Fisheries Bill [Lords]

Alyn Smith Excerpts

Report stage & 3rd reading & 3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 13th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Cherilyn Mackrory (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

I will try to speak clearly with my new self-imposed time limit. It is a pleasure to follow right hon. and hon. Members, particularly the hon. Member for Angus (Dave Doogan), and here we are going straight back down the line to Cornwall, which just shows what an important issue this is for the whole United Kingdom.

Despite being the great-great-granddaughter of a Scarborough fisherman, I had no idea as a young girl that I would grow up to become a Cornish fishwife, but here I am. Actually, I am very proud to be so. It is a privilege to be married to a fisherman, because it gives a great understanding of what a scary but wholesome living it is. It is absolutely necessary for the health of our nation. I mentioned in my maiden speech some time ago how precarious a living it is, especially when one is on the end of the phone and the weather turns and they cannot get back, so I will not go into that again.

One thing I have to say is that the fishing industry does not speak with one voice, and that is important to remember. To stand up for the fishing industry means giving our fishermen their voices back, and that is what this Bill absolutely does. It takes a first important step, and that is what we have to remember about this framework Bill.

I will speak briefly to the amendments. I do not think that the Bill is the right place for them, but I understand why they have been tabled. I believe they are well intentioned, and I know that Ministers are listening. In terms of amendment 1, I welcome the Government’s consultation, and I urge anybody involved to make their representations known before the closing date, which I believe is 10 November.

I would like to see more support from Ministers for direct-from-the-boat sales. When people go to London and eat a nice plate-sized piece of fish in a restaurant, the price can be eye-watering. Let me tell the House that at the other end of the scale, when the fisherman gets his price from market, that can also be eye-watering, but for a different reason. Somewhere along the way, somebody is making a lot of money out of it, but it is not the fishermen, and we need to put that right. I know there are voices in the Treasury who are sympathetic to that, and I make a plea to urge those conversations forward. A business in Falmouth that has just opened has as one of its unique selling points the fact that it wants fish that has never touched land. That sort of business should be encouraged, particularly in Cornwall.

Amendment 2 is about sustainability. One of the main reasons I came to this House was for the sustainability of our oceans and sustainability on land, but when we talk about sustainability in the fishing industry, we cannot talk just about the oceans; we have to talk about the coastal communities as well. Take bass, for example. My hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Scott Mann) and I have spoken at length about bass and recreational angling versus the commercial fishermen, and I want to try to bridge the gap tonight if I can.

I absolutely get the reason why we need to have a sustainable bass fishery. The angling economy in Cornwall is growing and is worth a lot of money, but if that bass fishery is suddenly taken away from an under-10 metre boat, that fisherman cannot feed his family. We cannot just expect these fishermen one day suddenly to have to go out to fish for something else—it does not happen like that. I am not prepared to make people suddenly do that, so we have to have a long consultation with the industry, the fishermen and the conservationists before we come up with a plan. That is why this amendment is misplaced. We have to go with the framework and see where we go from that.

Amendment 3 deals with supertrawlers. Again, I understand why it has been proposed, but I am reassured by Ministers who say that we now are in control of those licences, and pressure will be on our Front Benchers to make the right decisions there. I will not go on for too long, I promise, but let me deal with a couple more things that I want to see, if we can do them.

The right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) is no longer in his place, but I have sympathy with him on the enforcement argument, and not just on the outrageous incidents to which he refers. We see daily off the Lizard Point that French fishermen are within our waters and they should not be there. Even in the spawning grounds in the estuaries we need to make sure that anglers are not going up and taking undersized fish. There should be enforcement from one scale down to the last, and we need to make sure we are properly prepared to have enforcement here.

I am a big advocate of labelling—everyone in Devon knows how I feel about that—and it is vital that we get some clear labelling on our fish. The technology is there now to put the boat name on anywhere that that fish ends up, be it in an expensive fancy restaurant or in one of our supermarkets; we can see what boat that fish has come off and how it was caught. The fisherman who is fishing hook and line should get a better price than the one who is using the nets. The fisherman will then suddenly become responsible for his catch, in the same way as farmers are responsible for the high standards of their animals. That is important and it means that the consumer starts to become king—I hope that Ministers are listening.

We have a great opportunity for a culture change in this country about what we eat and why we eat it—that was mentioned earlier. The new Cornish residents, our TV chefs, who have moved down to the south-west have an important role to play in this. If we suddenly start eating wrasse, which they do in Japan, in sushi, or whatever else it might be, we can start making this a good thing to eat and consumers will follow.

I will conclude because I do not want to take up too much time. This Bill is a great first step, from which we have learned lessons from the CFP. We are finally starting to release our fishermen from the shackles of the CFP, which is vital. What we can achieve for the industry is endless because we are now an independent coastal state. I am reassured that future consultations will benefit our industry and I look forward to plans that come forward next year.

