UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 76-ii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

ENVIRONMENT, FOOD AND RURAL AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

MARINE ENVIRONMENT

Wednesday 10 December 2003

MR B YORKE, MR G LAMBRICK, MR D MILES and MR I OXLEY

MR J REES

Evidence heard in Public Questions 176 - 264

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee

on Wednesday 10 December 2003

Members present

Mr Michael Jack, in the Chair

Ms Candy Atherton

Mr Colin Breed

Mr David Drew

Mr David Lepper

Mr Austin Mitchell

Joan Ruddock

Alan Simpson

________________

Memorandum submitted by the Joint Nautical Archaeology Policy Committee

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: MR BOB YORKE, Chair, MR GEORGE LAMBRICK, Director, Council for British Archaeology, MR DAVID MILES, Chief Archaeologist, English Heritage, MR IAN OXLEY, Head of Maritime, English Heritage, Joint Nautical Archaeology Policy Committee, examined.

Q176 Chairman: Welcome, gentlemen, to the Committee. For the record, we have Mr Bob Yorke, who is described here as the chair of the Joint Nautical Archaeology Policy Committee.

Mr Yorke: That is correct.

Chairman: Mr George Lambrick, the director of the Council for British Archaeology, welcome. Mr David Miles, the chief archaeologist of English Heritage and Mr Ian Oxley, the head of Maritime, English Heritage. You are all very welcome indeed.

Q177 Joan Ruddock: Obviously we have had written evidence from you and you mentioned the Mary Rose in the submission. I wonder if you can give us a few more examples and flesh out what exactly you regard as being the underwater cultural heritage?

Mr Yorke: The historic remains of both ships and submerged land surfaces are time capsules of our past. More importantly, a lot of the organic material is far better preserved than ever found on land. If we refer to the Mary Rose, which you may well have visited, you will have seen long bows. Long bows have never been found on land in England but they have been found on the Mary Rose, not just one or two of them, but boxes of them. They have been preserved and Robert Hardy has done some experimental archaeology on them to see how well they work. That is one example but there are a number of others, obviously.

Q178 Joan Ruddock: If you quantify it in any way, what volume of stuff do you think is down there?

Mr Oxley: In the national monuments records of the UK in the four home countries we have 58,000 records. 42,500 of those are in England alone, so we have an indication of what is there but that is not to say that we know exactly what all of those records mean, or their importance or significance or the threats that those sites may be under.

Q179 Joan Ruddock: Can you give us some idea of how much you know about the underwater cultural heritage?

Mr Oxley: That is the difficulty. We know about those fairly small numbers by extrapolating from where we know those records have come from in the last couple of centuries of fairly well known or documented wrecks and casualties. We know that since the Neolithic we have been using the sea and our indication is that there may be many hundreds of thousands of actual sites there.

Q180 Joan Ruddock: Presumably, many of those that you have already given us as a number are not investigated thoroughly?

Mr Oxley: That is right. Out of England's 42,500, only 5,200 have their positions known. That is quite a small percentage.

Mr Yorke: There is also the aspect of submerged land surfaces.

Mr Miles: We know of 33,000 wreck sites from historical records. When Ian mentions 5,200, those are the ones that are more precisely known to location. In terms of investigation, it is a mere handful that have been investigated and only a handful that are legally protected. Most people think of the underwater cultural heritage in relation to wrecks and they are terribly important. The Mary Rose is probably the most vivid survivor of the Tudor age next to the Works of Shakespeare, frankly. As well as that, much of the underwater environment used to be a dry environment because we are an island now but 8,000 years ago we were not. If you go back 8,000, 10,000 or 12,000 years ago, the North Sea and the Channel were a dry environment where Europe's major rivers came together so it is an area that would have attracted both people and animals. One has to imagine that what we are looking at is a flooded world, a kind of lost world, in which people and animals used to cross backwards and forwards and live. Those prehistoric sites, these camp sites and the places where animals were killed and so on, are extremely well preserved. We know from surveys off the south and east coast that some of our most exciting, best preserved, prehistoric archaeology is now under the water.

Q181 Joan Ruddock: That is obviously fascinating in itself but why is it particularly important?

Mr Lambrick: There are various things that you can say Britain has given to the world as a key part of international heritage, things like Stonehenge and big, ceremonial, prehistoric landscapes. In a sense, these submerged areas are part of that because north west Europe is unusual in the extent of land which has been submerged. That is on a worldwide scale. Similarly in Britain as a maritime power, certainly from the middle ages onwards, that is an issue in terms of Britain's heritage being of global significance.

Q182 Chairman: If we have this underwater landscape which represents a point in time where geology changed, do studies in this area give you any predictive tools to help us understand what is going to happen in the future?

Mr Miles: Yes. It is worth emphasising that our knowledge of the underwater historic environment is really quite slight compared with land. British archaeology as a subject is one of the most advanced in the world, but the one area where we are really not well developed is in maritime archaeology and that is because of various factors, such as the way that archaeology has been organised in this area. It was not the responsibility of English Heritage until a couple of years ago, for example. As a result, it has been a neglected area. While on land we have been carrying out surveys for a couple of centuries and aerial photography in particular has given us a detailed knowledge of the land surface, the maritime environment is very little explored. Where we have explored it, the results are tremendous. Just in the past year, for example, we have been carrying out underwater surveys off the south coast. That is giving us the predictive ability to model the seabed and to start to predict where the archaeology will be, not just wrecks, but these prehistoric sites as well. It can be done but it is only being done in very small area.

Q183 Chairman: Is it resources that prevent you from going further?

Mr Miles: It is resources but it is also that we have only just started. This has been a neglected area so we have literally only started doing this kind of detailed survey over the last 18 months or so; whereas, if you were to look at the land surface, we have been doing air photography since the Second World War.

Q184 Mr Breed: The British Council is extremely concerned about potential threats to these sites. Perhaps you could go through the sorts of threats that you think are evident and give us some evidence, bearing in mind that you have only got to grips with some of this in fairly recent times. What are the threats? What sort of evidence have you that these threats are being realised?

Mr Yorke: Underwater cultural heritage is a unique, irreplaceable resource. I know there is a great threat to the ecology in our seas but some of that, with luck, can regenerate. Once you destroy a wreck or land surface, it is gone for good. We have to remember that. It is also very physically fragile. A lot of it is sometimes exposed in the intertidal zone or on the seabed. The sorts of things that are threats include natural erosion, tides, induced erosion where people do engineering works and it changes flows over the seabed, fishing trawling, oil and gas platforms and pipelines, undersea cables, wind farms, harbour works and channel dredging, aggregate extraction, coastal development , salvage and of course ubiquitous divers, who we have to be careful of and educate to try and conserve the underwater cultural heritage.

Q185 Mr Breed: Unless you have a survey of the whole area, you are saying that almost every square foot of the marine environment is potentially something that might be worth preserving. You are not going to be able, presumably, with all these threats, to stop all those, particularly not natural erosion and such. How effectively can you start to address some of these threats without saying, "We want to preserve everything at the present time until we find out an awful lot more"?

