Bottom Trawling: Marine Protected Areas

Debate between Chris Grayling and Luke Pollard

Tuesday 28th June 2022 Westminster Hall

[Chris Grayling]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend, who makes some very good points. This is about proper, careful stewardship of the ocean and the ocean floor. As he rightly says, if these things are done well, it can benefit everyone.

Of course, there is another issue, because this is not just about scalping the seabed; it is also about our ability to tackle climate change and absorb carbon. It is not just the fish and other creatures that suffer because of bottom trawling. Kelp and seagrass are enormously important as well, and are a crucial part of improving our absorption of carbon emissions. We know that bottom trawling can destroy them as well, so there is a variety of reasons why we need to deal with this issue.

One irony is that, from time to time, I get messages from constituents who did not back Brexit asking me what benefits it has brought the country. I remember many people saying that Brexit would mean the destruction of all our environmental protections and that Britain would become a pariah nation, but the opposite is true. We can now do something that we could not do before. Bottom trawling was just a reality of the common fisheries policy, and the Minister would have struggled to take the steps that I have been pushing for. We would have had real difficulty overcoming either the vested interests in fishing fleets elsewhere or those countries that have no coast and that were not terribly interested in the issue in the first place. We are now free to act, and I thank the Minister for what she has done so far—the issue today is not a Minister who is saying no. I know she is sympathetic, for which I am grateful. I also know that she continues to face international pressures, and I encourage her to keep resisting those.

The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) is absolutely right that we have to be mindful of the livelihoods of those who work on smaller fishing boats and in the ports around the UK. My Bill was not about getting rid of all of that. History shows that many ports are home to people who are good at managing their fisheries. It is the large boats that we need to deal with, and the Minister has made a good start with the initiation of a ban in four of the protected areas, including Dogger Bank. Well done to her for that step in the right direction.

I asked for this debate so that I could ask the Minister and her officials to move faster on their plans and so that I could share concerns about the approach taken so far. We really need to get on with this as rapidly as possible. There will be more and more pressure in this place to cover not just the first handful of MPAs but a whole raft of them. Although there has been a good start, I sense that progress so far is still much slower than most of us would wish. Of course, officials will want to take a careful and methodical approach, but there is not a lot of time to spare. The more time we take, the more damage is done, and the more damage is done, the longer the ecosystems will take to recover.

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

Not only is damage done, but the damage is increasing. In 2019, Greenpeace found that the amount of time supertrawlers spent fishing in marine protected areas had more than doubled, to 2,913 hours, in that year alone. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that we have a real opportunity now to ban supertrawlers in every single MPA as a quick early win and then to help fishers move to different gear types to be more sustainable in their methods?

[Chris Grayling]

It is, as the hon. Gentleman says, the big vessels that are the problem. I am sure the Minister will take a careful note of those comments, with which I am extremely sympathetic.

There is another point of concern that I would like to put to the Minister. Not all of the protected areas are uniform in their underwater terrain. There are areas where there are reefs of great sensitivity surrounded by areas of sand on the seabed. That is just the reality of MPAs. The Marine Management Organisation, which is implementing the bans, seems not to be taking a uniform approach to all the protected areas. In some, it is deciding to ban bottom trawling in part of the MPA but not all of it. Effectively, it is saying, “You’ve got sandy seabeds, and they are not affected at all.” I can understand, in theory, the logic behind that. The argument has been made to me by some in the fishing community, but I ask the Minister to think carefully about this.

First, it is going to be incredibly difficult to police. Who will be monitoring the movements of a trawler to establish whether it has approached or gone over the top of a protected reef?