Fisheries

Austin Mitchell Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Austin Mitchell (Great Grimsby) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) both on his record on conservation issues and on securing this important debate. It is marvellous that the grumbles and grievances of Members about the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority have subsided so much that we have time for a full-length debate on this matter. I hope that all the hon. Members for inland fishing ports who are round about me in the Chamber are gathering to give us their ports’ views on the CFP. Fishing rarely gets such an opportunity for a serious debate. We are usually squeezed in at the end of another serious discussion, but today we have time, and I hope all fishing Members use it.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall certainly did a useful and important job, but we should draw attention to the iniquities of the CFP, which causes the problem of discards in the first place. The CFP puts marine wildlife, seaweed and all forms of sea life into the European constitution. It is the first constitution to include seaweed, marine life, algae and all the other things. That is a great achievement in constitution making: “We hold these truths to be self-evident. Marine life has a right to be part of the European constitution, to be dealt with only by European vessels!” That is Stalinism at sea—the last vestige of the Stalinist state—and it is being imposed on the waters around Britain, where it has been most damaging.

It is my contention that it is impossible to deal adequately with the problem of discards as long as the CFP remains, because it is the major cause of discards.

[Mr MacNeil]

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is aware of a European consultation paper on the CFP. The paper admitted the failure of the CFP and that the areas where it worked were those under national control. Surely if people want the CFP to continue, they should allow national control to 199 miles, and apply the CFP between 199 and 200 miles—a minimal ribbon. The CFP has failed and will continue to do so, but there are no milestones by which we can correct the CFP in future. We will bumble on for years with the CFP unless European Governments get their acts together and get rid of it.

[Austin Mitchell]

I hope that that becomes part of Scottish National party policy and that it is implemented by the new SNP Government in Edinburgh—it certainly needs to be. I hereby renew my application to become the SNP fisheries spokesman. My previous applications over the years have been consummately rejected.

The important point is that the CFP allocates catches by quota to fishing vessels in mixed fishing grounds, which waters around the British coast are. As long as we control catches by quotas, there will always be discards, because fisherman who put to sea for haddock or cod will catch species that are not in their quotas.

[Mr MacNeil]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that one other main problem with the CFP is the single-species stipulation, which often applies to the species that are most under threat? That causes distortions in the catching of other species and leads to discards. There are better models than the EU model, such as those in Norway, Iceland and the Faroes. The CFP model is the worst of the lot. That is why those countries will have nothing to do with Europe.

[Austin Mitchell]

I agree, absolutely—this speech is becoming a duet between me and the Scottish National party, which is an interesting state of affairs. The problem that the hon. Gentleman points to is that simplistic solutions will not work. The problem with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s proposals is that they are simplistic. The EU has responded to them with another simplistic solution, which will not work either. It took the Norwegians 20 years to develop their techniques, and they did it in very different fisheries, with an emphasis on conserving the young, immature fish. Norway’s job has therefore been much easier, but it has taken it 20 years to eliminate discards. We have had 10 years of working to reduce discards, in which they have been reduced by 50%. That has happened partly, it has to be said, as a result of decommissioning, but also because of other measures, such as square-mesh panels, which were developed by the industry as a means of conservation.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the Norwegians’ use of temporary real-time closures of areas when by-catch becomes excessive has served as an incentive for fishermen to use more selective gear? Does he also agree that selling fish caught illegally, without quota, through fishermen’s sales organisations—where the fishermen are entitled to only 20% of the revenue to cover the costs, thereby avoiding wastage and maintaining incentives to use selective gear by channelling profits back into fisheries—has been a key measure in achieving what he describes?

[Austin Mitchell]

I agree, absolutely. We have a lot to learn from the Norwegians, but the point is that the Norwegians control their own waters in the 200-mile limit around Norway, just as we should control the 200-mile limit—or the median line—around the British coast, but we do not. Therefore, we cannot enforce such measures. That is the problem with all these arguments.

The television programmes that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall did were fantastic. The great innovation—the great gimmick—of landing discards at Hastings and throwing them to the crowd on the beach, because landing them would have been illegal, was marvellous, because people took those fish home and cooked them. I wrote to Fearnley-Whittingstall and suggested that he should hire a cruiser and follow the fishing fleet around, picking up the discards and serving them as expensive meals to a wealthy clientele on the North sea coast. That kind of experiment would have been useful. However, his solution is simplistic; therefore, it will not work.

