Brexit: Fisheries (EUC Report)

Baroness Wilcox Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2017 Grand Committee

[Baroness Wilcox (Con)]

My Lords, I thank our committee’s chairman for a most wonderful exposition. He has not looked at one note. I feel really drippy now. I register my interests in the fishing industry. I have owned and worked inshore fishery boats for most of my life. I established, and am now patron of, the National Lobster Hatchery in Padstow, Cornwall, which is doing jolly well.

Joining this House enabled me to put forward a Private Member’s Bill to license lobster ranching. This was to encourage fishermen to trust the scientists. As our chairman said, at that time, every time the scientists told us something, the fishermen said, “What do they know? They’ve never fished in their lives”. It was important for us to come up with something that would allow the scientists to get closer to the fishermen. Therefore, it has been a great success for us to have built this aquarium right down on the edge of the water where the boats come in, where fishermen can walk up with the lobster, hand it over, and a year or so later we can hand them back a couple of thousand baby lobsters and say, “There we are, see if you can carry on growing those”. It has been a great success. It was funded by the European Community, so we must say a hurrah for that. We have an aquarium for children to learn about fish and fishing, and for PhD students to complete their studies, find new ways for lobsters to be raised and hand them back and forth between what were, in the beginning, two great enemies.

Our chairman wisely advised Members to speak to one area only. That did not apply to him, but it applies to us. It is a very good thing, otherwise we will be here all day. I will devote myself to quotas, for it is by quotas that I have seen two particular things happen. Quotas have stopped the rape of our seas that technology allowed us. I remember the first time I looked at a screen and saw that we could see the fish swimming around down there. We could pick exactly where we wanted to go fishing. When the Scottish boats came down with a cod-end net with an opening at only one end and fished in two boats, pulling the net behind them, all they had to do was look down at the screen at one or two miles of pelagic fish, which always swim together, put the net down and rape the sea with it. Standing and watching that happen, I realised this could not continue. Very quickly, they raped out their own area of pelagic fish and ours too.

I am keen on quotas in that way because they have stopped us doing that. The thing that has been difficult and caused a great deal of unhappiness for our fishermen is the lack of enforcement that has followed. It has infuriated us to see the Spanish fleet come swanning up and take as much as they like. We are not allowed to police them. They can be policed only by their own police, who sat in Madrid and never came down. As far as that was concerned, our fishermen were only too delighted to lead Cornwall to vote to leave the European Community.

Withdrawal from the common fisheries policy is an opportunity for the UK to review fisheries management practices and develop a management regime tailored to the United Kingdom. It is also an opportunity for the United Kingdom to address concerns regarding the current fisheries management regime and to reflect the needs and interests of coastal communities, the wider marine environment and the industry. However, this will need enforcement and monitoring. Therefore, my question to the Minister is: how will the Government resource the policing of the UK zone waters?

I finish where I began with science and the fishermen. As we have just heard, our UK domestic production consists of 451,000 tonnes of fish landed by UK vessels into UK ports, but 215,000 tonnes of fish is produced by United Kingdom aquaculture producers—back to the lobsters. It is amazing to see how much has been done through scientists and fishermen working together. We will do better and better at this but we still need monitoring and enforcement, as I have asked for. Will the ministry encourage this increasingly successful industry by bringing fishermen and scientists together to ensure a brighter future? Let us face it: the way they fish, there is no need for a quota.

Adam Nicolson said that the experience of evolving as an island race, with intimate contact with the waves, has had a profound effect on who we are, from love of liberty to xenophobia, practicality and propriety, our water, our common law. After never having been invaded for a thousand years, we are again to be an island race. Sink or swim, I believe we shall enjoy our freedom yet again.