Fishing Industry
Debate between Barry Sheerman and Austin Mitchell(9 years, 11 months ago)
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Austin Mitchell
I strongly agree with the hon. Lady. That is the danger that I want to avoid. I am inciting the Minister to fight to protect the industry in order to prevent that eventuality, because what happened to the Bristol channel must not be allowed to happen to the rest of the country.
The prospects for the wider industry following the European Council meeting are gloomy indeed. The problems are compounded not just by cuts in the total allowable catches, but by the discard ban, which is to be introduced in two stages. That will be very messy and difficult. I believe that a discard ban is impossible unless every fishing vessel is equipped with closed-circuit television so that catches can be monitored. Alternatively, perhaps we could send unemployed Methodist Ministers to serve as observers on all the vessels—and Church of Scotland Ministers to serve on the Scottish vessels—to give us an honest account of what is going on.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
I have long been an admirer of my hon. Friend, who is passionate about this subject. He has always said that it is possible for this country to have a healthy, vibrant fishing industry which also protects marine conservation and the environment. Will he reassert that view?
Austin Mitchell
That is exactly right. That is what I want to achieve, as will emerge from my speech, whether it proves to be passionate, discursive or very boring.
As I have said, the problems caused by the cuts will be compounded by the discard ban, which will be unenforceable. Moreover, if fish are to be expensively dumped in landfill rather than being discarded at sea, we shall need more ports at which to land them, and we do not have those ports, because they are being closed. In Lowestoft, for instance, everything has closed down. That, in turn, will be compounded by the landing requirements, which have not yet been specified because of the process of co-decision making. All that is compounded further by the rush to marine conservation areas. Conservationists want 127 of them, which is just daft. It is excessive. Those conservation areas will create a patchwork quilt of different regulations and requirements in different parts of the North sea, with which the fishing industry will find it impossible to comply.
Why are we faced with all this? We are faced with it because the common fisheries policy was not revised in the way in which it should have been in the recent 20-year revision. That revision provided an opportunity for power to be transferred to the regions and the regional advisory councils, and for the industry to control its own fishing, policing itself and maintaining its own stability. However, Brussels would not give up control. The result is that the policy is still controlled by diktat from the top and is enforced in the different areas. It is still decided on quotas and, if we have quotas, we are going to get discards, because those in mixed fisheries will catch fish that are not on their quota, and what is going to happen to them? The more they cut quotas, the greater the discards. We will face that problem as a result of this Council.
The common fisheries policy has always been enforced through political imperative. In the past it was the political imperative of doling out paper fish to all the states in the EU. Each got a catch, and inevitably the result was overfishing, with fish created to please the politicians and to be given to national entities. The political imperative has now changed; it is now to propitiate the conservation lobby, which is playing far too big a part in policy decisions, as opposed to the interests and concerns of commercial fishing and having a viable fishing industry. The conservation lobby is playing a part because it is strong in the European Parliament, which is the home of playaway politics and funny politics of all kinds.
Clearly, the conservation lobby has been very persuasive in the European Parliament. That is a sad change. I remember that 10 years ago the World Wide Fund for Nature and the British fishing industry co-operated in developing a plan for fishing that would lead to investment and, therefore, build towards a sustainable fleet and a sustainable catch, which is what we needed. We did not get the investment money from Government, however, so the conservation groups have moved on and are now demanding the close-down of the commercial industry, or restrictions on it that are so great that it will be impossible for it to carry on.
The conservationists are painting a picture of our seas being fished out by rapacious overfishing. It takes no account of overfishing by other countries, however, because we cannot effectively control our own waters if they are subject to incursions by other fishing fleets, which ours are. That was the argument that we had about bass in Westminster Hall a couple of weeks ago. It was an argument about whether the leisure industry, the returns on which are compounded by including hotel bills and travel and all sorts of expenses, produces a bigger economic return than the commercial fishing of bass, and it left out the French rapacious overfishing of bass and took no account of the French decimation of the stock. Similarly, discussion of the shellfish—lobster and crab—fisheries off Yorkshire took no account of the smashing of the pots of Yorkshire fishermen by French trawlers, which has been taking place.
We cannot have the kind of conservation policy that the conservationists want unless we have national enforcement in national waters, because the nation state has that interest in conservation. If we have a collective policy in which other people cheat and are given excessive quotas, which they maintain and defend, it is difficult to do what the conservationists want, which is to let the stocks build up.
