Food Import Requirements
Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts(9 months, 1 week ago)
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Lord Douglas-Miller (Con)
I thank my noble friend. The last time I checked, we collectively voted to leave the European Union. The Government’s job is to implement the biosecurity checks to make sure that we are protected—not just our farmers and our consumers but the trade deals, which are worth billions of pounds a year to the UK economy.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
My Lords, could the Minister find in his briefing pack the several occasions on which the European Affairs Committee of your Lordships’ House has recommended that there should be an SPS agreement with the European Union? If he looked at that, could he answer this question: how many of the new controls being imposed would be required if we had an SPS agreement with the European Union?
Lord Douglas-Miller (Con)
The noble Lord raises a very good point. I do not have the exact details of the requirement he is asking for, so perhaps the best thing I can do is write to him on that.
European Union: Trade Barriers
Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts(1 year, 4 months ago)
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Lord Benyon (Con)
You have to slice and dice the different products that are exported to China. We had a very good pork meat export, which was stopped because of issues relating to Hong Kong. We want a system that is focused not just on imports and exports from our closest neighbours, vital though that market is. We want to make sure we are trading fairly with the rest of the world, which is why we will have a sanitary and phytosanitary border system in place that is understood right across the world and that facilitates safe trade.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
My Lords, will the Minister explain why the Government are so firmly determined not to have an SPS agreement with the European Union, despite the fact that other third countries—for example, Switzerland and New Zealand—have such agreements? In what respect does the agreement reached in Brussels yesterday, by the Foreign Secretary and the vice-president of the Commission, on agrifood trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland differ from an SPS arrangement?
Fishing: France
Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts(3 years ago)
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Lord Benyon (Con)
I am grateful to my noble friend. Licences for UK waters are issued on the basis of five reference years, and a French vessel has to prove that it has fished at least one day a year in four of those five years. On the basis of that, I think I am right in saying that we have issued 98% of all licences applied for by French vessels to fish in our territorial waters. So, I am clear that we are doing our bit to stand by the terms of what has been agreed with the EU. It is for them to resolve the allegations they have made and the circumstances of this particular dispute.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
My Lords, does the Minister appreciate that the House would be in a better position to understand the facts of this extremely complex matter if only the Government had reported to this House and its committees what was going on—this issue has been brewing for several months now—and will he remedy that? Does he agree that this is a moment when it would be good if both Governments could put away their megaphones and do a bit of real diplomacy?
Lord Benyon (Con)
It is actually longer than that. I hate to disagree with the noble Lord, who knows so much about these matters, but I can remember a dispute in the Baie de Seine long before Brexit, so this has been a disputed area of fisheries. However, I can tell him that we are in the business not of escalating this dispute but of resolving it for the benefit of the fishing industry and the sustainable harvesting of marine benefits. There is no desire for this to be escalated any more. It is for the European Commission, as part of the TCA process, to address the accusations and threats made by the French Government.
Fisheries Bill [HL]
Lord Hannay of Chiswick ExcerptsTuesday 11th February 2020
(4 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
My Lords, I suggest that the Fisheries Bill to which we are giving a Second Reading today is no more than a picture frame without a picture. What that picture will be—the detailed shape of Britain’s new post-Brexit fisheries policies—remains as shrouded in mystery as ever. I note that I am the first person speaking in this debate who has even recognised that quite a lot of this will have to be thrashed out in negotiation with the European Union and Norway and cannot just be decided unilaterally by us—although we will of course have a much bigger say than we had before we left the EU. Moreover, as with other aspects of post-Brexit legislation, the detailed implementation and filling-out of that picture is very much conferred in wide-ranging powers for the Executive, with only a pretty vestigial role for Parliaments and Assemblies.
Thirdly, while I note what the Minister said about fisheries being a devolved subject, and due account of that having been taken, there is not a lot about how the devolved Administrations in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast are to be brought into policy-making for a sector of great importance to their economies and electorates—of proportionally greater importance, incidentally, than it is to the English economy.
That is quite a long list of gaps that I hope the Minister will fill when he replies to this debate. With regard to filling in the details of that picture, I have not the slightest intention of asking the Government to divulge their negotiating position in the talks, which will probably get under way in March—even if they knew what it was, which I rather doubt. I will be neither surprised nor particularly disappointed if the Minister says that at this stage he will not go into that detail. But it is important to go into those negotiations, which will inevitably be tough and difficult, with a set of realistic and realisable objectives, not just a collection of slogans and mantras—which is all that has been unveiled in the past three and a half years. We should also be prepared to reach compromises along the way, since an all-or-nothing approach would be all too likely to inflict damage well beyond the fisheries sector itself.
It is not rocket science to suggest that any decent deal will have to cover three crucial elements. The first, and most sensitive, will be access by other parties to fishing grounds lying within our exclusive economic zone and territorial waters. Secondly, there will need to be shared arrangements for fish stocks in those waters, particularly the North and Irish Seas and the English Channel. The third crucial item will be the tariff and phytosanitary control arrangements applying to both our exports and imports. If we gave total priority to one of those three, or excluded one of them from consideration, the results would not be as we wished.
Access to waters is a hugely sensitive issue. It is not a new one, nor did it first arise in the context of our membership of the European Union or the common fisheries policy. In 1964, when the Government of the day decided to extend Britain’s territorial waters from six to 12 miles, we negotiated the London Convention, which gave what were called historic rights to continue to fish in our waters to a number of European countries. At that time, it is important to remember, we were not a member of the EU, and the common fisheries policy did not exist. That has to be borne in mind, because that history will be on the table when we come to negotiate. It will not decide how we handle it, but it needs to be taken into account. That is not just a legal issue—I am not making a legal point here at all—but a political issue: what is pragmatic and practical. I believe that an all-or-nothing approach to that issue will work to our disadvantage.
