Fisheries Bill [HL]

Earl of Caithness Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 2nd reading (Hansard)
Tuesday 11th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, I join the Minister and my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay in paying tribute to our fishermen, who carry out an amazing job in extraordinary weather. Those who have been tossed around in a force 8 gale and run for shelter when the fishermen are working hard in that same gale know the sort of conditions that they have to work in. Safety at sea has of course considerably improved, and I am delighted by that. When I was Fisheries Minister, I was very involved with safety because of some very sad accidents. I particularly remember Albert McQuarrie bringing in the Safety at Sea Act, which all the fishermen wanted except when it came to actually implementing it on their boats and it took up space. The reward that my friend Albert McQuarrie got for all his hard work was that he lost his seat at the next election.

This is undoubtedly a hugely critical area for relationships between the UK and the EU, and for the Government. As my noble friend Lord Lansley has just said, we start from totally different poles. The Government quite rightly, as our own state, want to go in one direction, but the EU will resist tooth and nail moving away from any benefit that the common fisheries policy has. We were misled to some extent when we joined the EEC; the rules regarding fisheries were changed before we joined. That is the lesson for how careful we are going to have to be in our negotiations with the EU. However, there are opportunities, as my noble friend Lord Dunlop said. He mentioned the Western Isles, and my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay mentioned Kinlochbervie and Lochinver. I will of course mention Thurso as being a critical landing port, and a critical point from which the EU gets a lot of its fish. There is a stream of traffic and, when you know that that stream of traffic is going to come, you get ahead of it on the A9 coming south; otherwise, you are going to get stuck behind it all the way to Inverness before you have a chance of overtaking the fish lorries.

Enforcement is critical for the Bill. I join the noble Baroness, Lady Young, in asking the Minister to be a bit more forthcoming about what the UK fishery administrations are planning for in the way of enforcement at sea. We are going to have a new line between us and the EU. If the EU is aggrieved by the deal that will be done with it later this year, a lot of those boats are going to test our resolve and our enforcement at sea to the highest level that they can. If my noble friend could be more forthcoming, that would be helpful.

On the proposed fisheries agreement with the EU, I agree with my noble friend Lord Lansley that this is something that Parliament ought to look at. It intersects with the Bill in a number of areas. He mentioned Clause 23, but I am also thinking of Clauses 7 and 12. In a number of areas, what is going to be agreed in July and in the trade deals cuts right across the Bill and could undermine a huge amount of what it is trying to do. I am not trying to tell the Minister how to negotiate or what his negotiating brief should be, but when we get to a certain point before this becomes a statutory instrument, Parliament really ought to be in a position to debate it and look at its relevance to the Bill.

Talking of enforcement, I would also like more information about how we are going to monitor by-catch. I listened with interest to the debate that the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, had the other day, and what I did not listen to I read. Clearly, this is another area where we need much more information in order to be accurate on the data. As the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, has just said, it is about getting that data. And it is not just about our data; it is about making sure that the EU is doing the same thing. We find far too often that people are working on different bases and do not have the right scientific information.

I turn to the devolved Administrations. I am delighted by the close working relationship that seems to have been developed on fisheries, but there are a couple of aspects that worry me. Under Clause 17, Scotland is able to license a foreign boat, but Clause 17(2)(a) says that boat is not allowed to fish in waters outside Scotland. What happens if the Scottish authority licences a foreign boat and it strays into English waters? Whose responsibility is that? Would it not be better for all the fishing authorities to work together on licences so that there is a common pool of the foreign boats that are licensed as well as the UK boats?

On Clause 33, I am concerned that the power for devolved authorities to help fisheries might lead to an intra-UK state war. I hope this can be avoided, and I hope that by working with the devolved authorities we will all do roughly the same thing, but it would be sad if one devolved Administration used state aid in a way that was detrimental to the rest of the UK. Given the problems that we could have among the devolved Administrations, and between the devolved Administrations and the fishermen who will be seeking to get the maximum catch that they can, is there not an argument that there ought to be some sort of mediation or arbitration service to help in that respect?

I end on a point that the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, mentioned. He called them “historic rights” and I remember that, when I was Minister for fishing, we called them “grandfather rights”, but either way they are long-established rights. I am thinking particularly of the fishing boats designation orders in 1965 for France, Belgium and Ireland, which give certain boats from those countries the right to fish in our waters, particularly when they are going to the Isle of Man’s territorial waters, where they have a separate arrangement. I do not think that in the Bill those rights have been extinguished. Could the Minister confirm whether those grandfather rights have been extinguished? What discussions has he had with the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands to make certain that no grandfather rights will continue forward under the present legislation? While we are on grandfather rights, can the Minister be absolutely certain that he is not inadvertently creating new grandfather rights should there be a break-up of the United Kingdom—which I certainly would not like to see—that would cause us problems in future?

The Bill is absolutely going in the right direction and my noble friend has my support, but I hope he will be able to fill in some of the details of the picture that badly need to be painted.