Leaving the EU: the Rural Economy

Eilidh Whiteford Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom]

My right hon. Friend makes a good point about the potential for all UK fishing. I hope that our policies, when we come to them after consultation, will enable us to deliver exactly what he asks for.

[Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)]

Today, the Prime Minister made a passing reference to Spanish fishermen and their interests when she was talking about doing a deal with the EU. That suggests that fishing is already in play in these negotiations, so can the Secretary of State clarify what the Prime Minister is offering Spanish fishermen and why our fishermen are being used as pawns in this process already?

[Andrea Leadsom]

I can assure the hon. Lady that, as she will appreciate, we are not entering into any negotiations until we have triggered article 50. We are, however, consulting our colleagues very widely in the devolved Administrations, and any negotiating positions will be discussed with them, so she does not need to worry about that.

A healthier environment will enable our world-leading food, farming and fishing industry to go from strength to strength. As pledged in our manifesto, our upcoming Green Paper on food, farming and fisheries will set out a framework for the future of these industries over the next 25 years. We will consult widely on that Green Paper.

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[Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)]

I am desperately disappointed that the Prime Minister signalled today that she intends to pull the UK out of the single market as well as out of the EU. Those who potentially have the most to lose from this hard Brexit approach include Scotland’s beef and sheep farmers. We have been farming beef in Aberdeenshire for thousands of years. Farming is a way of life more than a job, and we produce some of the best beef in the world for premium markets.

I am not going to repeat the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Calum Kerr), because he made the case well, but I will say the following in response to the Secretary of State. Scotland exported beef and lamb worth £73 million to EU countries in 2015. It is important to realise that more than 90% of Scotland’s red meat exports go to EU countries, and Switzerland, Norway and Monaco are at the top of the non-EU destinations.

Over the last 10 years Scotland’s food and drink exports have grown substantially, and our biggest growth markets have been in the EU, with a massive 20% growth over the last decade, a much higher rate than in other markets, including the UK market. That is why retaining access to the single market is so important to our future economic security, especially in rural areas where livelihoods are so affected by trade.

The other commodity produced on a large scale in my constituency is fish. We have a huge catching sector; up to a quarter of the UK’s fish is landed in my constituency. But for every job in the catching sector there are four or five in the processing industry, and that sector supports thousands of jobs across Scotland and a wider supply chain.

The vast majority of fishermen voted to leave the EU—and given the way they were sold out in 1972 and shoe-horned into the common fisheries policy, who can blame them? The catching sector sees many potential gains from being outside the CFP, not least a big bonanza on the horizon if it can secure extra quota. However, it is a very different story for the processing sector, where the opportunities are tempered by some significant drawbacks from a hard Brexit, as against a Norwegian-style deal that keeps our foot in the door of the single market. One of the major employers in my constituency has already come out and said publicly that we need to protect our position in the single market because we have a market advantage there.

We need to remember that two thirds of our fish exports go to the EU, so this is a huge issue for some employers. We exported nearly £450 million-worth of fish to the EU in 2015. That is a big chunk of our food exports; we cannot afford to jeopardise trade. While we probably cannot avoid tariffs at this stage, we can avoid non-tariff barriers such as rules of origin or the requirement for export health certificates at £300 a consignment, adding costs and bureaucracy that we do not need. That would leave an open goal for our Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese competitors.

During the Brexit campaign, when I talked to people in the fishing industry who were ardent Brexiteers, they consistently held up Norway as the model they wanted to emulate, but that is no longer an option in this post-Brexit mission creep situation. The biggest risk now is, as I said to the Secretary of State, our Government selling us down the river, which was suggested might be happening in respect of the Prime Minister’s speech earlier today.