The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Richard Benyon)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh) for securing this important debate in the House, and I commend the excellent report that her Committee has produced. This debate has benefited from some very interesting interventions and speeches by hon. Members on both sides of the House, and I hope to refer to as many of them as possible.
My hon. Friend launched the debate with real knowledge and enthusiasm. Her enthusiasm for and interest in the subject are apparent from how she speaks about it, and they are very welcome. I enjoyed taking part in one of her Committee’s sittings on this subject, and I was impressed by the level of knowledge and interest across the Committee.
In answer to the hon. Member for East Lothian (Fiona O’Donnell) and others, I am happy to report on how we are progressing with our discussions in the European Union. On Monday I am going to Brussels, where I will be discussing, not least, regionalisation, as well as the external dimension, on which we are making some progress, although it has not yet got to where I want it to be. I entirely share the position taken by the hon. Lady and my hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall (Sheryll Murray) in abhorring the dreadful practices that we have learned about in recent years regarding the external footprint of fishing vessels that are subsidised by our constituents’ taxes so that they can fish unsustainably in the waters of some of the poorest countries in the world. I am looking forward to putting forward a very robust line on that, and I am impressed by the progress that my officials are making on it.
We will also be talking about discards, which I will discuss later. The hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford) will be interested to know that we will deal with the thorny issue of mackerel and the perhaps not-very-sustainable activities of the Government of Iceland and the Faroe Islands. The hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil), who extolled the virtues of the Faroe Islands, might like to reflect on the fact that that country is not behaving at all properly in this matter.
I know as well as anyone how complex the issues are surrounding the whole area of the common fisheries policy and how difficult it is to unpick the diverse and interlinked problems that we face in reforming this failed policy. The Committee’s inquiry gets to the heart of these issues with a remarkable degree of perspicuity, and it has, as I said, delivered a very impressive report. The Committee’s thinking also reflects the stance that we are taking across a range of important priorities for reform of the CFP. It is crucial that we get past the “one size fits all” mindset that has served European fisheries so badly.
My hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Oliver Colvile) hosted my visit to the wonderful Plymouth marine laboratory, where we saw the impact of climate change. We saw how the fronts that change the temperatures of our seas in different places are moving, and how fish populations are moving. It is clearly ridiculous to have one constraining system for managing our fisheries that goes from the sub-Arctic waters of the north to the waters of the south Mediterranean. We must have a system that is much more fleet of foot, and we can do that only if it is more locally managed. I will come on to talk about how we are going to try to achieve that.
We are facing a critical stage in the negotiations in the coming months, and I will continue to press for radical reform; as I said, I will do that at the Fisheries Council in Brussels next week. In addition to those discussions on reform, we will have further discussions in April, May and June. The European Parliament is also considering the proposals in its committee stages, and we expect a plenary vote there on the whole package by the autumn.
The Committee’s report rightly highlights the importance of regionalisation. We must find ways to allow member states to work together regionally on the detail of fisheries management—in discussion, of course, with stakeholders—and I agree that we can do that within the bounds of the current treaty. Technical and legal constraints should not overshadow our aims in this regard, and that has been our message to others. I hope that I will discover that the issues of competence are as clear as the Committee suggests. We have been exploring with other member states the types of provision that it has identified in order to build support for potential solutions. I can assure my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton that members of her Committee are not the only ones with access to legal opinions. In my experience, there are many and varied legal opinions on the subject, and it is important that they should be robust and able to stand up to the rigours of challenge.
The Commission’s proposals reflect that same concept of empowering member states to take some of their own decisions. However, we are concerned that conferring more delegated powers on the Commission, as the proposals have the potential to do, might end up centralising decisions again.
I made an interesting visit to the constituency of the hon. Member for South Down (Ms Ritchie). I quite understand why she is not in her place, because she informed me that she would have to depart. I was shown a net in which an eliminator panel had been put in precisely the right place to allow cod to escape, but the net was deemed illegal by people who manage fisheries about 1,000 miles away from the fishermen who use it. They insisted that the eliminator panel should be further towards the cod end, even though the fishermen knew that by that stage the fish would be too tired to swim up through it. How crazy is that? What lunacy it is to have a system that does not allow the fishery in a particular area to develop the means to do virtuous things such as excluding discards.
I recognise that what I can achieve will probably never be quite what my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax), the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Austin Mitchell) and others would like, but I will do my best to achieve as much as I can.
The genuine regionalisation that the Government and the Select Committee are calling for will need the robust co-operation of member states on shared fisheries for it to be credible and to win support from others. Empowering member states to take some decisions may form part of the process, but it might not solve the whole problem. As many hon. Members have said, many of our fish stocks are shared with other countries and can best be managed on a regional basis. I believe that a properly devolved system, with close co-operation between member states, operating with an ecosystem-based approach, as the hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) mentioned, is the right way forward.