Mr Lambrick: Perhaps we can have an analogy with terrestrial archaeology where things have been developed rather more clearly. With terrestrial archaeology, through the planning system, we have a very clear basis on which an assessment of potential is made and surveys can be carried out, although relatively speaking our database of sites is well developed. Nevertheless, we need to know more to be able to make informed decisions about what happens. That partly involved doing further archaeological surveys on the ground to establish what is there and how important it is. In a sense, the maritime environment were probably even a step further back because we need techniques of action predicted of where the potential areas of interest are and those need to be interdisciplinary, because we need to know about the hydrographic information, the sedimentation patterns and so on, to know where survival is likely to be greatest. Then there is the question of can you start to predict where the threats are most likely to happen. For example, I was involved - again, a terrestrial analogy - with some work for DEFRA, looking at the risk of plough damage to archaeological sites where we used soil characteristics, cropping patterns and that sort of thing to predict where the risk would be highest. The kind of analogous system is probably needed, but we are starting from a much lower base of firm knowledge. There does need to be a development of these techniques of predictive modelling.

Mr Miles: The assumption is not to go for large scale preservation. We want better decision making so that we can manage the resource. Preservation specifically is applied to the most important sites, certainly not the generality.

Mr Yorke: You did ask what was under threat. There are a number of wrecks: HMS Colossus, Stirling Castle, Hazardous, which are known to be affected by erosion and human actions. There is also the Mary Rose site itself which is subject to threat from the Ministry of Defence which wants to dig a new channel into Portsmouth for these new large, draft aircraft carriers.

Q186 Mr Breed: We might have some good news tomorrow; they may not be quite as big.

Mr Yorke: You know something we do not.

Q187 Chairman: How much more of the Mary Rose is down there for you to dig out or bring up?

Mr Yorke: There may be more than people think. Ian worked on it so I will let him answer that question.

Mr Oxley: There are substantial areas of the bow structure still surviving to the north east of the site.

Q188 Chairman: Are there any plans to excavate?

Mr Oxley: I think that is a resource issue for the Mary Rose Trust. It is also an issue of management for ourselves because we are responsible for managing the site and the protection of the wreck site.

Q189 Chairman: Going back to a point you were making in answer to Joan Ruddock's question when she said, "Can you quantify it?", you have given us one example of one channel where there is a threat. In terms of marine activity and your knowledge of where the archaeological sites are, or where there are particular landscapes that need protecting, have you a hit list of things that are live and under threat at the moment, apart from what you have just described to us?

Mr Oxley: Yes. We have issues with the major port developments. You can take the analogy again of a linear land development, a new motorway or a runway. Within that linear development you might have Neolithic long houses, Roman villas, mediaeval houses. In the same way, in an approach to London or Southampton or Harwich or any of our major ports, there will be evidence of past activities in terms of a landscape which is now drowned. There will also be evidence of seafaring or maritime activity, quite possibly from the Neolithic onwards. We get indications from the surveys where a geophysical survey may pick up two or three hundred anomalies or indications or features along the track of the linear development, but at the moment we do not know what they all are. They could be of that timescale and depth.

Q190 Mr Mitchell: I do not want to be philistine about this but why on earth should we get worried? We do not know what is down there. When you mentioned the sinking of the North Sea and the possibility of transit campsites and so on, there may or may not be, but it is not the same as archaeology and sites on land which you can protect, dig and work at. It is inordinately expensive to do anything down there. Nobody can visit it if you do anything, so why bother? If the threats are to a beneficial development like oil or cable laying or reclamation or sediment removal or even beam trawling, that in itself is a means of exploration, so why should we get excited about it?

Mr Miles: For exactly the same reason as we do on land. I have been having these arguments with people who have been philistine or pretending to be philistine for donkeys' years. Those are the same sorts of questions that were asked about land archaeology in the 1960s in relation to motorways, gravel digging, house building and so on. As archaeologists, we are not trying to stand in the way of sensible, economic development. For a start, we do know there are things down there. We know, for example, that there are Dutch trawlermen who are making more of a living out of trawling up archaeology than they are from fishing. They have websites that you can go and look at and buy the antiquities that they are bringing up. We know the sites are there. We have seen the sites in certain favoured circumstances. For example, just recently we were looking at a site in the North Sea found by some of our Danish colleagues where we have Mesolithic houses still surviving as houses and, when you go inside them, all the tools and the gear are there. It is like being able to go back and look inside an 8,000 year old house. You cannot do that on land anywhere in Europe but you can do it in the sea. We may have many sites like that in the sea. We know we certainly have plenty of Mesolithic sites. We can model the kind of density of those sites. They are a fundamental part of our history. You might as well say, "There is an unknown work of Shakespeare. I have not read it but it is in the way of something so we will burn it." This is an aspect of our past, of our history, part of our culture, that we know is in there. We could look after it better. We could find out lots more about it and it could help to rewrite chapters of our history. If we were to take the attitude you put forward, we would be writing that off and I would say it is philistine.

Q191 Mr Mitchell: You are not saying, "Stop developing"?

Mr Miles: Absolutely not. In the past week, we have had two absolutely fabulous sites that have turned up during construction of roads, one in Yorkshire and one in southern England. Nobody is suggesting that the Yorkshire site should be preserved, but it would be a tragedy if in order to build a road you destroyed something as historically important as that without recording it.

Q192 Mr Mitchell: What happened in the North Sea? Did it sink suddenly?

Mr Oxley: Over thousands and, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of years, it receded and in some cases came back again. The land moved at the same time. It is a phenomenon that took place over a long period of time, so there was a changing landscape, harbours, estuaries and lagoons, which would have been attractive for resource exploitation or habitation.

Mr Miles: During the ice age, the water was captured in the glaciers. When the climate warms, the glaciers melt and the sea comes back through, so the English Channel was previously a river valley. It then floods and goes underwater, but it is essentially how much water is captured in the ice, as opposed to how much has melted.

Mr Lambrick: You asked why bother. There is another answer which is that the public is extremely interested. We monitor TV viewing figures for archaeological programmes and they are regularly hitting the three million plus mark. They are in the top 30 viewing figures virtually every week and quite a number of those are underwater archaeology and they hit just as many viewing figures. There is a real interest in the history. It is very iconic. The point about encapsulating these time capsules that you do not get on land is an incredibly interesting thing that really sparks people's interest and imagination. It is very much part of our history that we have no other source of evidence for. There is no written documentation about an awful lot of this.

Q193 Mr Mitchell: Where does responsibility lie in government for conservation of this heritage?

Mr Yorke: The statutory role stays with DCMS. There are a number of legislative Acts but most of the protection is based on salvage. It is very much out of date and it cuts across a lot of the different departments. You have the Protection of Wrecks Act, which protects about 50 sites in the UK. You have the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act which is also under DCMS, which does not do any underwater sites in England but does some in Scotland now, in Scapa Flow, where the remains of the high seas fleet were scuttled. You have the Merchant Shipping Act which is in the Department of Transport, where you have a receiver of wreck, to whom all wreck found on the seabed has to be reported. You have the Protection of the Military Remains Act, 1986, which is the Ministry of Defence, which is all naval vessels but obviously particularly those of last resting place and loss of life. They have scheduled about 16 sites, including some of the Falklands sites. You have the FCO which deals with the East India vessels. You also then have a number of other cross-governmental things which Ian can talk about because he deals with them on a daily basis.

Mr Oxley: In English Heritage's role as a statutory adviser to government, we are involved with a number of different departments and agencies. There is first of all Crown Estates, which is the landlord of the seabed, and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister for aggregates. These are all sectorally based, as you know. We speak to the DTI, the Department of Transport and a number of the different agencies, according to the remit of their regulations. It is quite disparate.

