Fisheries Management

Anthony Mangnall Excerpts

Tuesday 13th July 2021 Westminster Hall

[Anthony Mangnall (Totnes) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to be able to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles. Let me start by congratulating the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael); we have a good tradition of following one another in debates, and it is always a pleasure to hear him speak with such knowledge on this issue.

I recently arrived at Westminster and am privileged to represent Brixham, Salcombe and Dartmouth, which have fine fishing fleets and a fine fishing tradition, which I hope I will ably represent in this place. I also pay tribute to David Linkie; I did not know him, but I did see his work and I know how much he meant to the industry. On that note, I also pay tribute to Jim Portus, who has stepped down as the head of the South Western Fish Producer Organisation, and I wish Juliette Hatchman the best of luck in taking on that new role. She will certainly have a number of us to deal with in the south-west.

I take the right hon. Gentleman’s point that there is an opportunity for the fishing industry and there must be political will. At the same time, we must ensure that we are not playing party politics with this issue, because there are opportunities in leaving the European Union, one of which has recently been recognised. The Minister knows that all too well because I have been knocking on her door almost daily about it. It relates to bivalve molluscs and the gradations of our waters, and the fact that the Food Standards Agency has moved significantly in the last eight months to allow us to challenge anomalous results. Each of our constituencies will be impacted differently by that, but it is extremely welcome to see how we can move at pace. After organisations have been asking for those changes for 30 years, we have managed to see some of them come through in eight months. I hope we might see a little bit more of that approach. We can never give certainty, but we can look at reforming our domestic legislation and providing opportunities for the fishing fleets in our coastal communities.

The second point I would like to make is about highly protected marine areas and the Benyon review. I understand the point that Lord Benyon is making in the review, but we must also have faith in our fishermen to look after their waters. They want future generations to be able to make money and have a business and a livelihood; they want to look after their waters and their coastlines as much as we do. Whatever we do with highly protected marine areas, we must make sure it is in conjunction, co-operation and discussion with the fishing fleets.

I hope the Minister and the team at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs will engage with as many people in this place and outside Westminster to find the right balance, so that we can operate in highly protected marine areas in a way that will work. There is also a move on the environmental side of offshore wind farms, which are also heating up.

In a rare moment of cross-party unity, I find myself in agreement with the Chair of the International Trade Committee, the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Angus Brendan MacNeil) about the maritime fisheries fund, which I believe has now been replaced by the fisheries and seafood scheme—FaSS—about the £100 million. DEFRA has been generous about that, but it does not mean anything until it is produced. I appreciate that the Department has to jump through hoops with the Treasury, but a lot of people have been waiting close to seven or eight months to hear when that will happen.

Speaking of certainty, we have a transition period. We have an opportunity to provide a degree of certainty to the industry about what our future relationship with the European Union will be after 2026. I hope we can begin that process of reassurance, build up the opportunity to develop our fleet in our coastal communities and ensure that people understand where we are going and why the trade and co-operation agreement we have now is what it is. There is room for opportunity.

The Minister was very kind and gracious to come down to Brixham; unfortunately, I was not able to be there, but I know she met a number of my constituents. She will have heard a great deal about non-total allowable catch species. We need further discussions about what goes beyond 2021, because right now there is uncertainty. The disparity between what EU vessels can catch in our waters and what we can catch in their waters is of grave concern. There is a lot more we can do.

Two specialised trade committees have been established that will be linked to fishing: the first is on sanitary and phytosanitary measures and the second is on just fishing. How will those committees be set up, who will be put on them and what representation will there be from Westminster and DEFRA? The committees offer us an enormous opportunity to streamline the process of ensuring that we can get our exports up to where they need to be, which so many other Members have raised as a point of concern.

To end on a positive note, I received the statistics this morning from Brixham fish market. It is now earning £800,000 per week. In previous years, it was £300,000 to £400,000. It is selling 40% up on previous years. It is looking forward to a very prosperous summer. I know that is not the case universally across the United Kingdom, but it is worth noting that my fishermen in Brixham, England’s most valuable fishing port, are painting a very positive picture. I was asked the other day what they were doing on 5 November and they said: “We built the effigy of you, but we are just deciding whether to burn it.” I have been told they are not intending to quite yet.

[Sir Charles Walker (in the Chair)]

There is plenty of time for them to reconsider that, though, isn’t there?

