Fisheries Bill [HL]

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 11th March 2020 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

111: Clause 28, page 19, line 10, at end insert—
“( ) For the purposes of making provision relating to subsection (2)(a), a charging scheme must take account of the public interest in ensuring that chargeable persons do not—(a) make financial gain, or(b) gain competitive advantage,as a result of their unauthorised catches of sea fish.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would require charging schemes, when calculating penalties for unauthorised fishing, to consider the public interest in ensuring that unauthorised fishing does not result in a fisher enjoying a financial gain or competitive advantage.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a fairly straightforward amendment addressing the issue of the discards ban, which we have debated thoroughly in the past. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, for signing the amendment, given his committee’s impressive and forensic work on this very issue. I hope for a constructive reply from the Minister because the need to strengthen measures relating to discards is one issue where there has long been cross-party consensus.

We have moved quite quickly away from the original intent of the discard ban, which was to put virtually no value on the unauthorised fish caught and landed, to what is now proposed, which enables a charge to be paid so the fish can still be sold at market. But it is vital that these new charges do not incentivise wrong behaviours. We welcome that there are provisions in the Bill for penalties to be imposed as a result of unauthorised catches, and hope that these powers will be used in a sensible and proportionate manner. Perhaps the Minister can confirm that authorities, particularly in the first stages, will consider issuing warnings before imposing fines as the new scheme is bedded in. On the other hand, I hope that he will also be able to confirm that authorities will be able to ramp up fines in the case of repeated offences, where it is clear that a more deliberate illegality is taking place.

In the meantime, our amendment is primarily for probing purposes in order to better understand the proposed system. But it was also tabled out of a genuine concern that, if the penalty system is not designed properly, charges may be considered as a price worth paying in order to get around the discard rules. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reassurance on this issue and I beg to move the amendment.

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I say in particular to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, that not only are we working collaboratively within England to bring forward the scheme but, as I said, we are working closely with the devolved Administrations. Following this debate, I will make sure that noble Lords’ remarks are passed on to those working on the scheme. As I said, I absolutely endorse the points that all noble Lords have made in this short debate—we are on the same page—and I want the chance to take back what has been said because, candidly, this is work in progress. Our bona fides on this are strong. We want to put the best discard prevention charging scheme in place and this debate will have been very helpful. I reassure noble Lords that this matter is taken extremely seriously. It is one of the tools that I hope we will be able to deploy on the whole issue of discard and bycatch. With that explanation, I hope that the noble Baroness will feel able to withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his helpful response. We are all looking for the best way to stop wasteful discards. As he will know, that has been campaigned for over many years. We were very pleased when the discard ban was introduced because it felt as though it was finally beginning to address the issue. If we now move away from it, we need to be assured that anything that runs in parallel has equal advantages.

I suppose that I had not quite understood that the scheme would be voluntary, so I assume that it is all still underpinned by the current discard ban and the charging scheme will work only in certain areas and certain fisheries.

[Lord Teverson]

Perhaps I may make an obvious point. It is generally understood that discarding is continuing as it always has done and that there is very little change in fishers’ activity in that regard. Therefore, bringing in a charge will be a greater incentive to them to carry on as they are at the moment. I welcome this initiative but for the scheme to be successful there has to be remote electronic monitoring or whatever on the vessels so that fishers cannot discard at sea. The scheme will work only if that is done; otherwise, it will be an additional incentive to discard.

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

That reminds me of a point that my noble friend Lady McIntosh raised. We have had a discussion about the requirements—not only REM but all the ways in which we need to work. We absolutely need to work with industry but we also need to say to it, “It is in your vital interests to work on this area because, in the end, if there aren’t sustainable stocks, there isn’t a sustainable industry”. They are so intertwined. I repeat that, once a scheme is up and running, the existing arrangements for prosecution of overfishing and the issuing of fines remain. This is an add-on, a further tool. There are other countries where it has worked well; this is an opportunity and work is in hand. We want to get the best scheme. It is important that we look internationally to see where it has worked and where it has not so that, when we deploy this, it hits the right target.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

Again, that is very helpful. I agree absolutely with the Minister that it is a good idea to look at what is working well internationally. If there are schemes that work well, we should certainly try to learn from them. It is a good idea also to take this slowly and at an appropriate pace with respect to the consultation. Having introduced one scheme, the last thing we want is for people to be confused about the legal underpinnings and their obligations. So, taking it in stages is a good idea. I accept that this is work in progress. It would be great to be updated at some point about how that consultation is going. It is a very delicate balance to set the charges to a level which bring about the right behaviours. They will need to be very nimble because what works in one sector or quarter might not work the same way in another. I do not envy the people who are trying to set those rates so that they incentivise the right behaviours.