Mr Lambrick: On top of that, there is a broader policy agenda about responsibility. In some cases, it is statutory. For example, the Environment Agency has a statutory obligation to take account of the historic environment alongside wildlife and access to recreation in all its functions. That is a very general statutory responsibility. In terms of government policy, the government statement historical environment, "A force for our future", has established this principle that the historic environment should be part of the responsibility of green ministers, so that they should be taking a look at all the ways that the departments interact with it. This obviously as much applies to the maritime environment as to the terrestrial environment. Responsibility also comes through the principles behind the strategic environmental assessment and the project, EIA, process. That again in a sense has a kind of policy basis of responsibility behind it.

Q194 Mr Mitchell: That sounds more like a confused mess rather than a coherent strategy.

Mr Oxley: Yes. We would agree with that.

Q195 Mr Mitchell: If there is an important historical site like the one you mentioned where you have round houses that survive or indeed some other parliamentary constituencies that were washed away on the east coast of Yorkshire, is there a procedure for designating them as preservation sites?

Mr Lambrick: The Ancient Monuments Act is one of the ways that you can designate things.

Q196 Mr Mitchell: Have many been designated?

Mr Lambrick: Virtually none. Indeed, one of the flaws in the ancient monuments legislation is that at the moment it does not cover things like the buried land surfaces that we have been talking about, simply because it is not within the definitions. That is something that the DCMS designations review is looking at.

Mr Miles: The answer to that is that there is one: Scapa Flow, in Scotland. That is a shipwreck designated in that way in order to make diving possible, but around the English coast there is none.

Q197 Chairman: In paragraph four on page two of your evidence to the Committee, you said, "What we believe is urgently needed is the full implementation of the general standards for responsible management of the cultural heritage to which the UK is committed, acknowledging its exceptional, international significance." Do I interpret from that that you want some kind of revision of all these pieces of law welding together into one single piece of legislation that deals with the preservation of the marine, cultural, geological, archaeological environment? Is that what that means?

Mr Yorke: Yes, it is. DCMS is doing a consultation paper, "Protecting our marine environment", on the protection of the marine environment. It is also doing the same thing on land, on designations and scheduling. The consultation paper should hopefully go out in January and will, we are told, feed into a White Paper some time in the spring. This review does present a unique opportunity to put in place cross cutting legislation that will bring it under one body and will give proper protection for both submerged land surfaces and wrecks and may well encompass a larger amount but will treat it more in the same way we treat the protection of monuments on land.

Q198 Chairman: Would you say that the land based legislative provisions that currently exist, if they were transferred with appropriate modification into an aquatic regime, would provide in totality the kind of protection you are seeking?

Mr Yorke: Not quite. We had hoped it would be a seamless drift from land into the sea but unfortunately the marine side is a little more difficult because of the question of establishing ownership. On land, you have owners where things are found. The Crown Estate is the owner of the seabed, but there may well also be owners of wrecks and cargoes of wrecks, so that has to be established. It is also more difficult to police. We need to get information. We need to get reporting. We need to get disturbance reported and finds.

Mr Miles: In relation to the question is the land system satisfactory, the answer to that is no for one particular reason. That is that much of the evidence of the early, prehistoric landscapes we have been talking about consists of activities of people who were not building monuments. They were killing animals; they were at camp sites and so on. Much of the evidence is quite ephemeral forensic. One of the most important sites on land is Boxgrove in Sussex which is the earliest hominid site in north western Europe. It goes back 400,000 years. It is brilliantly preserved. It is a camp site and a kill site and we cannot preserve it as a scheduled monument because it does not count as a scheduled monument under the present definition of the Act. English Heritage has recently purchased that site in order to protect it because we cannot make it into a scheduled monument. It could be a world heritage site but it cannot be a scheduled monument, so we need changes to scheduled monument legislation that recognise that these very early sites which are not monuments in the sense of something constructed are also worthy of preservation and that applies very much to the sea.

Q199 Mr Lepper: In the evidence from the Council for British Archaeology, Mr Lambrick, you give me the impression that we have been very good in this country at signing up to international agreements about what we should and should not be doing in terms of marine nautical archaeology, but when it comes to doing anything in terms of domestic policy to forward some of those international agreements we have perhaps not been as far reaching as we could have been. Is that an accurate interpretation of your view?

Mr Lambrick: Not quite. Over the last, say, five years, the UK has signed up to a number of international conventions, particularly the Valetta Convention on the archaeological heritage, which defines the archaeological heritage more widely than our ancient monuments legislation. It envisages all sorts of other things which would be really helpful to protect the marine environment. We have also signed up to a whole lot of conventions on portable antiquities and trade in antiquities. The one where we have not signed up is the UNESCO Convention on underwater cultural heritage, for various reasons that do not quite match up to some of what is being done in practice. For example, we have just recently, in the last couple of days, heard that the government has sorted out an international agreement about archaeological work on the Titanic which is entirely in line with the Valetta Convention, but one of the things we are very concerned with is that other cases - the Sussex warship exploitation is an example - are not in line with those international standards. We need to get up to the basic principles that clearly are being applied in the case of the Titanic and the very careful, interdepartmental negotiations that have gone on to establish that. We then need to sign up to the UNESCO Underwater Cultural Heritage Convention to establish what the government has, after all, said it is committed to do in principle that seems to be rather variable in its application.

Q200 Mr Lepper: What do you feel is the reason why the UK government has not signed up to the UNESCO Convention?

Mr Yorke: There were two reasons. UNESCO wanted it to cover all cultural heritage, everything found on the seabed. DCMS preferred it to be done on an importance basis. The other reason was the Ministry of Defence was concerned that the Convention might undermine the sovereignty of its vessels in other people's waters. We believe that both those can be got round and there is a certain lack of will to make it work, perhaps.

Q201 Mr Lepper: Was there any lobbying that you are aware of from the gas and oil industry?

Mr Yorke: No, none at all. I do not think they were at all concerned about it.

Q202 Mr Lepper: You have set great store on the outcome of the DCMS designations review.

Mr Yorke: It is a unique opportunity, yes.

Q203 Mr Lepper: Do you have a model for what a new form of protection or an all-embracing form of protection for the marine environment might look like in practice?

Mr Yorke: Yes. The JNAPC has written two papers, Heritage Law at Sea and a follow-up on that which looked at the way the current legislation is compliant with Valetta. We were able to show that it is not compliant, although we have signed up to Valetta, so therefore there is a clear case that we have to change the law so it becomes compliant. As a result, we have done a lot of research, some of it kindly funded by English Heritage, which has gone into the consultation paper which DCMS is producing. It is on its way, so a lot of research and thinking has gone on and hopefully something might come of it.

Q204 Mr Lepper: How urgent is all this? You have talked about this huge treasure in archaeological and historic terms that is down there. How immediate is the threat to some of those sites?

