Fishing Industry

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and Torcuil Crichton

Thursday 28th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[Torcuil Crichton (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq. I thank the Backbench Business Committee and the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) for this important debate. I particularly thank the right hon. Gentleman for the tribute he paid to our fishermen who face dangers at sea each day—“For those in peril on the sea”. The hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway (John Cooper) referred to the loss of the Solway Harvester; I well remember covering that tragedy as a journalist, and the shadow it cast on the Isle of Whithorn and Kirkcudbrightshire.

My fishing community and the other communities I represent are quite different from those constituencies. The Western Isles account for 22% of the inshore waters in what is mostly an inshore fishery, although that might well have been 0% of Scotland’s inshore fishing grounds if the SNP-Green coalition had got away with its ludicrous plans for highly protected marine areas, which the hon. Member for Gordon and Buchan (Harriet Cross) highlighted. Although those plans were defeated, pushed away by a rebellion across Scotland’s coast and the songwriting power of Skipinnish, and have been put away for now, they have created a high level of uncertainty, which means that some fishermen are deciding whether to stay or leave the industry.

In the Western Isles, the picture is mixed and somewhat rosy. We have had some £12 million-worth of tonnage landed in the past couple of years—something like 3,000 tonnes, of which almost 90% is shellfish and only 11% is white fish. Marine Scotland shows that there are 215 registered fishing vessels—small fishing vessels, like those for which my hon. Friend the Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner) has just made the case—and something like 290 fishers, or about 7% of Scotland’s national total.

The industry faces many different challenges in different constituencies, but we have a lot in common. I will give some attention to one of the biggest challenges facing the industry and the associated processing sector in the Western Isles. It was a pleasure to go to the annual general meeting of the Western Isles Fishermen’s Association a couple of weeks ago and see so many young faces among the attendees. There are young entrants to the industry, helped by locally administered schemes that encourage entrants. One such scheme is community quotas, which the Western Isles council, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, has bought and which it licenses from quota to new entrants. That all helps people into the fishing industry and has a significant impact.

That glimmer of hope should not mask something that is a problem for the islands’ industry, the Scottish industry and the UK industry: the lack of skilled crews. The demographics in the Western Isles are not good. Although I have talked about young entrants, the working-age population has dropped by 12% over the past 10 years, and there has been a 26% rise in the elderly population. All employers are competing for a reduced number of school leavers, and virtually all sectors are dependent on sourcing migrant labour to grow their business.

The most important ask from the Western Isles fishing industry is that the Minister recognise that there has to be some flexibility in immigration policy to allow the needs and demands of rural and island areas to be accepted. The current sponsored employment scheme seems to have been based on city and urban salaries; it ignores the variation in wages in rural and island communities, which of course are lower and are coupled with increased food, energy and transport costs. I suspect that the £70,000 salary for a processor that my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes (Melanie Onn) mentioned has as much to do with the lack of skilled people as it does with the skills involved in doing the job.

Only this week, I had some correspondence from the Isle of Barra. Barratlantic is one of the large seafood processors on our island chain. Christina MacNeil, the general manager, tells me that in 35 years of working in the seafood industry, things have never been more difficult. There is huge demand for langoustine and scallop, but supplying customers is becoming increasingly difficult because of the lack of staff. We can imagine how difficult it is on a small island. She has four Filipino workers, who have been employed there since April 2023; they came through the sponsorship scheme, but given the nature of the work and the lack of available staff, the company needs some flexibility in order to retain them. It can just about manage the salaries now, but if they increased to £38,000 a year the operation would be impossible. The company has been in operation for 50 years, but its future is in the balance because of restrictive immigration schemes.

It is the same for fishermen. It is impossible to employ UK crews, as we know, so they must look overseas. Once again, cost is a criterion, but so too is the visa system. Crews need an English qualification at a very high level, which means that they are almost barred from entry. That creates huge difficulties for fishing boat owners and processors in my constituency.