The hon. Member for East Lothian asked if we have friends in Europe on this matter. We do. There are many like-minded states that share my sense of exhaustion over and rhetoric on how appalling this system is, and we are working closely with them. It is mainly, but not exclusively, the northern European states that have a like-minded view. I hope that we will find plenty of allies in the coming weeks.
Dr Whiteford
Does the Minister think that the regional advisory council model is appropriate for aquaculture?
Richard Benyon
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for reminding me of the very good point that she made. I share her view entirely that this is an area where the European Union does not need to tread. We have a successful aquaculture industry in the United Kingdom. We are all aware of the agenda here. Some of the more land-locked countries, which are seeking to access some of the European fisheries money, are interested in developing a competence over aquaculture. I assure her that I am robust in trying to exclude that possibility. How successful I will be remains to be seen.
We remain hopeful that the reformed CFP can build in a robust process to regionalise decision making. That will require agreement not only on issues of legal competence, but on practical processes for co-operation on management decisions with other member states which are transparent and enforceable. We will continue to press for that and will build support with the member states that share our fisheries.
The hon. Member for East Lothian asked when I last met the commissioner. It was just a few weeks ago. I meet her regularly and count her as an ally and a friend. I think she needs friends at the moment. I will be robust in giving our support for what she is trying to do. She needs legal advice as well. There are legal opinions coming from all directions on these matters and we are keen to provide her with ours.
I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Mr Doran), who made a thoughtful speech. He addressed a serious problem that goes to the heart of the credibility of an industry for which I have the highest regard. We should not minimise in any way the fact that when black fish are sold on the scale that he described, those fish have been stolen from legitimate fishermen. That is a crime of multi-million-pound proportions, and he was both brave and right to state that.
To achieve what we want to, we will require improvements in how we collect data and develop scientific evidence. A number of Members have referred to that. At the moment, the process can often lack robust data or be too narrowly focused on the short term to be credible with fishermen or to help policy makers. A more grown-up relationship is needed between scientists, fishermen and policy makers so that we can gather more effective data on the impact of fishing on the whole marine environment, and build trust. The fisheries science partnership that we have in the UK will help to pave the way to achieving that.
Nearly every Member who spoke referred to discards. I say to the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar—[Interruption.] That pronunciation is the best I can do at this stage of the week, I am afraid. I remind him that more than half the tonnage of discarded fish has absolutely nothing to do with the European Union but is because it is made up of species that we do not eat and for which there is no market. There is a supply chain solution to that if we are imaginative. I am not diminishing the blame that must be apportioned to the system of management that creates the remainder of the discards, and we must not stop trying to deal with that, but more than 50% of discards are because there is no market. Great progress is being made on that, not least by DEFRA, through good projects such as Fishing for the Markets.
I am glad that my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton mentioned my evidence to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, in which I said how wrong it would be if we created a system that transferred a problem over the horizon at sea to one of landfill. Through a discard ban or an elimination of discards, we need to progress a supply chain solution to creating new markets for fish.
Fiona O'Donnell
Does the Minister also support fishermen in identifying markets overseas? For instance, there is not much of an appetite for cuttlefish at home, but there is in other parts of the world.
Richard Benyon
Those who watched Monty Halls’s programme last night will have seen the export of fantastic-quality spider crabs, which we should be eating in this country. We have to develop more eclectic tastes, but that is a debate in itself and I want to press on.
I agree with the Select Committee that we need to get our measures right and proceed carefully in setting targets. However, that has to be done on a fishery-by-fishery basis. I am also mindful that if we equivocate, we could find a thousand reasons why we should not do anything about discards. I believe that the Commission is right, and there should be an absolutely clear determination to move as near to an elimination of discards as we possibly can. That is why we will not sign up to the French declaration next week and why we must go into the next stage of negotiations on discards as robustly as possible to achieve a solution.
The debate on the CFP objectives raises similar challenges in a variety of areas. On the achievement of maximum sustainable yield, for example, I agree that we have to be guided by the best available scientific advice, particularly about complex mixed fisheries, and do so in a credible way. That is why we want clear objectives that are linked to existing commitments and enable us to get the specifics right for each fishery through multi-annual plans. That requires an intelligent approach to getting scientific data and advice. We have some good examples in the UK of partnership working with the industry, and I agree that member states must be more accountable for delivering the data needed to manage fisheries effectively. I appreciate the words of the hon. Member for Brent North about the need to define what we mean by MSY. FMSY is a different target from others, so we must get that right.