I thank the Minister. It has been helpful to get these issues out on the table. Of course, I echo the points made about REM by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh. That is an issue that we have rehearsed before and will rehearse again. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 111 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

113: Clause 33, page 22, line 17, at end insert—
“( ) the gathering of scientific data relating to fishing, including but not limited to carrying out stock assessments, vessel monitoring, remote electronic monitoring with cameras and recording fishing catches.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would enable financial assistance to be provided for scientific data collection.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 113 I shall also speak to Amendment 120. These amendments relate to the Secretary of State’s powers to grant financial assistance. Although amending different clauses, they work in tandem to allow for the collection of additional scientific data to influence future policy. Amendment 113 adds scientific data collection to the causes to which the Secretary of State can provide financial support. It also refers to support for remote electronic monitoring, the importance of which we have debated on a number of occasions. Amendment 120 would give the Secretary of State further powers to make provision relating to the collection of scientific data. It may be that other powers within the Bill would be sufficient to allow this; I hope the Minister can clarify that point. However, we believe that it is important to strengthen the requirement to fund and collate the best scientific data available. This is particularly important as we leave the EU and lose access to the mass of scientific work on fishing being carried out by other member states.

Much earlier in the withdrawal negotiations, there seemed to be a genuine desire to continue academic collaboration with our EU neighbours on a whole range of mutually beneficial research, but this desire seems to have withered. It no longer seems to be given any priority, so it is likely that we will have to rely on our own scientific community to provide the data which will form the basis of our sustainability agenda. If I am wrong, and the intention is still to seek some form of research collaboration, I am sure that the Minister will put me right. If I am right, our scientific community, however good it may be, will be stretched and will need all the financial support it can get.

We need the best available scientific data, produced in a timely manner. There are still enormous gaps in our knowledge. Data deficiency remains a real challenge. According to government data, the status of three of the UK’s 15 main fish stocks is unknown. As a result, much of the fish caught in UK waters cannot be marketed as sustainable. The catch, therefore, cannot be considered for Marine Stewardship Council certification. If we can address this deficit, it will help to improve sustainability, as well as potentially offering up more fishing opportunities and more economic stability for our fishers. I hope noble Lords will see the sense in these amendments.

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[Lord Teverson]

May I come back on a couple of points? I thank the Minister for his positivity and I am grateful that he points out that the Bill allows financial intervention in terms of selective gear—that is very useful. One of the things that has come out from Select Committee work is that something that is perhaps not tracked by government, and I am not saying that this is easy, is how selectivity is being applied or is increasing. It is one of those areas that is quite important to track, so I just make that point.

I find it difficult to accept the idea that by giving a financial answer to sustainability we will get a rush to fish. Let us get back to the real world. The way it has worked in the past and will do in the future is that there will be, I presume, an annual agreement about quotas for the various fisheries. At that point we will get the dilemma that if we have an extremely low TAC we know that it will be very difficult for certain sectors of the industry, whichever sectors they are. That is the point at which the political compromise will be made and we will say, “All right, that is not sustainable. We have to help coastal communities, so we will fudge the scientific advice and allow that quota to go up.” This amendment would mean that at that annual negotiation we can say, “No, don’t fudge the scientific advice. You have to go by the scientific advice, but we recognise that there is pain in that sector of the fleet and we will find a financial way around it.” The noble Lord, Lord Cameron, has often made the point that this has often been used in Europe as an alternative, sometimes quite successfully.

I was in Mevagissey at the weekend, looking at the vessels there. It is the second largest Cornish fishing port, and there was a proud sticker on the side of one wheelhouse saying “Fishing For Plastic.” There are schemes like that, so we are not paying for fishers to sit down with their feet up and enjoy the rest of the year at the taxpayers’ expense. It is a bit like the initiative on elms in the Agriculture Bill that I praised in the past. There are ways of doing it. There is no incentive to rush out to get your quota and then stop: this is about an annual situation. Responding to the positivity of the Minister, I am trying to explain that this amendment does not do that; it is trying to solve the dilemma in a positive way, a way that has been done by other fisheries administrations before. I think it is key to solving the economic issue while making sure that we are able to stick to sustainable fish stocks and scientific advice. I just wanted to make that clear.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, made that point extremely well, and I hope the Minister will take it away and reflect on it further. As he says, there are all sorts of sustainability activities that one can imagine the fishers being funded to carry out that are not just straight fishing. If we were being more imaginative in the Bill, we could be more imaginative on those sorts of issues as well.