Mr Miles: It is a real and immediate threat. You might say, "Why are we fussing now?" In our particular case, because we only got responsibility for this just over a year ago, so it is now on our plate and we feel it is an area that has been grossly neglected. In terms of the protection of this environment, we are about 100 years behind the land protection. It is very much our responsibility now but that is not why we are saying this. We are saying it because we are now at a point where technologies have miraculously improved. The images that are now coming out from the kind of surveys that we are doing off the south coast, that we are able to do in deepwater and so on, are absolutely fantastic. We are now able to explore this environment more radically, more cheaply, than we have ever been able to do before. You do not just have to go down there as divers; you can do it remotely, so our ability to explore this environment is amazing and in the relatively small amount of work we are doing we have all been flabbergasted by the results that we have seen. As essentially a land archaeologist, I really see this as the major area that archaeology should be going into in the next two decades but at the same time the threats are becoming increasingly powerful and it is all the more important that we do something about them very quickly.

Mr Lambrick: Can I add a further point about the threats? Firstly, quite a number of these processes of threat that we have referred to are clearly increasing. Wind farms and aggregates extraction are clearly a couple of them. It is on the up. We are way behind on the level of knowledge that we have and the processes by which these threats are assessed compared with where we are on land. Our basic knowledge of precisely what is where is woefully inadequate by comparison. Not only is the threat increasing and getting more urgent, but there is an enormous amount more work to do to get together the information, the modelling and the research which enables us to make informed decisions about what should be done in terms of management and how that should be integrated with all the other ecological, geological and other interests that need to be brought together in managing how we use our marine environment.

Mr Oxley: It is not a completely negative situation because those changes or improvements in technologies which are enabling more understanding and perhaps more access and exploitation of resources, quite legitimately, are also generating information so there is a huge opportunity for joining up and for what we might call "our side" learning from the survey, the investigations and exploration. The example that we would give is the oil and gas exploration SEAs, which started with SEA3 whereby the government commissioned a consultative paper on the potential of the archaeological remains that might possibly be threatened. This is a prime example of the way forward. If we can do that or integrate in that way, we all learn and we all make better decisions.

Q205 Mr Lepper: We have been told by earlier witnesses that there has been good sharing of information coming out of that gas and oil SEA process. You would agree with that?

Mr Oxley: Yes.

Mr Miles: Before I became a gamekeeper working for English Heritage, I was an archaeological consultant and among my largest customers was the gas and oil industry. Archaeology in the gas and oil industry that can work together compatibly is simply a matter of managing it properly, but we can both learn from each other. There has been a transformation in recent decades with the relationship between archaeological work and road building. The same kind of cooperation can perfectly well take place with the gas and oil industry.

Mr Oxley: We have had very good relationships with the marine aggregates extraction industry too, but we cannot take that forward to all other industries yet.

Mr Yorke: This cooperation is essential. Looking at what DEFRA is hoping to do and looking at the mapping of the seabed, creating marine special arrangements, that is essential. I see no reason why we cannot do that hand in hand, because we both need that sort of information.

Q206 Ms Atherton: I rather think of wrecks and other structures that you find in the sea as like the honey pots of the marine environment. Wildlife is attracted to them; fishermen are therefore attracted to them; divers are attracted. Therefore, any protection presumably that you provide for the structure or the wreck, by its very nature, protects wildlife and the environment, which is basically where we are coming from as a DEFRA select committee. You presumably are fully signed up to that. Anything that is good for archaeology is good for wildlife?

Mr Yorke: Yes. The Nautical Archaeology Society runs a scheme called Adopt a Wreck. It is open to anyone!

Mr Miles: It is only one of the vagaries of government organisation that archaeology happens to be in the Department for Culture. Before that, it was in the Department of the Environment and personally that is where I think it belongs. Archaeology and the historic environment is part of the wider environment. The environment includes human beings.

Q207 Ms Atherton: Going back to one of the groups that is attracted to this honey pot, it is divers. Representing a south west constituency, I have a large number of divers who make a reasonable living instructing others to become divers to explore this wonderful environment, much as an archaeologist, amateur or otherwise, on land can conduct his or her activities within certain areas. I can feel them picking up their pens to contact me as we sit round this table. I wonder if you would like to respond to that because it is a fairly big industry in this country.

Q208 Mr Yorke: It is a very valid question. It is something that the JNAPC has addressed for some time. We have representatives of the three main diving organisations on our committee, SAA, BSAC and PADI. The message that we are getting through to them and they are taking back to their members is look; don't touch, because if you take that porthole away it is not there for the next diver to look at or whatever. It is very important that this "look; don't touch" attitude goes forward. It is something that is spreading very fast and most responsible people are happy with it, including responsible divers.

Q209 Ms Atherton: Presumably, you would support artificial wrecks?

Mr Yorke: They are a brilliant idea, yes.

Mr Oxley: It is an educational message that can be carried forward in initiatives like that too. They may be visiting because of the enhanced diversity but it is a wreck they are visiting and to transfer that awareness and appreciation is a part of stewardship or custodianship.

Q210 Ms Atherton: Can I ask how much it costs to adopt a wreck?

Mr Yorke: It does not cost anything. All you have to do is take responsibility for diving on it, monitoring it, measuring it, photographing it.

Q211 Ms Atherton: I think we will ask the Deputy Prime Minister.

Mr Lambrick: If we could take the analogy that you raise about the integration of the interest in natural conservation and archaeology within the diving community, both are very strong and clearly bodies like the JNAPC can do quite a lot through the member organisations to educate divers about that. Also, if one goes up a few tiers, there is a big process that is needed to educate decision makers and policy makers about the integration of the two and how the interests overlap. The CBA is a member of one of Wildlife Countryside Link, who I think gave the first evidence, and we are completely signed up to the principles that they are adopting and they take account of our interests. When you go up to government, just observing DEFRA, perhaps in particular but some other departments, and some of the consultations that have been made, there seems to be a very, very strong emphasis on the ecological interests. This is obviously tapping into public spending, assessment targets on ecology, the high level priorities that DEFRA have for the natural environment which do not include the cultural heritage. Very often we find in consultation papers about policy that cultural heritage, if you are lucky, is mentioned but it will then be almost ignored, so there is not a parity of concern about these two strands of policy; and yet they have a very strong inter-relationships. As we said at the beginning, these are issues in terms of our maritime cultural heritage which are of global significance. I think a lot of this is coming from the fact that we have EC directives for habitats and species, but we do not have the equivalent for the cultural heritage. We have the Valetta Convention and other international conventions, but these are not getting to high level points in government. We would be quite worried knowing that both the wildlife and the cultural heritage conservation needs to be much better than it is at the moment - and we are completely attuned on that - if we suddenly find these high level policy drivers leave the cultural heritage behind.

Chairman: Gentlemen, thank you very much indeed. You have given us a very interesting perspective on this matter. If there are any points that you think the Committee must know about that, do not hesitate to write to us. Can I thank you, on behalf of the Committee for coming and giving your evidence today? Thank you.

Memorandum submitted by The British Geological Survey

Examination of Witness

Witness: MR JOHN REES, Coastal Geoscience and Global Change Programme Director, the British Geological Survey, examined.

Q212 Chairman: We welcome John Rees on behalf of the British Geological Survey. You are the Coastal Geoscience and Global Change Programme Director, which must rank as one of the longest titles that we have had for anybody's responsibility. I gather that your colleague who was coming with you sadly cannot be with us today, so I am most grateful to you for making the effort to come and join us. One of the joys about sitting at this end of the room is to look into the audience and, if you do not know them, to try to guess who will be the next witness. You can usually tell, by the attentive nature of the people in the audience, and I think you scored very heavily on that! You have a general idea of the area that the Committee are interested in. I will start by asking you to comment on the Government's overall approach. The Government seem to say, "We're getting it right. We're doing better on measures to try to protect the marine environment". They put forward Safeguarding our Seas, if you like, to summarise their position. In your judgment, how effective is the present legislative structure as far as protecting the marine environment is concerned?