My plea to the Minister—it is echoed by others such as the hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (Seamus Logan), who is no longer in his place, as well as the Migration Advisory Council and almost every coastal community—is that there be flexibility in the visa system. We do not need a separate visa system, as some Scottish colleagues might argue. There is no need to replicate the system: we just need enough flex to take into account the needs of island and rural areas.

[Mr Carmichael]

In relation to separate systems, I suspect that the hon. Gentleman agrees that the problems for the fishermen in both our constituencies are shared by fishermen in Kilkeel, around the south-west coast and elsewhere in the country. Does that not rather illustrate the truth that the problem is for the sector rather than for any particular constituent part of the United Kingdom?

[Torcuil Crichton]

That is true. Our problems are not uniquely island problems, nor are they uniquely Scottish problems: they are demographic, economic and social problems for coastal communities around the whole UK. I know that that is not entirely the responsibility of the Minister.

Having risked the ire of the Home Office, rather than the Minister, I will carry on and risk the anger of my hon. Friends the Members for Truro and Falmouth (Jayne Kirkham) and for South East Cornwall (Anna Gelderd), and possibly of the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George). I am after their tuna, or rather our tuna. One quota for which the Minister does have responsibility is the bluefin tuna stocks, which have increased significantly. Thanks to climate change, bluefin tuna are roaming far north and wild in the Atlantic. There has been a great decade-long catch-and-release scheme around the British coast. The catch is by rod and line, so the catches are selective, of good quality and of the same stock as those caught in other regions of the UK. They have the potential to be a great home market and export market.

The UK was allocated something like 39 tonnes of bluefin tuna in 2023, but so far none of those commercial licences has been granted to a Scottish boat. All 13 were granted to the south-west of England; none of them has come to Scotland, far less to the Hebrides, where operators have set themselves up not just as rod-and-line operators, but potentially as smokers and exporters to the domestic and international markets.

For all the quota to be allocated to one area seems very odd. It is not what we would expect. We might expect weight to be placed on geography and on socioeconomic impacts: a bluefin tuna fishery in the Western Isles would be economically significant. For rod-and-line operators and others who have prepared themselves to turn commercial, it is deeply frustrating to be turned off in that way.

Future of Fishing

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and Torcuil Crichton

Tuesday 5th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[Torcuil Crichton]

I agree that we should disagree agreeably when it comes to common national assets such as fishing.

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

I am interested to see that the hon. Gentleman has rediscovered his distributist roots from Glasgow university. There are serious, practical considerations here to be faced before we get to the point that the hon. Gentleman would want to get to, which has significant force. Most skippers in my constituency, and in his, are carrying massive amounts of debt and loans. If we cut the feet out from underneath them in terms of quota reallocation and the rest, the law of unintended consequences could be really severe for the people who have kept that industry going through the lean times.

Rural Depopulation

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and Torcuil Crichton

Wednesday 11th September 2024 Westminster Hall

[Torcuil Crichton (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered depopulation in rural areas.

Tapadh leibh, Ms Vaz; thank you. It is an honour to have you in the Chair. I thank all colleagues for their attendance and support in what I am sure will be an illuminating 90-minute debate. Staging your first Westminster Hall debate is a bit like throwing a birthday party and wondering whether anyone will turn up—at least we know there is not a depopulation crisis in Westminster. I also thank the Minister for taking this debate. It may not seem obvious at first what the demographics of the Western Isles have to do with the Home Office, but if she bears with me, I will explain and expand on why this issue, which now affects the periphery of the UK, influences the entire economy and should inform the decisions that we make at national level on immigration.

First, let me give some context. In Na h-Eileanan an Iar, the Western Isles, we are in the middle of a depopulation crisis, and I am here to sound that alarm. We are painfully aware of what is a rapidly changing population. An older, strongly Gaelic-speaking demographic is passing on, and we see the rapid out-migration of younger, economically active families. They sometimes face insurmountable challenges: being priced out of housing and facing failing transport connections, stuttering health provision and childcare and a host of other issues, which weigh heavily in the scales of deciding whether to stay or go. And while we sound the warnings at home, the lights should be flashing on the dashboard in this place, too, and in offices across Whitehall. That is why I am staging this debate—to highlight the fact that we are simply running out of people to take up key public sector and private sector posts to keep our islands going. That affects the viability of vital services and it ill serves the local economy and the national one, too.