--- Later in debate ---

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) for the way he introduced this debate. This is a deeply political area. It genuinely matters, and it is important that we do not take cheap shots because people’s livelihoods depend on it. The way in which the right hon. Gentleman introduced this debate shows why he is held in such high regard by Members on both sides of the House.

I would also like to pay my respects on behalf of the Labour party to the friends and family of David Linkie. It is really important that we have robust journalism on fishing at this time, especially because so many promises have been made and so many promises have been broken. It is important that those people who serve fishing communities, both in this place in elected roles and in journalism, are as professional and thorough as David was, so I pay tribute to him.

As this is a fisheries debate, although not the annual fisheries debate that the hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) from Waveney mentioned, I would also like to pay tribute to all the fishers who go to sea every single day to catch our food—it is the most dangerous peacetime occupation and they deserve our thanks—as well as organisations such as the coastguard and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, which exist to save lives at sea. I support all efforts to continue allowing them to legally save lives at sea. If someone is drowning in the channel, they should have a legal right to save them. Sadly, that is not the Government’s current position with the Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill, and I hope that the Minister, in support of saving lives at sea—something so important for this debate—will have words with the Home Office to say that saving lives, wherever they come from, is the right thing to do.

[Anthony Mangnall]

I think the hon. Gentleman has overlooked the National Coastwatch Institution, which is made up of thousands of volunteers, has extraordinary stations and does so much of the good work he has mentioned.

[Luke Pollard]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving me the opportunity to say thank you to my stepmother, who is one of those officers along the coast in Boscastle in North Cornwall. I thank him for that.

This is a debate that has been prompted by Brexit. It is because of the promises made by Ministers about fishing—the sea of opportunity, the additional fish—that we are here today. It is interesting that those who attended these debates before Brexit have not always done so after Brexit. Having made the case for Brexit, and then made the case for a harder form of Brexit, many of them are not here to stand up for their fishing communities in the way that those communities now need. As a small but perfectly formed representation of the south-west, we know that that is really important and we need to do it.

The betrayal of the promise on the six to 12 nautical miles is something that fishers find unforgivable. The hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) was right to say that we should assess this on how fishers feel. Well, let me tell you: fishers feel betrayed, they feel abandoned and they feel lied to. That is because they have been betrayed, they have been abandoned, and in many cases they were lied to by prominent people whom they respected because of the offices they held and whom they believed would tell the truth, when that was not always the case. That is why the Members in this room, whom I genuinely believe care about their fishing communities regardless of which party they are in, must now clear up the mess that has been made by the Prime Minister and his botched Brexit deal. If we do not, fishing businesses will go under, and that is simply unforgivable.

I want to address a number of issues and to pick out others that have been raised by colleagues. The first is the plight of small boats. Throughout this debate, hon. Members have alluded to the extra difficulties for those people who work on our small boat fleet—the backbone of the British fishing fleet. In 2019, the Seafarers UK report, “Fishing Without a Safety Net”, found that many of those small businesses were struggling to afford the vital safety equipment that has been put in place. I very much enjoyed the Minister’s foreword to that report, which said:

“Small-scale fishing is a cornerstone of local coastal communities around our shores.”

She was right then and she is right now, but that is why I am so confused about why so much of the support provided by the Government throughout the covid period went to large fishing companies and not to the smaller fishing companies. So much potential help for those small businesses escaped them because of technicalities and because the people who sat on those boards did not value sufficiently those small boats and initiatives such as the brilliant Call4Fish, which came from Plymouth and helps provide those small boats with a domestic market. As we heard from the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland, those small businesses were subsequently penalised because of how those rules were drawn up. I do not think that that is right. The hon. Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) is right to say that the delays in bringing forward that money are unacceptable. The Minister and I will no doubt pick that up when we discuss the statutory instrument on MMO funding tomorrow morning. It is unacceptable that, eight months after we left the European Union, fishers have not been paid the money that was promised to them. Ministers need to sort that out pretty fast.

Ministers have been speedy to enforce on those small boats the catch app—a needless piece of home-grown, Conservative digital bureaucracy that is sinking many of those businesses. The catch app requires fishers to weigh their fish before they are landed, on scales that do not exist on small boats and that are not marinised. When those same fish are landed and get put through a grading machine, the same information is provided. We know that handling fish for extra time reduces their quality and price, yet the Government are forcing needless Conservative digital bureaucracy on fishers. It is simply nonsense, and I encourage the Minister to please look at that again.