Mr Rees: As you recognise, it is quite split up at present. In fact, marine work and marine legislation is a responsibility of several bodies, several government departments. You have a lot of organisations, such as the Natural Environment Research Council, CEFAS, et cetera, working on marine issues. One of the problems in recent years has been trying to bring the information from all of these different expert areas into one place, and that has been quite difficult.

Q213 Chairman: For example, the wildlife and countryside link - in evidence, the Committee have called for a comprehensive overhaul of legislation in this area - is that something that you too, like our previous witnesses, are signed up to?

Mr Rees: Yes, we are signed up to it. We think that is a good idea.

Q214 Chairman: How would you achieve that objective? Have you given thought as to what you would like to see?

Mr Rees: We, unlike English Heritage, have not put a concept paper together. We have not put a paper suggesting the way we would like to follow. In principle, we would agree that we need to bring a paper such as this together, so that we can move the issue forward.

Q215 Chairman: But you are not actively working on a document to try to do that?

Mr Rees: Not at present, no. I think that I should say a bit more about where we come from. The British Geological Survey is part of the Natural Environment Research Council, which comes under the Office of Science and Technology. We are effectively a research body, which provides the raw data which then the Office of Science and Technology, the DTI, take up.

Q216 Chairman: Given that you are almost part of the establishment, do you think that all the different people who have a finger in the marine pie are properly co-ordinated in government? It strikes the Committee, in terms of what we have heard, to be a rather bitty landscape out there - lots of people having lots of different responsibilities, some above the waterline, some below the waterline, some out 12 miles, some out 200 miles. It is all a bit of a mess really, is it not?

Mr Rees: Undoubtedly, yes. We wholeheartedly agree. In fact, if you only look at where the boundaries of legislation work in the coastal zone, you will find that there is a whole stack of different boundaries working to different tidal datums, different limits offshore - as you say, the three-mile limit, the 12-mile limit. It really is very complicated and it is very difficult sometimes to work out whom we should be approaching to deal with an issue.

Q217 Chairman: Do you see any signs within government that that position is being recognised?

Mr Rees: I think that it is being realised slowly. There is a general recognition that this has to be resolved, but at present I cannot see any real drive which will bring this about in the near future.

Q218 Chairman: Could you, for my greater education and understanding, say something about this thing called the Irish Sea Pilot Project? It keeps cropping up, but I am not quite certain what it does.

Mr Rees: The Irish Sea Pilot Project is really a product of the JNCC, the Joint Nature Conservation Council. The idea of developing a project like this is if we can establish the morphology of the seabed as a tool to help us to get better planning boundaries. If you look at what we have done onshore, we have moved increasingly towards things like natural boundaries such as catchments to determine where we should actually manage our onshore processes, for instance within drainage, pollution, et cetera. Ultimately we want to do the same thing offshore, using the landscape as a principle for splitting up the seabed in terms of how we manage it. As you well understand, the seabed is quite complex and has great variation within it. In fact, most of the variation within the seabed is geological. Basically, it is where the sediments are; where there is gravel, mud, sand; where you have rock outcropping, et cetera. Looking at a lot of the marine issues, such as the habitat issue - where you find habitats, for instance where you may want to build a wind farm - the geological boundaries are the most important. Part of the marine landscape principle is in establishing those landscapes so that we can designate them in different ways: how different types of landscapes can be given different classifications, and therefore we can put planning boundaries around these in a much more effective way than if we just put straight lines across different parts of the sea.

Q219 Chairman: What techniques do you use to survey the very big area which effectively is hidden from view by the sea?

Mr Rees: Most of the data which is used at present, which my organisation collected with Department of Energy funding between the 1970s and 1990s, used echo-sounder. In latter years we had a system called side-scan sonar, which gives a kind of photographic picture of the sea floor. These days we have much better systems. We have a system called multi-beam, which gives a very high-resolution bathymetry of the sea floor.

Q220 Chairman: Could you say that last word again?

Mr Rees: Bathymetry - the depth of the sea. It gives you a very good idea about the morphology of the seabed. That is invaluable for getting very high-resolution images of where sediments are and, in the instance of the past witnesses, where wrecks are, but also any other cultural features.

Q221 Chairman: Have you had any surprises about what all this monitoring has thrown up? Are there any gasps when you look at the readouts? Do you say, "Oh, I didn't know we had that round our shores"?

Mr Rees: In fact, yes. During our surveying over the last 20 to 30 years we have found some amazing things, not only archaeological but geological as well.

Q222 Chairman: Give us a flavour of that. We are trying to understand the enormity of what actually is there that we ought to be thinking of conserving and/or preserving.

Mr Rees: Before the survey, there was nothing. It was basically the water, and "There must be something at the bottom of the water". It was that bad. In the course of our surveying, however, we found very large aggregate resources, for instance. As part of the surveying, we established where there may be new oil or gas prospects, in terms of economic interests. We found wrecks. We still continue to do so. In fact, we have been working in the Faroes-Shetland Channel off Scotland recently and we have been finding many features we do not understand. It is quite exciting to be there and to find that we have underwater waterfalls and big landslides, which we did not know existed. Of course, a lot of this information is very valuable for looking at a whole range of interests, going from the economic - aggregates, the oil industry - to, at the other end, looking at climate change. In fact, in the Faroes-Shetland Channel, how the water motions between the Greenland Sea and the North Atlantic have changed over the last 20,000 to 30,000 years can be seen from the seabed.

Q223 Mr Mitchell: Does this mean that, just as aerial photography produced big advantages for archaeology - being able to find land patterns and settlement patterns, and generally knowing where to look - we have the same kind of photographic record from above of the bottom of the North Sea?

Mr Rees: Only in limited areas. Most of the data is held by the MoD, and it is mostly ----

Q224 Mr Mitchell: So they have got a lot more in secret?

Mr Rees: Yes, there is a lot more in secret. In fact, it is held by BGS but it cannot be released to the public in most cases. We use it to make high-resolution geological or seabed maps, but it has a limited availability. Multi-beam surveys, as I have just described, have only been done very locally around the UK shelf. You heard the archaeologists describe some of the work they have done off the south coast. We have been doing some recently in the Bristol Channel. Other countries in Europe, for instance Ireland and Norway, are undertaking widespread surveys of their entire shelves, because they realise the importance of such surveys and of this high-resolution information to habitat databases, et cetera.

Q225 Mr Mitchell: What proportion of ours has been done?

Mr Rees: At best, 1 per cent, I would say.

Q226 Mr Mitchell: Eventually, given the opening-up of the defence archives and given the extension of this method of photography, you could produce a North Sea map?

Mr Rees: You could do, yes. We already have produced crude maps. Do not get me wrong. In terms of the general distribution of sediments and landscapes around the North Sea ----

Q227 Mr Mitchell: And archaeology? And wrecks?