The Select Committee is right to sound caution about the Commission’s proposal for transferrable fishing concessions. My hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Amber Rudd) raised that matter with passion. Although I recognise the benefits that a market approach can bring, I want our fishing rights to be managed in an economically rational way, by decisions on the allocation of rights being left to member states. If it were run and organised at that level, we could achieve real results. In certain circumstances, groups of fishermen might invest in an increasing biomass and see the attraction of a transferable fishery concession, which would in turn benefit the marine environment. It is important to look at that, but we should do so with caution, as advised by the Committee’s report.
A number of hon. Members asked who owns quota. I do not want to break with the cross-party consensus of the debate, but I suggest that the hon. Member for East Lothian has a bit of a nerve criticising the Government. We must get a grip on this problem. My Department intends to produce a register of who owns quota. To do that, we are working with producer organisations, which hold much of that information. I am constantly told of celebrities and football clubs that are alleged to own quota, but I have never found evidence of it. As the fishing opportunity should sit with vessels, the situation becomes complicated.
Sheryll Murray
As I pointed out, people who have quota must have a vessel, or a dummy vessel that is held in a producer organisation. Quota can transfer between different producer organisations, but it is impossible for somebody to go out and buy fish quota without having a vessel.
Richard Benyon
The argument centres on who owns various companies, which makes things complicated, but my hon. Friend is, as always, absolutely right. The work we are doing to reform domestic management of English fisheries reflects those principles, but a lot has been said today on what we are trying to achieve. She knows more than anybody how important that is, but many hon. Members represent constituencies where there is a small inshore fleet.
A measure that has been raised in the debate—it is essentially independent from our reform measures—is my decision to give an opportunity to others to catch stocks that have been left unutilised for four consecutive years. I hope all hon. Members agree that where valuable fish quotas have been left unfished for four consecutive years, it is reasonable to look to give others the opportunity to catch them, so that we make the best of our national quota.
The Government’s reform measures are a response to our consultation in 2011. Many fishermen were uneasy at the prospect of the rapid introduction of an allocation system based on fixed quota allocations to the under-10 metre fleet. Therefore, we have since explored other ways in which we can give fishermen in that sector more control over their future fishing activity, and are seeking to establish voluntary pilots to set out the benefits and challenges of a more local approach to management.
To align those pilots as closely as practicable with the measures on which we consulted, in particular the proposed foundation quota, we are temporarily taking from producer organisations a percentage of quota allocations if they were increased at the December Council. That will apply only where vessels in the prospective pilots hold a track record of catching the increased quotas. Producer organisations will still benefit from having greater amounts of quota than last year, but they will have slightly less of an increase than they would otherwise have enjoyed.
There have been rumours regarding the suspension of all leasing and swapping by certain POs to the under-10 metre fleet in reaction to those proposals. I would be very disappointed if any PO looks to penalise other fishermen for circumstances that are not within their control and hurt their members financially. Should such attitudes and behaviours take place, it would not bode well for our wish to impart greater management and responsibility for fisheries to those who fish them. DEFRA officials are in close touch with colleagues at the Marine Management Organisation, who are monitoring the position and will be assessing likely impacts on the profitability of our fishing sectors should those rumours develop.
As I have said, I will be discussing the external dimension of the CFP at the Council meeting next week. I believe that the principles of the sustainable use of marine resources must apply in the same way outside EU waters as within. Proposals for agreements with third countries should be strengthened to ensure better value for money; integration on fisheries development projects; clauses on human rights; greater transparency to ensure appropriate spend of money and science to improve sustainability; and improved fisheries governance to ensure that the benefits of the agreements are delivered in reality. I think we are making progress on this, but there is more work to do.
The Committee questioned the links between Government advice on healthy eating and the sustainability of fish stocks. Current Department of Health advice suggests consuming two portions of fish per week, one of which should be oily. This level of consumption can readily be sustained if we manage our stocks effectively.
I fully support the motion. The failures of the CFP cannot be allowed to continue eroding the livelihoods of our fishermen and blighting the marine environment. This is why the current reform process is so important, and why I am committed to making sure we get the right policy during the discussions this year. That means a policy that allows member states to work together regionally to manage their fisheries more effectively, and a policy underpinned by better scientific knowledge of what is happening in our marine ecosystems.
On a point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Eric Ollerenshaw), I am proud to be the UK fisheries Minister. It is important that I represent a noble industry, one that I wish to see revived, but if I restricted my actions to the management of fisheries, in a myopic, silo way, I would be letting down fishermen and all who care about the marine environment. So my hon. Friend is right: we should take a holistic view in our policies on fisheries, our marine policies and the reform of the common fisheries policy.