Fisheries Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Worthington and Lord Mackay of Clashfern

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard - continued) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 2nd March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Worthington (CB)]

I must confess to feeling that perhaps I am not the best person to lead off this segment of the debate, because my amendment seeks to change subsection (8) of the clause but the group as a whole will take into account a wider range of issues relating to the definition of “national benefit”. I look forward to hearing the many views that will be expressed around the amendments in this group.

My amendment simply seeks to make the point—I fear this is a return to the discussion at the start of the debate—of what it is that we are doing in the handing out of a fishing quota, which is held in public trust, for private benefit. I therefore seek to amend the description of the national benefit objective as set out in the Bill from a fairly narrow definition that

“fishing activities of UK fishing boats bring social or economic benefits to the United Kingdom”,

and suggest that it should be reworded that the national benefit objective is that

“the public exploitation of the fishery for commercial, recreational and environmental purposes brings benefit to the United Kingdom”.

So the amendment seeks to make it clear in the Bill that it is more than simply the fishing activity for which we are granting quotas that constitutes a national benefit.

I know that noble Lords will speak to other amendments around the principle of the UK benefiting from the granting of quotas, but my amendment seeks to probe why it is that we are defining national benefits so narrowly and restricting it to fishing activities and fishing boats. The phrase seems a little odd, given that, as we have discussed, the founding principle of the Bill is that we have a national asset in our fishing resource that is held in trust for the public and granted out to fishing activity. I feel that the national benefit has been too narrowly drawn and too narrowly attached to fishing activities and fishing boats.

That is the purpose of the amendment. As I say, the rest of the amendments in the group seek to consider and assess different aspects of the national benefit—but I beg to move my amendment.

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern (Con)]

My Lords, my Amendment 19 is trying to deal with the same matter, but it attempts to use the activities of fishing fleets to bring

“social, economic and employment benefits to the United Kingdom or any part”.

In other words, it is intended that the activities of fishing boats should not merely benefit the fisheries, but also the rest of the United Kingdom, and in particular produce social, economic and employment benefits. One can see that this is a bit wider than the proposal of the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, but it is just a question of what precisely this “national benefit objective” is aiming at.

I think it does not aim at benefiting the fishing industry itself, but at benefiting others through the activities of the fishing industry. Paragraph (b) of my proposed new subsection, which contains a reference to fish and aqua- culture activities, manages to achieve the same sort of thing. In other words, in both cases the activities of the boats and the management of the fleets are supposed to bring these general social, economic and employment benefits to the United Kingdom and parts of it.

The issues in this amendment were brought to my attention by the national authority, or corporation, of the fishing fleets of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The Scottish people are somewhat separately represented, and it is not altogether surprising that their attitude is that the Bill is pretty good and perhaps the best thing to do is to leave it alone. It may be that they have ideas about the present situation, and the way in which the Bill is constructed is, from their point of view, very acceptable.

Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill

Debate between Baroness Worthington and Lord Mackay of Clashfern

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 5th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Worthington (CB)]

My Lords, I offer the suggestion that rather than making a long shopping list of particular types of vehicles we might introduce the concept of zero-emissions vehicles, which would be a very important category to report against. When we get statistics from the SMMT it talks about alternatively fuelled vehicles as a category but that includes hybrids, which of course have tailpipe emissions, and sometimes those emissions can be higher than those from a normal car. I encourage the Government to think about zero-emissions vehicles as a catch-all.

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern]

My Lords, it must have already been accepted that hydrogen vehicles are within the scope of the Bill, otherwise an amendment to deal with them would not have been accepted. I should have thought that having done that, it might add a bit of clarity to add it to the title of the Bill as a supplementary amendment with very little substance except form.