Mr Rees: No, not in that detail. This is something which is really quite crude. It is perhaps 100 or 200 metre scale. You might be able to say where the edge of a sandbank is or where the edge of a channel is. It is at that kind of resolution. For many purposes, in terms of offshore planning I would say that is a good start and it is probably going to go a long way. In terms of the detail, however, it is not half enough to help us in, say, archaeology, in looking at individual sites, or perhaps in terms of habitat classifications, to determine where you are going to find a certain species on the sea floor.

Q228 Chairman: You have whetted my enquiring appetite by saying that there is a cloak of secrecy around some aspects of what is out there. Given that we might want to try to get some kind of comprehensive picture of the marine environment, what is so secret? Perhaps you can give us a hint as to what it is we must not know about that is out there in the deep waters of the North Sea or the North Atlantic? What is lying there that we cannot see?

Mr Rees: One of the reasons the MoD are very keen to maintain secrecy, or limit the availability of data to the public, is because a lot of submarine mapping uses the seabed sediments as a navigational tool. If they understand where the seabed sediments are, they can monitor these as they are passing over them and can work out where they go in and out of ports. They also have sensitivity about high-resolution data because they see that an enemy could decide where to plant a mine. With a mine, you might want to anchor it in a certain substrate. If we provide high-resolution data, that could be seen ----

Mr Mitchell: I can see that it has to be kept from al-Qaeda, but ----

Ms Atherton: They do not have any submarines actually.

Q229 Mr Mitchell: They are so secretive as a department that they would not tell you where the Mary Rose was, if you did not know.

Mr Rees: Absolutely, yes.

Chairman: Before we send you down to have a look on our behalf, I will pass you over to Alan Simpson.

Q230 Alan Simpson: Mr Rees, I can see the value of having a defined and identifiable topography of the seabed because everyone who has come as a witness has told us how important conservation of the marine environment is, except that it is hard to know what it is. What does it mean in practical terms? What are we able to say in answer to some of the responses we have had? When we press people to define the marine environment, we have often been told, "It's a bit difficult. It's a bit of a movable feast", and that would be so in respect of the movements on the seabed and also of fish stocks. Where does your mapping process take us in that?

Mr Rees: Our mapping - which is not only geological mapping onshore but also geological mapping offshore - is done in a strategic sense. We do not decide, "That's going to be of interest tomorrow. We'll go and map that". We have rolled out and mapped the whole of the United Kingdom onshore and we have mapped the continental shelf, looking at the distribution of sediments and rocks over the entire area. As time has gone on, we have had lots of different interests and interests have changed quite frequently. For instance, the current issues now are cod stocks and where we are going to put wind farms. If you had asked me the same question 10 years ago, I would have given you a very different answer. To take an onshore analogy, we cannot determine what will be of interest when and so we have to do something strategically. For instance, in the foot-and-mouth crisis, everyone immediately wanted to know where we should be burying cattle. We could tell them or we could give some very good ideas, because we had the strategic data at hand - which is one of the reasons we need a geological survey, I believe, so that we can pass this information to government, to the public, when they need it.

Q231 Alan Simpson: I am with you on the geological information. I can understand the value of that. What I am struggling with is that we have had, in our inquiries and in the debate in the Commons yesterday, very big differences claimed regarding the depletion of fish stocks. Whatever position you take on that obviously determines your view on the conservation measures that are required. I am trying to edge towards an understanding of what your mapping technique would give us as a Parliament, in order to assist us to be clearer about the evidence base from which we are working.

Mr Rees: You have to realise that the evidence base is very poor. That is the principal thing here. Although we have a reasonable idea about what is out there now, largely due to organisations such as ours but also other organisations, it is still extremely poor. We have only a very fuzzy image of what there is. We also have a poor understanding about some of the processes. When I say processes, that is, natural activities - where fish breed, where fish feed. Although we have some idea about some of these processes, it is a very bitty scenario. We have a good appreciation of some fish stocks, but not of others. We are at the stage where, yes, we have a general idea of the picture but we still have most of the work to do. It is only by having a good understanding of the processes, of the distribution of the landscapes, that we will be able to get a good idea about what we are trying to manage.

Q232 Alan Simpson: You pointed out to us that this approach has been in use at different times in Norway, Ireland, Australia and the USA. So far, what evidence has come out of the use of those approaches that would allow you to say with reasonable confidence, "These are the findings here. These are the outcomes. We can expect a similar payback for us in the UK"?

Mr Rees: I apologise that, because of the fog, my colleague could not come from Edinburgh. One of the papers we were going to bring was some evidence from the Canadian survey. The Canadian geological survey has used multi-beam mapping around places like the Grand Banks in eastern Canada to determine better the habitats. There is very good evidence that that has already increased productivity of the fisheries in a way that does not deplete the fishery. Just because we know what is out there now, we can manage it better. There are examples from New Zealand, where there is very good high-resolution data which again has allowed us to manage deep-sea fisheries much better - because we have an idea about where fish are breeding and feeding. So there is good evidence. Likewise, another example is in Norway where they have a great shortage of limestone. They use a lot of calcareous sands, marine sands. Their multi-beam habitat mapping has shown where these marine sands may be found, fairly near the coast, and they can be used as a resource.

Q233 Alan Simpson: If we were to go down that path, what is it that the UK would have to do next? Inevitably, the Chancellor would be the one who would say, "At what cost?". Do we have any ballpark figure of the cost, and the steps that we would need to be taking?

Mr Rees: It would definitely be a many multimillion-pound project to do most of the UK continental shelf. I do not think that we could expect to be able to undertake that in the short term. Having said that, the Irish survey cost between £21 million and £28 million to do most of the deepwater areas. I would have to check that. With multi-beam, which is the main technique we would want to use, it has a ship at the surface and it has a swath system, which gives almost a photographic record of the sea floor. The deeper the water, the broader the area you can survey. If you have a swath system which is in five metres of water, you will only see perhaps 10 metres of the sea bed; whereas in deep water you might see it a kilometre or a couple of kilometres wide. The costs relate very much to the bathymetry and the area you would want to cover. One of the problems we have is that, in the UK, the area on which we need much more information is the coastal zone, and that is the bit which is shallowest. This is where there is the greatest depletion of data. In fact, in the geological survey it is known as the "white ribbon" because we have no data there. We have fantastic data onshore, down to the low water mark. We have data from where a survey vessel could come in, in the 1980s, out to sea. We have nothing in between. You will find that the same situation arises in most of the survey organisations. For instance, the Hydrographic Office and the Maritime Coastguard Agency, have very small datasets in those areas. They are the most expensive data.

Q234 Alan Simpson: And the cost of filling that knowledge gap?

Mr Rees: I would have to get back to you on that. We can give an estimate based on the line kilometres we would need. We have to remember that this is a very fast-moving environment. One of the reasons we are very interested in the near-shore area is because we want to understand those processes for coastal defence and because they are very important for habitats. These are the areas which are the most dynamic and, of course, what we map tomorrow will be very different to what is perhaps there on Sunday. Not quite that fast normally, but it will change certainly over a couple of years. You only have to look at how the coast has moved landwards over the last 6,000 years to realise that what we are dealing with is a very mobile system, and what we see today is effectively just a snapshot of that transition.

Q235 Paddy Tipping: You made some comments in the written evidence about habitat classification schemes and you say that they are deficient. Can you explain that to me?