The aim has been to cut down on commercial fishing in order to build the stocks and support the small boat industry. I have in my hand one of the pamphlets, with a touching picture on the cover. It is entitled, “Championing coastal waters and communities”. Small boat fishing and commercial fishing are not necessarily at each other’s throats, however. Both are essential. Small boat fisheries do not go much more than 12 nautical miles out. They are not catching the kind of fish caught by commercial fisheries—high-volume, low-return fish such as herring. They are not supplying the markets in the same way as the commercial fishermen are, so while it is necessary to support the small boat industry and fishing communities, it is also necessary to support and maintain commercial fishing.
The conservationists are trying to create panic and a fear that we are going to decimate our waters and cut down on commercial fishing. They are being financed by American money: $50 million has been provided for campaigning by the Pew organisation, plus another grant from the Oak Foundation. That is why the campaign is so well-oiled, so vociferous and so effective. The British fishing industry does not have the resources to combat that kind of propaganda. The campaigners want to tie the industry down.
The conservationists have an admirable ideal, which I share. We have to achieve sustainable fishing with a fleet that is matched to the fishing opportunities, but we will not achieve that through the brutal enforcement of targets using excessive haste. A term much used by Grimsby fishermen is “festina lente”—take it slowly. I say to the conservationists, let us do this in rational, reasonable, slow steps. Or, as the Prime Minister would say, “Calm down, dears!” Fishing has changed. It is no longer done by the kind of rapacious privateers that we used to see. Stocks are building up, and fishing mortality has halved in the north Atlantic since 2000. The amount of discards has also been halved through technical conservation measures, which is the most effective way of doing that. We are also seeing the biomass building up, very slowly in some cases but very fast in others. Look at North sea plaice: it is now abundant, and the biomass is at its highest level ever. Five years ago, North sea plaice was a threatened species. So there can be a rapid turnaround, and that turnaround is now going on, so let us take it as it comes. Let us balance the cuts with the development of the stocks.
We need to have sustainable catches, but we also need a sustainable industry. That does not mean just the small boat industry; it involves the commercial fishing industry as well. Grimsby has moved from being the world’s premier fishing port. I used to boast about that when I was first elected, but it is not a consequence of my election that it has gone from that to having perhaps only 20 boats. However, some of those boats are doing a good commercial job. Some are catching flatfish, for example. Large, tied vessels are catching North sea plaice and maintaining continuity of supply to the market. We need to sustain both: the small boats and the large, commercial vessels.
If these cuts go ahead as prophesied, the effect will be to decimate the small boat industry. It will be more serious than the conservationists envisage. We need profitable companies and profitable small boats. So why rush into the measures proposed for this coming year? Let us postpone the multiple sustainable yield target. Ministers have the latitude to postpone it to 2020, rather than introducing it in 2015. I urge them to postpone it, to maintain catches without cuts and to bring in the discard ban slowly and more partially—species by species—rather than promptly and all at once. We should let the build-up of stocks continue, and match the effort to that rather than to some target ordained in advance that is perhaps unreachable by 2015.
I urge the Minister, as we always do on these occasions, to resist the scale of cuts that has been proposed. I urge him to proclaim the need for both a sustainable industry and for us to develop a system—unlike this dictatorial one of setting quotas from the top and then enforcing them on the British industry—that listens to fishing and to the regional advisory councils. They are the biggest advance, and a necessary one, in giving us regional control, regional targets and a regional management system. We need to involve the fishermen more in their research. We need to open up to the industry the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, which is far too secretive and far too scientific. The industry knows where the fish are and ICES does not necessarily have the same scale of knowledge. We need to stop trying to bully the fishing industry to fit into someone else’s plans, be it those for political union or for a conservation heaven achieved overnight.
We need to help the fishing industry; let us not restructure it by bankruptcy. Fishing has an interest in having a sustainable catch and a sustainable industry, because that is the interest of future generations. If we destroy our interest—if we cut down fishing drastically now and stop the training, the family connections, the growth of communities dependent on fishing and the investment by companies that has gone on—we are not going to be able to restore the industry later. So let the industry get involved in the management of the stocks. Let us recognise that it has a future and work to preserve it. Let the industry develop in its own way, rather than imposing these excessive cuts on it.
Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill
Debate between Barry Sheerman and Austin Mitchell
Austin Mitchell (Great Grimsby) (Lab)
It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Northampton South (Mr Binley), provided that one does not follow him too far down his idiosyncratic paths.