[Alyn Smith (Stirling) (SNP)]

I will speak to new clauses 1 to 7, which we tabled to try to improve this legislation. I spent 15 years in the European Parliament, alongside the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), working largely on fisheries reform, among lots of other issues. It is safe to say that the CFP is not the Scottish National party’s favourite policy and a number of things need to be done to improve it. It is the primary reason why Norway and Iceland are not EU members, although they are proudly part of the EU single market, for reasons also largely to do with fisheries and fisheries products.

If I learned anything in my time in Brussels, it was particularly about the marine ecosystem: everything is connected to everything else, and if one does not look at the whole picture, one makes poor conclusions. This Bill really is only part of the picture and it leaves the big questions—the existential questions for all our fishing communities and the people employed in fisheries—unanswered. Passing this Bill tonight, as I suspect Conservative Members will, is the easy bit; making good on the fine promises we have heard this evening will be an awful lot harder. Four years after the vote to leave the European Union and a year after we left the European Union—a fact that I regret deeply—we have yet to see the much vaunted advantages of that Brexit. It is a poor state of affairs that we are this stage in this stage of the proceedings.

The fishing industry is complex. It is not just about boats going to sea and catching fish. In Scotland, it is even more complex. We have a structurally different set-up to our industry in Scotland from that UK-wide. As we have heard throughout the debate, for every one job at sea, there are—depending on how one counts them—seven to 10 jobs on shore.

Stirling—by way of a counterintuitive point, as it is a generally landlocked constituency but for the tidal Forth—is one of the biggest UK producers of farmed prawns. The aquaculture department at Stirling University is engaged in world-leading, planet-saving research that is crucial to our economy. Tens of thousands of people are employed in aquaculture: in the prawn sector, the salmon sector and the inshore fishery, catching scallops and langoustines, and in the wider processing sector. All those thousands of jobs and all that GDP are utterly dependent on access, by which I mean tariff-free and frictionless access to the EU single market. That really does bring us to the nub of our scepticism about this Bill, which, as we have heard, the Scottish Government and Parliament have consented to because it is necessary, given that we have left the European Union. There is a need for a new legislative framework; we just do not think that this Bill answers the big questions.

The Norwegians joke that there is nothing in such a hurry as a dead fish on the back of a lorry. There are going to be lots of dead fish on the back of lorries wondering where they are going if we do not get a deal that ensures tariff-free and frictionless access. The vast chunk of fisheries’ economic activity is in grave danger in these ongoing talks, and this Bill answers none of their concerns and takes account of none of their interests.

This Bill is a framework for catching fish, and it is meaningless unless there is a deal for market access for all the other fish and fisheries products. The big questions are unanswered, so we have tried to make the legislation better with new clause 3 on the sea fish authority. We believe that more transparency in that structure would very much help the evolution of the organisation in the new challenges ahead. I urge Members to support the new clause, much though we have heard of the Minister’s scepticism this evening.

I am struck by the tone of this debate, as I was struck by the tone of the debate back in December, when I made my maiden speech, on the withdrawal agreement—the withdrawal agreement that so many Members on the Government Benches are now lining up to trash and the Government are looking to resile from in a “limited and specific way”, barely nine months later. The promises that have been made this evening are cheques that will not be cashed in the real world. When Government Members fail to deliver on their grand rhetoric—or, indeed, sincere hopes, genuinely held—they will have nobody to blame but themselves.

[Anthony Mangnall]

It is always a pleasure to be asked to speak briefly; brevity is one of my strengths, I am sure.

I have four points to make, and I feel that this may be—for those who were here on Second Reading—something of a rehash of my previous speech, not least because I want to speak against two amendments tabled by the Labour party, notably amendment 1 on UK landings. The Opposition talk about the need for specifying percentages for what our fishermen should be required to land. Rather than restricting where our fishermen can go and where they can land their catch, is not the answer to develop our ports to make them competitive with European ports, so that we can attract not only our own fishermen, but fishermen from Europe to land their catch here? That is a more efficient way of building and sustaining the processing plants across the United Kingdom, and building the ports such Brixham in my constituency. That is what we need to be doing—not restricting where our fishermen go.

My second point is on the sustainability principles and amendment 2. The first page of the Bill talks about the principles of sustainability; it is sustainable at its core. This is a finely tuned balance between the economic values and the sustainable values. The Opposition need to have a little bit of faith in the fishermen who fish our waters, who are determined to look after that stock, and to see their children and grandchildren go into the sector. That really matters.

A point that has been touched on by a number of people is how we develop and encourage our own “buy local” campaign.

I spoke during my maiden speech about the idea that the best of British—that British local seafood—should be on every menu across the country. That remains the case and we have a great opportunity to be able to create that campaign. I hope the Government will look carefully at how we can do that with cross-party support.

Lastly, I am going to sea next year for three days to see what goes on on a trawler vessel. I know that when they look at the Bill and hear us talking about it, they are proud of what the Government are trying to achieve. They are proud of the fact that it takes back control of our coastal waters, and they are proud of the fact that we will no longer be part of the common fisheries policy. I look forward to being able to report what it is like at sea and how the Brixham trawler fishermen operate —and I end my speech there.