Mr Rees: The European initiative on habitat classification is something that we welcome, in that it is a good first stab. However, I think that it needs to be seen as that. It is a first stab which is very much based on what datasets are out there and can be brought together to make something which is useful. It has to be better than what existed before. Having said that, there is broad agreement that it is a mile from being as good as we would like. In fact, the classification is very crude. If you look at the Annex I classifications, there are only four habitats.

Q236 Paddy Tipping: Could you explain that? Annex I?

Mr Rees: The different types of habitat have been identified within this Annex and there are only four types of habitat which are recognised within the UK waters. We have only found two of them, but we guess that others may exist. Going back to the issue of the resolution of the data, we have crude data at the moment which allows us to see shallow sandbanks and some reefs, for instance, but there are other features such as gas escape structures and submarine caves which we would guess are out there but we have not seen them.

Q237 Paddy Tipping: You go on to say in the evidence that the EU know that it is not acceptable. I think the phrase you use is that, in the short term, they are not going to do anything about it, and then you contrast that with places like the States, Canada, Norway and Australia, which are better now. Just explain why they are better and how they are different.

Mr Rees: I think the reason that Europe has done what it has done is because it is looking at it on a European scale and looking at what can be achieved on a European scale, using the present European datasets. What we could do in the future with high-resolution mapping such as multi-beam mapping is to split up the habitats of fish stocks, say, giving much more definition. We could look at it on a species level, looking at where it likes to live - rather than just saying, "This is a reef". To say, "This is a reef" is like saying "That's a forest". If you looked at where a certain variety of bird would be, you would not say, "It lives in the forest". You would say, "It lives within a canopy or under a certain type of bush" - a very specific habitat. By doing this, we would be able to do the same thing.

Q238 Paddy Tipping: What about our own Government? What is the UK Government's view on this? Do they acknowledge that there needs to be more work on this? Are they constrained by other European partners? Are they taking a European approach rather than a UK approach?

Mr Rees: At the moment I think that they are taking a largely European approach. Having said that, the UK is being quite forward in wanting to move the issue along, but it still has not financed any high-resolution mapping which would allow us to start further subdividing habitats. There are European initiatives which would allow us, if they were successful, to start pulling these details out. There is one called EUNIS, with which we are involved and which will allow us to do that. Yes, we are getting support for that but it is very much at the level where it is something that BGS is doing and they are watching what we are doing, rather than their saying, "Yes, this is the way we want to go and we will fund you to do it".

Q239 Paddy Tipping: Where should that funding stream come from? This is a complicated area.

Mr Rees: One thing that has to be recognised offshore is that we have many departments which have an interest. For instance, we have DEFRA and the ODPM. Quite where the funding for the mapping comes from, I would not like to say. The fact is that it is needed.

Q240 Chairman: In paragraph 14 of your evidence you refer to four species listed in Annex II of the Habitats Directive, which seems to determine whether areas will get this special status - Special Area of Conservation. They are grey seal, common seal, bottlenose dolphin and harbour porpoise. Why such a restricted list?

Mr Rees: That is a very good question. I feel that the list needs to be greatly expanded.

Q241 Chairman: What would you put in it?

Mr Rees: My interests principally are not with mammals. You can see the focus here. I think that there are many other species that we need to be worrying about. For instance, some of the deeper water species which are being very badly affected, such as the coral species, which we need to be protecting in a much greater way than we are at present.

Q242 Chairman: I go back to another of your answers - again, the offshore phenomenon - sandbanks, reefs, submarine structures made by leaking gases, and submerged sea caves. Are they the total extent of the things that we can conserve under the Annex I listing in the Habitats Directive?

Mr Rees: At present, yes.

Q243 Chairman: That is it?

Mr Rees: This is where we need a better classification and where we need the detail. This is a really good example of why we have to do this. In BGS we feel that, using our existing data, we could take the classification a lot further than we have at present. The landscapes and the habitats we are recognising at present are based on our fairly crude sediment mapping and bathymetry - that is, the water depth. There is a lot more we could do to split up the landscapes at present and provide more habitat information. This is a good illustration of why we need to do that.

Q244 Mr Breed: Under the Habitats Directive it is possible to designate some SACs as "temporary". Why was that introduced?

Mr Rees: With planning, as you know, once you have made a plan, plans are made on plans and it is very difficult to get rid of a plan later on. You will find that one boundary is used to set another boundary and, although you might get rid of the first boundary, you will always have it in the second. I think that it is widely recognised in Europe that you have this proliferation of boundaries and they are often seen as unhelpful, especially if they are removed later on because they are recognised as temporary. By setting something up only where we have a fairly good idea of where it needs to be, at least we will stop that proliferation.

Q245 Mr Breed: Typically, how big would these areas be?

Mr Rees: They vary, depending on the habitat. Some of the features which we are presently looking at in terms of designation can be whole sand-wave fields, areas perhaps the size of Anglesey. They are pretty big. In other cases, they may be part of a marine cliff and only a few metres wide.

Q246 Mr Breed: So you could have a temporary site literally the size of a place like Anglesey?

Mr Rees: I would not have thought a temporary site, but there have been problems with such temporary sites.

Q247 Mr Breed: For how long are they temporary? Is there a limit to their temporariness?

Mr Rees: One of the problems is, because everyone is dealing with poor resolution and poor data generally, they are given a "temporary" site, then investigations are undertaken to see what is there, what the habitat is, how important the habitat is, and maybe after doing that you think, "It's not that important", and you remove its status.

Q248 Mr Breed: The Commission have said that we should not go round designating things as "temporary" if we think it likely that there will be evidence coming forward at a later stage to change that. That is a sort of warning to say that we should not be doing it wholesale. You believe that is obviously a sensible approach?

Mr Rees: I think that it is quite sensible.

Q249 Mr Breed: And one which in general is being adhered to.

Mr Rees: Yes. If we had far more complete data, I do not think that we would be going through this phase in the first place, because we would know much better whether what we are looking at in that site is actually a real rarity, or whether it is something that we can find in 2,000 other places around the UK coast. At present we cannot say that because we do not know about the distribution elsewhere. So when we find, say, a new coral species or a new invertebrate, we will perhaps put a "temporary" designation on it and then find afterwards that it is not needed.

Q250 Mr Breed: By definition, you cannot really know that when you put the "temporary" designation on it. You cannot know that you are going to find stuff to be absolutely deselected. I just wondered how that functioned.

Mr Rees: One of the important things to realise is that there is a very close correlation between the geology of the seabed and what you have living on it. If we find a species which lives on a certain substrate, at least if we have a high-resolution map we will be able to say that that substrate can be found over 11/2 per cent of the UK shelf within this water depth, and therefore we would expect that we will also find a similar species distribution.

Q251 Mr Breed: Overall, you would say that the policy of the "temporary" designation is working broadly?

Mr Rees: It is broadly working okay. As an interim measure, it is probably not that harmful.

Q252 Mr Breed: It is not totally dissimilar to spot listing of buildings, is it, under the grading of English Heritage?

Mr Rees: At least it is precautionary, yes.

Q253 Paddy Tipping: You made a good case for more data, but there is already a lot of data about. You have told us about the MoD and how they trust just you and nobody else. Presumably other people have data. I think you said earlier that the Department of Energy, long defunct, had some data, and the DTI and DEFRA must have some data. How far are these datasets compatible and how far is information shared between them?