I want to say something about funding, because the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, quoted the Secretary of State on long-term funding commitments and asked which budget they will come from. I know that the Minister mentioned the spending review, but that is not the same as the commitment that seems already to have been made. I think he said that he would write or give us further information. Perhaps he could do that in writing to say what that longer-term funding will be and how it will be funded in the future. That would be extremely helpful, because that question mark still hangs over this.

I was not convinced. I did not come to bang my drum for Amendment 113 in particular, but the more the Minister tried to rubbish it, the more I got quite defensive about it. For example, in the Bill we have this long list of reasons for funding to be given by the Secretary of State, some of which are quite major and others one might think are not so significant. We are trying to say that collecting the scientific data is as important as them. I am sure that it is. It must be on a par with that because it is at the heart of our sustainability measures. Given that we already have a long list, I cannot see why we cannot add a paragraph (j) to the bottom of that long list.

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

The point is that I can foresee that there would be scientific analysis of the majority of them. It is not as if science is over there; science will provide the solutions and the answers to this long list. That is why—obviously not successfully—I am seeking to deploy that science and the collection of scientific data are absolutely included. That is a given, and it is applicable. There will be all sorts of ways in which science can apply for financial assistance with regard to much of that long list.

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[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

My response to that is, if that is the case, why not put it here? The scientists themselves might find that easier, rather than having to claim for funding as a sub-clause of one of these things listed here, and it might make the funding more accessible if it was stated absolutely in the Bill. I am not absolutely convinced by what the Minister has attempted to say on that.

The Minister then attempted to say that, in any case, Amendment 113 does not stand up legally. We talked about the gathering of scientific data and some of the reasons that it might be necessary—stock assessments, vessel monitoring and so on—and he said that some of those things are mandatory already. I hear that point, in which case I increasingly feel that I will take this away and put forward a more general clause which says “the gathering of scientific data”, so that we will not be precluded from some things that are already mandatory. We can play around with the wording, which might provide a solution for all of us.

I feel that the Minister’s lawyers have been overanalysing all this, poring over it in rather more detail than they needed to. Again, I absolutely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, that the idea that there is a legal failure in the wording of the policy that is put forward in his amendment does not stand up to scrutiny. If we do not have the wording exactly right on that, we can find the right words for what the noble Baroness and the noble Lord are attempting to do to ensure that we have sustainable fishing and a balance with socio-economic activities.

I am sorry to say this, but I am not absolutely convinced. It would be helpful to have some more information about how the long-term science will be funded, and it comes back to something that we have been discussing ever since we started talking about the EU withdrawal Bill. A lot is riding on the UK science community. We always talk about the great strengths that it has and the fantastic work that it does, but it will be stretched to meet all these new targets as it used to share a lot of the work with its EU counterparts. It will need support and access to new funds, and the more reassurance we can give it in the Bill or elsewhere that those funds will be coming to it, the more we can have confidence that a future sustainable scheme built on the best scientific advice is a reality rather than just something that we aspire to. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 113 withdrawn.

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[Lord Randall of Uxbridge]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 128, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, has attached her name.

In 2001, I was top of the Private Member’s Bill ballot in the other place and introduced the Marine Wildlife Conservation Bill, which passed its stages in the Commons but, sadly, did not go through your Lordships’ House. At that time, I realised how complex the whole marine environment—in the wider sense of the word—is, including how many different interests there are and the different contexts; fisheries is the most obvious, but there are many others. I am pleased to say that my early foray into this area led to the Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009, to which my Bill was a little nudge.