I am also really concerned that much of the so-called windfall stock—the uplift in fish quota—does not exist. They are paper fish, deliberately enhanced and inflated in the stock assessments leading up to Brexit. We will not get them. I am not convinced that we are getting those extra fish; indeed, because of problems with quota swaps and with the science, many of our fishers up and down the coast are now seeing reduced quota. It is not the sea of opportunity that they were promised.

The hon. Member for Waveney, who knows that I am a big fan of his, praised his REAF initiative, and I would also like to praise it. It is a great example of what happens when communities come together. There are similar examples around the country and he does a good job of promoting his.

I would like briefly to pick up on shellfish. We are facing the potential collapse of the shellfish industry because the Government failed to negotiate a proper export arrangement for our shellfish. Live bivalve molluscs are a really important part of the industry not just in the south-west and in Wales but right across our coast. It is simply not acceptable that they were excluded and that a solution has not been put in place. Simply blaming the EU was the tactic before we left the EU. We now need solutions, not blame. Simply reallocating class B waters does not make those waters any cleaner or any better. If anything, the Government are opening themselves up to legal risk by saying that these waters are no longer as dirty as they were. We need a proper solution to the issue of the export of live bivalve molluscs. If that does not happen, businesses in the south-west and around the country will go bust within months. That simply has to be addressed. I encourage the Minister to listen very carefully to Conservative, Labour and other party Members who represent coastal areas.

[Anthony Mangnall]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Luke Pollard]

I will not at this time, I am afraid.

I had hoped to be able to raise a number of points. In the spirit of praising people when they get it right, I want to thank the supermarket Aldi for stocking British fish. They are mainly Plymouth-caught fish. Whenever we go down the meat aisle at a supermarket, we see flags aplenty—we see the heritage of where that meat comes from—but we do not see that down the fish aisle. Why is that? It is because we mainly export the fish we catch and import the fish we eat. At a time when the Government have made importing and exporting more complicated, more costly and more difficult, we need to buy and eat more of our own fish. Well done to Aldi for taking a punt on that. I encourage other supermarkets, which will no doubt have their monitoring alerts for this, to stop ignoring British fishers and to put British fish on their shelves.

The plight of the distant water fleet is often ignored. It is a sector of our economy that has been hugely betrayed. I pay tribute in particular to the Labour MPs in Hull, who have fought the case on behalf of our distant water fleet. Those fishers are a living, breathing example of the betrayal that has been perpetrated against them.

The Minister will know that Sir Charles, I and other Members of Parliament have an interest in the bluefin tuna catch-and-release trial, which will ensure that those wonderful, amazing fish are not simply caught and eaten when they are in our waters, but can be used to propel and support the recreational fishing industry. The announcement that the Minister was hoping to make about that is a few months overdue, so I would be grateful to her if she could touch on it.

We have not spoken much about non-quota species in the debate, but it is a really important area. Non-quota species are the financial foundation of our entire fishing sector, and the Government’s deal allows EU fishing boats to take and exploit our non-quota species. They have failed to negotiate a real-time transfer of data, so we cannot even see to what extent they are doing it. That needs to be resolved urgently, to support our small boat fleets.

On a point that I hope everyone in the House will welcome, the Minister for Digital and Culture, the hon. Member for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage), made an announcement today that will be a real boost for Plymouth. The campaign to have Plymouth Sound designated as the UK’s first national marine park—a campaign launched by a Labour MP, supported by the then Labour council, and now supported by a Conservative council—now has the support of the Government, with a £9.5 million boost that will support marine jobs and help bring our oceans and seas closer to people living on land. If we have learned anything from the debate, it is the fact that what happens at sea matters. We need more people to understand the fantastic array of marine life at sea, the importance and fragility of marine coastal habitats, and the importance of those jobs.

I want a proper debate on fisheries on the Floor of the House when we come back from the recess. I want to see proper, robust scrutiny ahead of any annual negotiations, which were mentioned by MPs on the Government side. Most of all, with an impending reshuffle and uncertainty about whether the Environment Secretary will still be in his place, I want the Prime Minister to apologise to fishers for the poor deal. I want him to take a personal interest in ensuring that those businesses do not go bust and in protecting the future of this industry. It is a brilliant industry and full of fantastic, innovative people. They deserve a proper plan to support their sector.