Draft Common Fisheries Policy (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019 Draft Common Fisheries Policy and Aquaculture (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019 Draft Common Fisheries Policy (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) (No. 2) Regulations 2019

Alex Sobel Excerpts

Monday 25th March 2019 General Committees

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

In the Environmental Audit Committee last week, the Secretary of State said that there would be interim arrangements in the event of a no deal, but there would not be an environmental agency until 2021. That creates a huge governance gap.

[Luke Pollard]

My hon. Friend has highlighted my point better than I was doing in my speech. Creating governance gaps in our regulations is deeply worrying. We need certainty. With the absence of a Fisheries Bill—I will return to this time and again—the jigsaw piece of the fisheries regulation is incomplete. If we look at regulations in future, the omission of advisory councils and other types of governance oversight included in the SI is deeply worrying, because it does not provide the same type of oversight as we have currently.

There are concerns around enforcement in the first SI, which was also a weak area in the Fisheries Bill. Provisions remove the requirement to establish

“effective, proportionate and dissuasive penalties”.

Why have those penalties not been replaced in this SI? Perhaps the Minister will set that out when he gets to his feet. Regulation 4(10)(c) removes the ability for a member state to share vessel monitoring system, or VMS, data of its flag vessels with another member state where its flag vessel is in that state’s waters. That presents a risk that the UK will not have access to other countries’ data, which risks overfishing. What is replacing that provision? We know that data sharing between the UK and the remainder of the European Union after Brexit has not yet been fully established.

Regulations 4(69), 4(74), 4(78) and 4(81) of this SI again remove the obligation on member states to carry out certain inspections and requirements on what actions should be taken for infringements. Again, what replaces those provisions? We are led to believe that all we are doing is simply swapping out European Commission functions for member state or UK functions, so it is worth asking whether we are removing functions as well as transferring them over. Where does all that sit? We saw tensions flare in last year’s scallops war, but there could be additional risks in future, and enforcement is an important part of ensuring that our fishing sector is able to succeed. We need more protection for our fisheries after we leave the EU, not less.

Finally, I turn to conservation. When it comes to sustainability, certain provisions of the CFP in relation to emergency measures have been removed entirely from this SI. Regulations 4(35), 4(53) and 4(54) remove the ability of the member state or the Commission to close fisheries or prohibit fishing where a stock has been exhausted. Stakeholders have raised concerns with us about the thoroughness of the provisions that replace the ability that is now being removed from this SI. Will the Minister address those concerns?

The Opposition have concerns about these statutory instruments, many of which are comprehensive and detailed and require good legal knowledge if their full implications are to be understood. I am aware that the Minister has opened a DEFRA reading room for some stakeholders, but not all. Indeed, parliamentarians have been explicitly excluded, which means that the time available for scrutiny has been limited.

If we were dealing with only one SI at a time, the issues might be understood, but we are dealing with dozens at the same time. That means that many of the concerns could have been raised at a pre-legislative stage rather than their having to be dealt with as a simple binary yes/no approval in relation to this SI, for example. Will the Minister address those concerns? I am concerned that this first SI fails to deliver the comprehensive governance arrangements that we need for fishing in future. Will the Minister set out a detailed response to those points?