Fisheries

Iain Wright Excerpts

Thursday 6th December 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Iain Wright (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Clark. I echo other hon. Members in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen North (Mr Doran) and the hon. Member for South Down (Ms Ritchie) on securing this debate.

I hope that you will not rule me out of order, Ms Clark, if I start by wishing my father, Mervyn Wright, a very happy 70th birthday today. He is not a fisherman, but he is my dad, so I wish him very many happy returns.

[Mr MacNeil]

Does he eat fish?

[Mr Wright]

He does. The hon. Gentleman is quite right.

I want to concentrate on the concerns that fishermen in Hartlepool have about the future viability of their industry. My constituency has had a fishing industry for the best part of 800 years. Generations of Hartlepool families have farmed the seas, building up a knowledge of conditions, changes in stock levels and fish movements in the North sea that is second to none. As I think was said by the Chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh), that combination of local knowledge—as opposed to top-down bureaucracy—should be used, alongside technology and empirical evidence, to inform fisheries policy.

Hartlepool’s fishing fleet largely comprises vessels of under 10 metres. Fishermen in my constituency are rightly concerned that developments over the past few years are making it even more difficult for them to make a living from the seas. Their concerns are predominantly based on two factors: the specific make-up of their industry, particularly in relation to ownership, and the common fisheries policy, which is hindering the long-term sustainability of a vibrant fishing fleet.

On the make-up of the industry, boats of under 10 metres—as I have said, they comprise virtually the whole fishing fleet in Hartlepool—make up about 75% of the total fleet in the UK, but they are allowed to catch only about 4% of the annual quota. The rest of the quota is given to a small handful of large organisations. As in other industries, such as banking and energy, the actions of larger producers and powerful vested interests are distorting the dynamics of the industry and undermining the ability of Hartlepool fishermen to remain viable. Overfishing of the seas was not caused by the under 10-metre fleet, but the small proportion of the quota allocated to them is having a hugely disproportionate impact.

Hartlepool fishermen play by the rules; they farm the seas sustainably and think of the long term, because their fathers, grandfathers and great grandfathers fished in the North sea before them and they want their sons and daughters, their grandsons and great grandsons to follow them and do the same. They do not want to undermine the industry or the chances of the next generation. None the less, the nature of the industry and the punitive share of the quota allocated to them mean that they are, at the moment, barely scraping a living.

The Minister—who, to his credit, understands the industry—has looked at the matter of increasing the allocation of quotas to the smaller vessels. I appreciate the immense challenges and difficulties of that. For example, how do we take quotas from organisations that may have a legal right to them? That is of huge significance to the fishing fleet in my constituency. On the back of what the Chairman of the Select Committee said in her contribution, I ask the Minister to outline his current thinking on how we will push forward this agenda.

The second element that concerns my fishermen is the commons fisheries policy, which naturally dominates any debate of this nature. From listening to the contributions so far in this debate, I think that there is consensus that there will be no long-term future for our fishing industry if the CFP system continues to be a top-down, bureaucratic, clumsy, blunt and inefficient tool. For a policy that is supposed to stem from a long-term, sustainable view based on scientific evidence, it is remarkably short term in its scope, having the annual rigmarole of quota setting, which does nothing to embed long-term thinking into the industry.

On the back of what has been said about regionalism, on which there again seems to be a consensus, I am interested in the Minister’s view on multi-year agreements in which quotas can be set within a broad framework for a three-year period. Does the Minister agree that that would provide more certainty for the industry rather than this current annual negotiating round, which does not provide a long-term and sustainable view for the industry? Would it not be best for the EU to provide that longer-term objective for the sustainability of our fish stocks while allowing the manner of implementation to be devised and then adapted wherever possible at a regional and local level? Should not that be done at a much more localised level? That would allow people who have strong local knowledge, such as the fishermen in Hartlepool, to take a more flexible and adaptable approach, which in turn would sustain the economics of the industry while being sensitive to the environment and future fish stocks.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

Do not the views of the hon. Members for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh) and for South East Cornwall (Sheryll Murray) about the rogue behaviour of Spain in particular underline the problem of the common fisheries policy and the apparent weakness and failure of the European Union to have any control over what it does?

[Mr Wright]

I have tried to speak in the annual fisheries debate to put forward the concerns of my constituents. I remember—it seems many years ago now—raising the concern that Spanish and French fishermen were, essentially, illegally operating in British waters, and that the level of enforcement was virtually non-existent. We need to have a more robust review of such practices.

Another blunt, clumsy and top-down initiative relates to the days at sea allocated to Hartlepool fishermen. The EU plans yet again to cut days at sea under the cod recovery plan, even though it has been estimated that cod stocks in the North sea have almost tripled in the past six or seven years. Does the Minister agree that we should avoid that somewhat simplistic tool of days at sea because it grossly distorts the economics of the industry and again embeds that short-term view? Should not we instead be thinking of a policy response that emphasises technological modifications to fishing gear, as well as making better use of technology and scientific evidence to see real-time closures of specific fishing areas in the North sea where stocks seem under threat?

In conclusion, Hartlepool has had a fishing industry for 800 years, providing a decent living for many generations of my constituents. The hard and dangerous nature of fishing the North sea has embedded itself into the culture and character of the Hartlepool people, making us who we are. The fishing industry in Hartlepool and across the North sea, and indeed around the UK waters, must be sustained for generations to come, and we must protect the stock for the long term and for the economic future of the fishermen who farm those stocks.