Inshore Fishing Fleet

Derek Thomas Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2022 Westminster Hall

[Derek Thomas (St Ives) (Con)]

I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) for securing this relevant and important debate. I welcome the Government food strategy, through which, in effect, they want to maximise the supply of homegrown nutritious food. The inshore fleet is absolutely the answer, or part of the answer, to that problem.

We do not have long in this debate and we will never cover all the aspects of fishing that we should cover. In five minutes, I would not have time just to list the coves and ports that people fish from in my constituency, so I will not attempt to do that, but if people ever get the opportunity to come down to Cornwall and go to one of those coves—such as Cadgwith, Coverack or Porthleven —they will see how important the small inshore fleet is to the local community, what a key part of the local economy it is and what a local tourist attraction it is.

There is a danger of us missing an opportunity to harvest the contribution that the inshore fleet makes to good nutritious food. In April, I was privileged to meet inshore fishermen in Cadgwith, Porthleven and Newlyn, which is the fourth biggest port in England—in the UK actually—in terms of the value of fish landed, and what I saw was men who know what it is to work hard to put good food on our table. However, those men were tangled not in nets but in red tape, despite the UK having left the common fisheries policy. Today I want to run through what I learned and suggest some answers.

One issue is reporting catch. Fishermen do not object to good data in support of sustainability. I have never yet met a fisherman who wants to completely exhaust the sea of fish. The impression is, though, that reporting to both the MMO and the inshore fisheries and conservation authority is clunky and duplicative, involving a mixture of hard copy and online data collection. It cannot be beyond DEFRA to sort out the way we ask fishermen to record what they catch.

On safety, my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes was right to raise the issue of the under-15 metre safety code. Again, fishermen understand the need for the highest safety levels at sea, but the impression is that the under-15 metre safety code is being applied in a way that gives rise to multiple examples of extreme stress for the inshore fleet. The inspections seem inconsistent and I have met a number of fishermen who believe that changes they have been asked to make risk making their vocation less safe rather than more safe.

There is also the use of technology to consider. We have heard about the roll-out of the inshore vessel monitoring systems. Fishermen I have spoken to are concerned not so much about the principle of I-VMS as about the pace of the roll-out, the ongoing cost of the system and the implications they face if the kit fails and they are grounded because they cannot go to sea to fish legally. The loss of income for a fisherman who already faces restrictions on the number of days they can spend at sea would be significant, if that issue is not properly understood and addressed.

I have a few quick asks. First, I ask for some common sense to be applied to data collection and safety at sea. The Minister is not responsible for safety at sea, but she can support us in our efforts to work with the Department for Transport to ensure that the DFT makes sure that inspections are consistent, coherent and recognise both the enormous knowledge that inshore fishermen have and their years and years of experience of how to keep safe at sea.

I suggest that we scrap IFCAs altogether and instead concentrate marine management and conservation within the Marine Management Organisation. It is bizarre that we are asking fishermen to send similar data to two different places at different times in different formats. That just is not helpful in realising the full potential of our inshore fishing fleet and I suggest it would be a great thing if, as has been hinted at, IFCAs were scrapped completely. I might not be popular with my local council for saying that.

We should also be brave and scrap quotas. A lot of conservationists will be shocked by that, but if we look at the inshore fleet, we see that I am talking about much smaller vessels than those my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes referred to. These vessels do not go to sea very often, because the weather does not suit them—it is not safe for them to go in bad weather. Also, their capacity, their time at sea and how they fish are all very sustainable, so I suggest we could really regenerate our coastal communities, and provide fantastic, healthy food for local communities and for people further afield, if we just let the inshore fleet free and allowed those vessels to fish sustainably.

In the last 15 seconds or so that I have to speak, may I also say that we need to create dedicated areas where these fishermen can fish safely? Across the Lizard peninsula we now have massive freight ships coming through, cutting off the corner of Land’s End and trawling through the fishermen’s kit and making their lives very unsafe.