Just to give some further context, the estimated population of the Western Isles is 26,200. That represents a 5.5% decrease since the 2011 census and the highest percentage decrease in Scotland. According to estimates from the Western Isles health board, which has an obvious interest in this issue from a staffing and care point of view, the working-age population of the islands is set to decrease by 6% by 2028, while the over-75 population with the highest levels of comorbidity—people who have more than one illness—is set to rise by 25%. The situation is frightening. According to the board, these population changes will result in a year-on-year reduction in the available workforce—nurses and care staff—to attend the most important, most vulnerable people, and ultimately undermine the ability to sustain services.

I say we have to address this with local responses, Scottish responses and action at UK level to prevent the situation from entering that downward spiral. We know that an ageing-population pattern is part of a Europe-wide trend, and somehow we kid ourselves that this is an over-the-horizon event that we will deal with later, but for us in the islands, it is an urgent reality, and our breakfast will become everyone else’s lunch; if we do not address these issues on the edge of Europe, they will become structural problems for the rest of the country and the rest of the continent.

More than worrying about an ageing population, I worry about the exodus of a working population, particularly the female population. Since 2007, the number of women aged between 25 and 44 on the islands has dropped by 15%, from 3,289 down to 2,787. There are many reasons for that rapid decline but, for most parents, they can be encapsulated in one word—childcare. Of course that is a challenge for parents everywhere, but the lack of a working-age population, as well as the burdensome regulation, has strangled childcare in the islands. I am sure that is the experience of colleagues across the board. Working parents and primarily working mothers, of course, find it hard to return to work—to balance childcare and careers—and despite the many strong family connections and networks they have on the islands, ultimately they give up in frustration, and ultimately they speak to me, as they spoke to me during the election campaign, about giving up and moving to the mainland. And when we lose families, we lose the working-age population.

During the successful election campaign, I was joined by the then shadow Business Secretary, now the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, on a visit around some of the key ports in Stornoway. We went to a shellfish export company that was successful, with a £4 million turnover and rising, which was a great investment by the port and the parent company in the local fishing fleet. But the actual processing of the product in the chill of the packing room could not operate were it not for the Ukraine war. Most of the staff that packed the products were refugees from that conflict. They are a welcome and valuable addition to the workforce and the islands, but we cannot have our economic growth dependent on a conflict on the other side of Europe.

At a seafood processor on another island, a £3 million business at the end of a single-track road, there were sustainable stocks and work for perhaps 30 employees, but only 15 workers were available because there are simply no workers to be found locally. This was an operation that, pre-Brexit, had a large and well-integrated European workforce. Now it cannot find a local workforce, and the regulatory and bureaucratic challenge of sourcing staff is almost overwhelming.

In the fishing industry offshore, the present immigration requirements as I understand them require staff employed under the sponsored visa scheme to pass stage 4 English language tests. That is quite a high academic bar for an industry that seeks crewmen who are primarily experienced in working in noisy and challenging conditions where hand signals are often as useful as linguistic ones.

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

The hon. Member will be aware that this is a matter on which a number of us have campaigned over the years. Essentially, the problem is that the definition of what constitutes a skilled migrant worker is narrow and brings in skills, as with the English language test, that are not central to the jobs that those people are going to do. We have safely had migrant workers in the catching sector for years without that level of English language. Will the hon. Member and others join me in encouraging the new Home Office team to have yet another look, and this time take the issues seriously?

[Torcuil Crichton]

I agree entirely with the right hon. Member. The language requirement is just one aspect of the present visa system that is unsuitable for our fishing industry, the islands, and rural economies, and which we have until now been unable to navigate around. Hopefully it will undergo a fresh review under a new Home Office team.