There is then the hugely important issue of shared management and conservation of stocks. That must be a shared responsibility with the EU and with Norway, given the inconvenient tendency of fish not to know when they are crossing a boundary. In the earlier years of the common fisheries policy, that issue was badly mishandled and stocks were grievously damaged, with decisions taken that rode roughshod over scientific advice. That must not happen again, and I recognise that it is one of the aims of the Government in this legislation, which I welcome. We must not slip back into that period where the politics of allocating shared stocks gained over the science. Neither, again, should we take an all-or-nothing approach.
The third element is the trade in fish and fish products. Over the 47 years that we have been in the EU, we have benefited, of course, from zero tariffs, zero quotas and common phytosanitary rules. They have covered our exports and our imports of fish and fish products, both wild and farmed. Those exports have grown exponentially during that period. They are pretty substantial now, as they were not when all this started. That gives the possible outcome on access to fisheries markets great importance, and we should not delude ourselves that, if we acted in a way that led to the loss of those continental markets, we would be able to replace them quite easily, because that is not the nature of this highly perishable product.
On devolution, I will merely say that every aspect of our new fisheries policy will directly or indirectly involve the devolved Administrations, so it will be important to build them from the outset into the negotiating and implementing process—all the more so as fisheries are such an important subject for them. The alternative, to have a kind of running battle between the devolved Administrations and the UK Government, will only feed the fissiparous tendencies already undermining the unity of the United Kingdom.
So it is a complex picture, but I see no reason why our fishing industry should not emerge quite a lot better placed than it is now, so long as we do not insist on negotiating overreach and do not play about with fancy ideas of linkages with other sectors, of the sort that were put forward recently by the Taoiseach when he suggested some kind of linkage with financial services. That would make a balanced fisheries deal on the three crucial decisions that I have suggested far more difficult to reach, and it would be a mistake if we went down that road.
Upland Farming
Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts(5 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Gardiner of Kimble
My Lords, we have said as a Government that we will commit the same sum of money until the end of this Parliament. No Parliament can bind its successors, but 2022 is the likely end of this Parliament given the cycle we have. If we are to keep people on the land, they need a viable income. They also need to live a contemporary life, which is why I specifically mentioned the work we are undertaking to improve connectivity in the uplands, where we are not as strong as in other rural areas, and where we need to commit money, which we are doing.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
My Lords, will the Minister confirm as a matter of fact that remaining in a customs union with the European Union would achieve the objectives that all noble Lords who have asked questions—and the Minister—have agreed must be our objective?
Lord Gardiner of Kimble
Our objective is to trade freely with the European Union, the EU 27, our partners in what I hope will be a very productive and long-term economic arrangement. That is what we should aim for.
Fisheries: London Convention—Withdrawal
Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts(6 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Hannay of Chiswick
To ask Her Majesty’s Government under what authority they notified on 3 July 2017 the United Kingdom’s decision to withdraw from the London Fisheries Convention of 1962; and what account they took of the provisions of the Fishery Limits Act 1964 and of European Union Regulation 2371/2002 before making that decision.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Gardiner of Kimble) (Con)
My Lords, the London Fisheries Convention provides access to fish in UK territorial waters from six to 12 nautical miles. Similar provisions appear in the common fisheries policy. Article 15 of the convention permits parties to withdraw with two years’ notice. The UK gave notice on 3 July 2017, using prerogative powers. Before making this decision, we considered all relevant legislation, including the 2013 regulation that replaced the 2002 regulation and the 1976 Act that replaced the 1964 Act.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that Answer and for his courtesy in fielding a number of importunate questions on this matter from me over recent months. He started by trying to answer a lot of questions that I did not ask, but he has now answered the question that I did and told us that the royal prerogative has been used for this purpose. I wonder whether he thinks that is a trifle risky, given the Government’s experiences in the Supreme Court over Article 50. It is quite clear that the Fishery Limits Act 1964, which came after the conclusion of the London convention, was designed to take into domestic law the provisions of the London convention. On 15 June 1964, when introducing the Second Reading of that Bill, the then Minister of Fisheries said:
“The purpose of the Bill is to establish the fishery regime in our waters for which the Convention provides”.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/6/1964; col. 946.]
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
Sorry; I thought that the Minister might wish to be reminded of what one of his predecessors at the Dispatch Box said. My question is this: does that not make the situation even more risky due to the way in which the Government have acted without a parliamentary process?
Lord Gardiner of Kimble
My Lords, I assure noble Lords that a great deal of consideration went into this matter. For instance, the Supreme Court made it clear that an Act of Parliament was not required where a treaty did not grant individual rights. We decided that we should trigger article 15 to give complete clarity, so that when it comes to us leaving the common fisheries policy we could have a clean slate on which to negotiate for all our waters. We are talking about between six and 12 nautical miles, but it is in the 12 to 200 nautical mile median line that the vast bulk of fishing takes place. The 1976 Act provides Ministers with the power to designate which countries can fish in UK waters. We are all looking forward to the negotiations, so that we can have sustainable fishing.
Brexit: Environmental Standards
Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts(7 years, 9 months ago)
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The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Evans of Bowes Park) (Con)
My Lords, we have not yet heard from the Cross Benches, so we shall hear from them.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
My Lords, when we pass the primary legislation, if we do, on the great repeal Bill, how are we to know what effect that will have when we will not by then have agreed the terms of our trade and many other matters with the European Union?
Lord Gardiner of Kimble
As I say, because of the construction of our environmental protections which are part through domestic law and part through our EU law requirements, all of it is coming back so that it will be exactly the same continuum of laws relating to environmental protection. That is the whole point of the great repeal Bill, so there is certainty for the consumer, the producer and business.