Mr Rees: Over recent years there have been quite big advances in data-sharing, largely because people have known what data is out there. In fact, we have meta-data databases. Meta-data is basically a database of data - so that we know what is out there, who has surveyed it, when it was done, and for what purpose. That sounds very crude, but it is very useful for any organisation to know what has been done in the past and what they could use. That does not mean that they have free access to the data, but it means that they can contact another body and get hold of the data, normally at a reasonable cost.

Q254 Paddy Tipping: So, apart from the MoD, people are prepared to share?

Mr Rees: Broadly, yes. BGS runs a site called UKDEAL which is largely for the oil industry. For instance, anyone wanting to look at oil reserves around the UK can immediately come to the site and find out who has done what, what date surveys were done, who drilled what boreholes. For details of what is in the boreholes or perhaps a seismic survey dataset, they would have to approach the companies, but we can tell them whom they should be approaching.

Q255 Paddy Tipping: And the private sector? The oil companies, the gas companies, the aggregates companies - they are not secretive about this? They have information and they are prepared to share it?

Mr Rees: They are secretive and it is obviously in their interests to be secretive, because they are all exploration companies and they are all trying to find a new resource which no one else has. What they normally do, however, is they trade. In the aggregates industry and in the hydrocarbon industry that is quite commonplace. They will trade information - well information, seismic survey information. If another party wants to come along, however, they would normally have to buy it. Clearly, if it is old data it will be a lot cheaper than new data, but that is the way it would normally work.

Q256 Paddy Tipping: Is there any conflict between the extractive industries - the oil companies, for example - and the conservation bodies, bodies like the RSPB and WWF?

Mr Rees: There are conflicts. In fact, I should qualify what I have just said in terms of the aggregate industry and the hydrocarbons industry. If an oil company is going to put a rig somewhere or if a dredging company is going to look at a new prospect, the environmental data associated with that is free and open. There is no problem about that, and that is the way it should be. It is in terms of the geological data and perhaps the reserve data - that is what they will maintain their private access to. May I qualify something? You were asking about how joined up the organisations were and how much information-sharing there was. That is also increasing. I can give you another illustration of something BGS is doing with the Hydrographic Office and the Ordnance Survey in the coastal zone. It is ensuring that we are providing data, which is all for the same datum and the same projection - it sounds as though we should have done this a long time ago but it is just happening now - and, as a result, coastal zone users will be able to make sure that, when they use one of the three datasets, it will integrate completely with the others.

Q257 Ms Atherton: Why was there insufficient time for technical advice to be incorporated into the licensing process in the DTI Strategic Environment Assessment?

Mr Rees: We generally have quite short timescales to work to.

Q258 Ms Atherton: Who creates those timescales? Is it the DTI?

Mr Rees: I think that it is largely the DTI we are talking about here. Yes, it is too rushed. It does not give us a chance in all cases to look at an area in sufficient detail, before something goes on, to make a very good assessment about what is there. I am not saying that this is always the case, but there certainly has been a rush in the past.

Q259 Ms Atherton: So are they less than useless?

Mr Rees: Not less than useless, but I think that we could do better.

Q260 Ms Atherton: How much more time would you need?

Mr Rees: I would have to talk to my colleagues about this. Can I get back to you on that and give you some idea?

Ms Atherton: Certainly.

Q261 Chairman: I would like to pursue that line of questioning, because paragraph 27 of your evidence whetted my appetite as well. You said at the beginning of your evidence that you were part of the DTI. Given that in geological terms we know there are only certain undersea areas which are likely to be exploitable for further oil and gas discoveries, I was a bit surprised that you had not been set off earlier to do some of your work. Yet you comment that you are pressurised because suddenly somebody decides that they are going to have another exploration round. I was talking to a representative of a gas company at the weekend, and he was able to tell me whereabouts things were happening. He seemed to have quite a lot of foresight, particularly on the western environs of the United Kingdom, where or where not things were going to occur. If these people know, why the rush?

Mr Rees: We know fairly quickly but, yes, some of the people in industry know more quickly than we do. There is no doubt about that. We are quick to find out, but one of the problems is that the environmental information we are looking for, supplied by the industry, is often slow to arrive. It means that we cannot get down to the assessment we would like to do as quickly as possible.

Q262 Chairman: You have mentioned briefly the Irish Sea pilot, but I have to say that I struggle to understand the content of paragraph 24 of your evidence. I wonder if, in conclusion, you might be able to interpret paragraph 24 for me?

Mr Rees: To summarise paragraph 24, again it is coming down to the resolution of detail. It is about whether we are in a position to be able to make value judgments based on the datasets we have at present. This paragraph is basically saying that some parts of government - organisations such as the JNCC - are perhaps making value judgments that they are not in a position to make, because we do not have the data to allow them to do that.

Q263 Chairman: What we have had by way of evidence so far are perspectives from a number of key players in the marine environment world, all with their own focus and expertise. The one clear message that is coming across is that the law and the organisation which is involved in the marine world is fragmented, and there may be a need for coherence to be achieved in some way. Let us imagine that we could wave our magic wand and you could bring together all of these players into, shall we say, a Marine Conservation Agency. Would very big, as opposed to small and fragmented, necessarily be better, or would it be better to find some way of wiring people together but maintaining their particular area of expertise? Which model might deliver the better solution, in your judgment?

Mr Rees: I think that the wiring together could work very well. In recent years we have certainly made big advances in working together. That model could work a lot better in the future, with some hard wiring. One of the issues we have to be aware of is that we cannot just look at things - at, say, conservation. We also have to look at the economic needs. We have various interests, just as we have on land, in using the seabed and using marine resources. While we could bring it all into one body, I think that will probably not satisfy all of the stakeholders around that body. They cannot perhaps trust one organisation to do everything as well as against their having individual departments or individual representatives working for them. For instance, the environmental lobby could make sure that the unit or the body by which they are represented will not be devalued by perhaps being in the same department as a body which is looking at economic resources - say, seabed aggregates.

Q264 Chairman: Finally, a postscript question. On page 1 of your evidence you say, "One of the main threats to the marine environment is the fishing industry". As a Committee, we have looked at that on many occasions. You have whetted our appetite that, with more information on the marine environment, you could assist in the management of fisheries better. In a sentence or two, could you say why you think the fishing industry is such a threat to the marine environment? If you had listened to the fishing debate yesterday, you would think that it had turned round; there were lots of fish; lots of conservation going on; lots of responsibility; and there really was not a problem out there for the industry.

Mr Rees: I think that you only have to look at the scientists' evidence on fish stocks to realise that what may be apparent often is not the case. We can see that demersal fisheries, finned fisheries, capture fisheries, are in decline and generally, as you know, there are at present very poor stocks of cod, haddock, et cetera. We also know that the methods of fishing - beam trawling and so on - in the past have certainly caused a lot of disruption of the seabed. I have mentioned before some of the almost photographic images we have of the seabed. If you look at these, you will see trawl marks everywhere. It just shows the extent of trawling and the extent of disruption of the seabed in the past. Clearly, other industries have also affected the seabed, such as the aggregates industry. However, I think it is fair to say that the fishing industry is much more widespread and probably has caused more problems.

Chairman: Mr Rees, thank you very much for answering our questions so comprehensively. Please tell your colleague that we are sorry that he was not able to come and join us, but you have done a jolly good job and we are very grateful to you. Certainly, on those couple of aspects on which you said you were going to write to the Committee, we look forward to hearing from you. Thank you very much.