The new Home Office team and immigration policy are rightly the reserve of the UK Government. I do not seek to break up control of the system. I stood on a platform of a properly managed, points-based immigration system that links up the needs of the workforce, the economy and the country. But I counter the narrative, which this summer was in danger of becoming the prevailing one, that the country is somehow “full up”. There are parts of the UK and Scotland where we are crying out for skilled workers to come and be part of our workforce, and to then stay and become part of our communities.

Scotland has specific needs for our skills base, and the islands and rural areas of Scotland and the UK have some very specific asks of their own. The lesson of policy in almost every area—not just immigration—be it administered from here or Holyrood, is that one size does not fit all. What works at a UK level may need more flexibility at a Scottish level, and again at a rural and island level.

In the past, the UK Government in other guises have worked with the Scottish Government to show flexibility. The former First Minister Jack McConnell, now Baron McConnell of Glenscorrodale, promoted the fresh talent initiative for post-study work visas for overseas students at Scottish universities, enabling them to stay on for a period. There is, and should be, interest in reviving that plan, and the idea of rural visa projects, which was advanced by the Scottish Government with the Migration Advisory Committee before the previous UK Government stamped on the idea.

There are many levers of Government that are not at the hand of the Minister, but that bear mentioning because they are part of local and Scottish solutions to rural depopulation. In the islands, we are lucky to have a system of crofting tenure, a uniquely Scottish system which has kept generations in their home community, but crofting has been hollowed out by political forces that neither understand nor value its work. Crofting tenure, properly regulated, should be a defence against the property market, but instead it has become an enabler. The sale of croft tenancies at inflated rates has become a critical factor in the housing shortage.

Crofting needs urgent reform. I commend the Shucksmith report, “The Future of Crofting”, now more than a decade old but an excellent piece of work, which sought to rebalance—or restore the balance—between crofters’ right to security of tenure and their responsibilities to keep the market at bay. It should be dusted down and re-enacted, but that is probably a subject for another debate and another place.

The lack of affordable housing, however, is an issue that many other Members here and elsewhere will recognise. I hope that it will be taken up by other speakers in the debate. In many of our areas, it is impossible for anyone with modest means to secure a house, which is a pretty basic precondition for retaining a working-age population and keeping the economy spinning.

We therefore need action on housing and on crofting regulation; we need access to land; and we need access and action on depopulation. As I said, the dashboard lights are flashing. More than anything we need focus. We need economic focus on the peripheries of the north and west of Scotland, those areas of continued depopulation. We need economic incentives, state aid, perhaps a reduction in VAT on construction, and enhanced capital allowances. I do not want the Minister to worry too much about those issues, because they are for the Treasury and other Departments, and I will take them up with them.

My time is running out, and I do not want to end on a note of despondency. There is hope. There is hope in community ownership of the many crofting estates in the Western Isles, a quiet revolution that has injected not just a new wave of development, but a growing sense of confidence and assurance that, given the tools, we can tackle the issues for ourselves. There is the vast opportunity of community ownership of, and a community share in, the wealth of wind in onshore and offshore developments, which are due offers. That change is so tantalisingly close and could be so transformative in terms of finance and confidence that it cannot be ignored as part of the UK Government’s GB Energy strategy.

There is also hope in individuals, families and communities and their resilience, which make the islands not just a great place to visit, but a precious place to stay. There are examples of local initiatives like the Uist repopulation zone, which has provided training opportunities and much-hallowed childcare provision to parents. It is led by Comhairle nan Eilean Siar and has received £60,000 from the Scottish Government. I commend the work of that project and of many other individuals and communities who focus themselves on the issue of depopulation at a local level.

As I said, we have a sense of urgency about this in the islands: we are experiencing a depopulation crisis. I hope now that that can find an echo not just in the contributions to this debate, but in the UK Government’s awareness and response to the issue.