Following Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s pressure on fisheries policy—on which I again congratulate him—the EU has put forward another simplistic solution. What it is doing—I suspect rather cynically—is setting out the problem, throwing it back to the nation states and telling them to solve it with a ban on discards, which will not work and cannot work. The Minister cannot solve the problem, so we are in deadlock. The EU proposes measures that will not work and forces them on the nation states, which cannot enforce them because of the common fisheries policy, and nothing happens, which is likely to remain the outcome.

The British reduction of discards by more than 50% over 10 years was achieved through square-mesh panels, video observation of the fishermen, closing grounds in-season and cod recovery plans, which were submitted by the fishermen and approved by Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. They were all painstaking, laborious techniques, but they have worked. That is the only way to do it, not through a simplistic ban, because fishermen will continue to discard.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

There have been lots of European ideas to enable the cod recovery plans. However, on many occasions scientists put forward regulations and suggestions when fishermen were saying that there were schools upon schools of cod in the sea. Therefore, there is perhaps a difference between the scientist and the fisherman when it comes to who knows best.

[Austin Mitchell]

That is certainly true, and again, it illustrates the difficulties that we face. One attempt that Europe has made—the cod ban—has proved disastrous for enforcement and protecting stocks, not to mention avoiding discards. That is control from the centre. What we need in the EU now is a policy to address that, yet power is being taken away from the Council—at least we have an opportunity to put up a fight against any proposals in the Council, and to bargain and improve our position in negotiations—and transferred to the Commission. However, the commissioners have never knowingly handed power down to the nation states—or, in the case of fishing, to the regional advisory councils. The North sea RAC is doing a splendid job. If the power to manage stocks was conceded to it, it could eliminate discards. However, it is not doing that because in the final analysis, the EU will never hand over the necessary powers to allow the RACs or nation states to deal with the problem adequately. In those situations, discarding will continue because, under a discard ban, what is a fisherman who catches fish that are not on his quota supposed to do with them? It is inevitable that he will chuck them overboard, if he can do so unobserved. We cannot monitor every ship by satellite or closed-circuit television; that is just impossible. So this is an impossible plan and it will not work.

That is why I was loth to give my support to the early-day motion. There is a continuous conflict between the conservationists, whose aims I admire, and the needs of commercial fishing. We see this in the marine conservation areas. There is now an argument to make them areas in which there is either no fishing or very restricted fishing, but we must not turn the waters around the British coast into a patchwork quilt, with some areas where fisherman can catch and some where they cannot, or with different quotas for different areas involving limits on species. It is appalling that there is a proposal to ban fishing in the experimental areas that are being set up. We cannot do that.

[Barry Gardiner]

Does my hon. Friend acknowledge that the 2006 reorganisation of the Manguson Stevens Act in the US required the end of over-fishing by 2010? In fact, the National Marine Fisheries Service has now heralded the fact that that has taken place in US waters. That policy’s success was due to the requirement for new annual catch limits in every fishery, and the establishment of strict scientific guidelines on the limits of sustainability, within which annual catch limits could be set.

[Austin Mitchell]

That is so. We have set up our marine conservation areas, and I support them, but I do not support them as a means of restricting the opportunities for fishing.

I suppose that I had better bring my remarks to a conclusion, enthusiastic as I am to go on for hours, preventing all the other Members who want to raise matters from doing so. I shall simply say that the fishing industry has the greatest and the closest interest in proper conservation, because it has an interest in the sustainability of stocks. It wants the stocks to be there to hand on to the next generation of fishermen. That is why it was always important for us to have 200-mile limits to protect our fishing, in the way that Norway, Iceland, New Zealand, Australia, America, Canada and many other nations have been able to do. We cannot do that now, however, because Ted Heath foolishly handed these powers over, just like that, without argument, to Europe. The fishing industry wants sustainable catching as well as conservation measures, and it is the only body that can enforce them and ensure that they work, because it is in the interests of the fishermen to do so.

[Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)]

Although the industry might have the desire to be involved in conservation measures, would the hon. Gentleman agree that, as a result of the quotas and the ridiculous policy on discards, there is no incentive for fishermen to take that long-term view? Anything we can do to align the stewardship incentives with the incentives for the industry would be extremely welcome.

[Austin Mitchell]

I agree. That is a very important point, and well put—said he, unctuously. This comes back to my point that the only way of enforcing these measures is if the industry enforces them itself, because it is the only one who has such an interest in them. At the moment, the regulations work in a contrary direction, but if they could work with the grain of the industry, and if the industry could be involved in formulating the measures, we could get a proper, effective conservation measure that would work. That is the aim, and we should not look for measures from Europe. We should aim for a handing down of power to the industry, so as to involve it in creating sustainability and pursuing its own interests.