starve, then?” The agency said, “No, it’s just difficult”. I said, “Well, it works on the continent. It is in European legislation”. We really have to sort all this out.

My last point is on forecasts, because the Government say that they would like to take keep control of all the forecasts themselves, but that is wrong. The ports should be given a major role to play in telling everyone what their forecast is, and if the Government do not like it, there can be a debate. But it is important that that is done by the private sector, which is, after all, in charge of all the different cargoes that go in and out of ports. I wish this project well and congratulate the Government on producing it.