I am a very simple person and this is a very simple amendment. It seeks to add to the Short Title of the Bill the words “and Marine Conservation”, as in the Long Title. I have listened to much informed debate here, and now have much more knowledge of fisheries than I have ever had; when I have not been in the Chamber, I have looked at Hansard. I therefore realise that this is very complex. I think it is the Government’s intention to make the Bill not just about the fishing industry but about sustainability, and to look at marine conservation—as I said, it is in the Long Title. It is important to put it in the Short Title also because a lot of people, including probably me, think that when we talk about fisheries we are talking purely about the industry. It is of course much more than that.

As most life in the marine environment is under the sea, it is not visible—there are obvious exceptions, such as birds and the cetaceans that surface from time to time. I am not sure that the public are entirely aware of what has happened in our depleted under-sea environment. I think that if it was terrestrial, many people would realise what was going on. It is rather like the American bison that once roamed the plains in their millions, and was then reduced to very few, or perhaps the passenger pigeon that once darkened the skies, and was shot and used for pet food, and then suddenly went extinct. If people realised what was happening under the water to a lot of our fish stocks, they would be appalled.

This Bill does a lot towards that. Although I am a little disappointed with some areas, I am beginning to understand this place and know that the Government will look again at some of these things on Report, and that the Bill will go down to the other place. But we have to be very careful. In the first speech I made on this Bill, I mentioned the Newfoundland cod stocks that disappeared. I am very concerned that, if we are not careful, similar extinctions will occur, which will have an economic and social impact on our fishing communities, not to mention on wildlife. Obviously, it is not just us who enjoy the nutritious meal that is fish; the sand eels that are taken are a very important part of the diet of many seabirds.

I always want to be helpful to the Government—it is a trait I have had ever since my party has been in government—and I think this would be a good addition to the Bill. It will not cost much, only the cost of reprinting, and it would send a message. Of course, it would also make it easier for us to make sure that the Government’s feet are firmly to the fire on some of the conservation measures in the Bill. With that, I leave this with the Government. If they want to take it as their own clever idea, I would be more than delighted.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly. I am grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Teverson and Lord Randall, for proposing these amendments.

As the noble Lord said, Amendment 123 seeks a consultation exercise on how fisheries regulation activities can be rationalised or better shared. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, made a very good case for better co-ordination, particularly between the IFCAs and the MMO. Again, we all acknowledge his considerable experience in this regard. We would hope that this is something that the department is doing anyway, particularly as part of the repatriation of policy from the EU. However, I agree very much with the noble Lord that there is further work to be done on this and that this information should be made available to Parliament for further consideration and debate. Therefore, it would be helpful to have this as a requirement in the Bill.

The noble Lord, Lord Randall, has made a very simple proposal about changing the Short Title of the Bill to “Fisheries and Marine Conservation Bill”. It is a simple idea, but we very much support the amendment. It encapsulates many of the preceding debates we have had. It is clear that we do not want to put an artificial divide, with marine conservation being dealt with in the Environment Bill rather than as part of the Fisheries Bill, as we think it should be. This is important and it is a central principle here. As the noble Lord, Lord Randall, made clear, this Bill is not just about the industry; the decisions we are making have all sorts of wider ramifications and knock-on effects.

We have so much more to do in delivering the rollout of the blue belt of marine conservation areas. The amendment underlines the importance of marine planning in the conservation of our fishing stocks. As the noble Lord said, changing the title of the Bill would send an important message in this regard, so we share the hope that the Minister will see that this simple and helpful suggestion is something that the Government could support. Therefore, we add our support to the noble Lord’s suggestion.

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist]

My Lords, I am grateful for Amendment 123, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. I welcome the opportunity to set out the arrangements already in place for ensuring such co-ordination, because I believe the Bill supports the aims of the noble Lord’s amendment. I will address the amendment as two parts.

First, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency and the Marine Management Organisation have distinct and separate regulatory functions. The MCA is responsible for providing a 24-hour maritime search and rescue service around the UK coast, as well as producing legislation and guidance on maritime matters, and certification for seafarers. The MCA is sponsored by the Department for Transport, as its responsibilities relate to vessels and infrastructure. By contrast, the MMO licenses, regulates and plans marine activities in the seas around England to ensure they are carried out in a sustainable way.

Notwithstanding this distinction, there are areas of shared interest where these organisations already co-ordinate and work jointly to achieve their regulatory purpose effectively. This includes the operation of aerial assets for monitoring and surveillance, the collocation of personnel in the Joint Maritime Operations Coordination Centre, and intelligence sharing. Opportunities for further collaboration and efficiencies are still being identified.