It is difficult to speak about the Bill, as it is very much a rag-bag of a Bill. I would say it was a curate’s egg of a Bill, if we could assume that curates ate pterodactyl eggs that were good in parts but monstrous in others. It is a very mixed bag and it looks to me as though the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, who is, I think, the only wise man in Government—certainly in the Cabinet—has had a difficult fight beating off some of the more lunatic proposals that were put to him by Beecroft and others in the Conservative party. He has finished up with not a Bill but a bric-a-brac stall, with several bits that are very broken and others that are very messy.
We were told that the Bill is about growth—that it is about “encouraging long-term growth”—but that is completely crazy. Our economy is not growing because of the way in which the Government are handling it. They are obsessed with debt rather than the real problem with the British economy, which is demand. In an attempt to cut debt, they are cutting spending, firing public servants and reducing public spending, but those actions in turn are reducing demand with the result that we are acquiring more debt and that the burden of debt weighs more heavily on the shrinking economy. The economy was 4% below its GDP in 2008 and if we count the growth it should have had in the interim years, we can see that it is well below what it should be. Ours is the only economy in the world that has fallen that low, yet the Government are compounding the problem by trying to cut debt while widening the deficit, requiring more debt to pay the wages of misery and unemployment. That is an economic folly and what the Bill does to encourage growth is as nothing when set against that.
It is a deceit to pretend that business is hung down with regulations, tribunals and employment regulations, that that is the cause of the problems and that if we get rid of all the regulations and obligations to the workers, we will suddenly have a surge of energy and enterprise. That is absolutely not true. Workers in this country have less protection and fewer rights than those in nearly every other advanced country apart from two. Less protection, fewer rights. We have heard some tear-jerking examples today of small businesses being unable to fire people. I accept that there are some problems, but it is easier for such businesses to fire people than it is in most comparable countries. When multinationals want to reduce their international work force, they notoriously always fire people in this country first because it is easier and less expensive in redundancy payments. No surge in employment will come through concessions to small businesses in the form of regulation. Speakers from the Government Benches have been rather like the captain of the Titanic, locked in his cabin discussing how to reduce the conditions and pay of the stewards while the ships sinks with an iceberg making a great hole in it. That is the level of the debate on those Benches.
Let me look first at what the Bill does not do, because its inadequacies are more glaring than its adequacies. It offers a green investment bank—or, to give it its proper name, a pale green investment bank—that is not a bank and that is certainly too little, too late. It is much like the time when Michael Heseltine used to go around distressed towns in the north in the 1980s offering them a garden festival; the green investment bank is the Liberal party’s wreath from Government. What we really need is not a green investment bank with very little money at its disposal but a national investment bank that will raise money on the markets—it could use some of the proceeds from quantitative easing, too—and invest it in business, in housing projects and in infrastructure projects to get the economy moving.
Austin Mitchell
No, I want to be very brief.
We are being offered a marginal increase in shareholder rights when what we need is an increase in worker rights and worker representation, particularly representation. Workers are the ones with the interests of the company at heart and they want to see the company maintained, viable and healthy. Workers, as well as shareholders, should be represented on the remuneration committee, on the audit committee, which should have a central role, and on works councils, such as those that they have in Germany. I would move rapidly towards the Mitbestimmung system of co-determination and partnership that they have in Germany. The Bill does not do that, which is a failure. It offers a simplified structure for competition issues when what we need is a British version of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States and a business commission to enforce effective corporate governance of British companies and to impose tougher rules on mergers and foreign takeovers.
As Alex Brummer shows in his latest book, we have very few national champions left in this country and a higher proportion of our big firms have been taken over by foreign firms than in any other country. That means that they are dancing to a tune dictated from Zurich, Hamburg, Delaware or wherever else rather than to a British tune when making their investment decisions. We need to check and control foreign takeovers on that stage.
Let me make a brief mention of what the Bill does; it has to be brief, because it does not do all that much. First, the simplification of the tribunal process is okay and acceptable, provided that ACAS gets the extra staffing and money that it will need to take over the conciliation process before industrial tribunal. Secondly, we need a one-track approach, rather than having to go first to ACAS and then to the tribunal. The approach should be integrated down one track.
We need better protection and provision for whistleblowers. In many cases, that is the only way we will find out what is going on inside companies such as A4e—we heard all the revelations about what that company had been doing because they do not have an adequate audit structure or control structure. That means that fraud can be perpetrated at the lower levels, whereas the top management is not concerned and does not want to know what is going on. We need proper control structures and some system of strengthening and protecting whistleblowers to encourage them to come forward and reveal what kind of business practices are going on. If the Bill does not provide that, it will fail. Those are important provisions that must be implemented.