Common Fisheries Policy

Ian Paisley Excerpts

Thursday 15th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Sheryll Murray (South East Cornwall) (Con)]

In just over a week’s time, it will be a year since the best husband and father in the world was snatched from me in a sudden and cruel manner. I would like to make one final tribute to Neil. I have been able to steer a relatively straight course, navigating the various hitches on the chart, such as anniversaries, birthdays, the accident report and the inquest, because of the kindness and support that this House has given me. I would just like to convey a simple message: thank you.

I thank the Backbench Business Committee and my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh) for securing this important debate. The opportunity to get some sort of reform of the disgraceful common fisheries policy comes once a decade. This time, we have to secure positive results for the fish stocks and for British fishermen.

Last Thursday I secured an Adjournment debate on the external arm of the CFP, which I am aware that the report does not cover. That arm of the CFP is often forgotten, but it, too, has been a disaster. As I said, that was highlighted clearly in the report by my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) following his visit to Mauritania last year.

However, it does not follow that third-country agreements are always completely wrong. Pieter Tesch, now of the fishing company, Industrie de Peche & Representation, who joined and funded the Mauritanian delegation of four, confirmed that the agreement with Mauritania has the potential to provide alternative opportunities for responsible pelagic vessels, which are currently struggling to stay viable in the north-east Atlantic fishery. He also confirmed that it could assist with the development of processing facilities in Mauritania. I am pleased that the Minister will raise those issues in the Council of Ministers.

The CFP is very complicated. I consider it to be the greatest maritime disaster of the past four decades. The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee report raises many issues. I will look at three that concern my constituency of South East Cornwall.

The first issue relates to under-10 metre vessels and the quota available to them. As I have mentioned in the past, under-10 metre vessels were done an injustice by the inaction of the previous Government. It is wrong that about 76% of the UK fleet is allocated about 3% of the available quota for white fish.

On 6 March the hon. Member for East Lothian (Fiona O’Donnell), the shadow Minister, visited Plymouth and told the Plymouth Herald:

“The inshore fleet plays an important role in the local economy and provides sustainable local products for customers in Plymouth and the surrounding areas”.

She continued:

“It is clear that the current management system for the small scale fleet—under ten metres—is not working.”

Finally, she said:

“I want to see a more profitable, sustainable fishing industry in the South West. Politicians need to listen to the voice of the industry.”

Does the hon. Lady realise that her Government’s inaction over 13 years and the introduction of fixed quota allocations from 1 January 1999 worsened the problem considerably? Given her words to the local press in Plymouth, perhaps when she speaks she would like to apologise and acknowledge that fact. I was the chairman of a fish producers’ organisation when those allocations were introduced, so I know exactly what happened.

[Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)]

The hon. Lady’s poignant remarks will have touched the heart-strings of everyone here.

In Northern Ireland we have come to an interesting and amicable way of resolving the issue of the under-10 metre fleet. The Minister saw that when he came to Portavogie. I wonder whether he has shared that experience, so that English fleets will not have to face the pariah status that has been placed upon them.

[Sheryll Murray]

One problem is that when fixed quota allocations were introduced there was no quota restriction for under-10 metre vessels. The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food secured an agreement with the European Commission to estimate the catches of the under-10 metre fleet, and, sadly, they were grossly underestimated. A few years later, the registration of buyers and sellers was introduced. Sales notes had to be submitted to the European Commission for every fish landed, so the flaw in the estimates of the under-10 metre vessel catch was there for everybody to see.

--- Later in debate ---

[Austin Mitchell]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman—that is what we have to do and what we could operate regionally if we got the powers to do so. That is the way that we have to go, but if co-decision making is handed to the European Parliament, politics will be involved again. I can imagine the Spanish MEPs will fight vigorously for their industry in a way that the English MEPs are not conditioned to do.

I imagine, too, that the conservationists will have a much louder voice than the fishermen, because there are no fishermen in the European Parliament but there are lots of conservationists. Although some of my best friends are conservationists, their interests are not necessarily those of the commercial fishing industry. Conservationists are also over-alarmist about stocks, and on the basis of panic about stocks, they propose measures that will never work. It is vital that we separate policy and implementation. Implementation should go down to the RACs and policy stay in Brussels.

[Ian Paisley]

On the hon. Gentleman’s point about discards and conservationists—as a parliamentarian, he will be interested in the nuances of this—the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) yesterday introduced a very useful ten-minute rule Bill on food waste. She said that surplus should be donated and redistributed in preference to disposal. We can apply the same food waste policy to fish. We should not be throwing it back in the sea: we should be landing it and redistributing it.

[Austin Mitchell]

The hon. Gentleman will have the opportunity to make his own speech—or discard it, as the case may be—and I shall come to that point in a moment.

The second failure in the Commission’s proposals is the failure to deal with over-capacity. They say that decommissioning has failed to reduce capacity, which is just not true. It has certainly reduced the impact of fishing on North sea stocks, especially cod, plaice, sole and round fish. Instead of proposing a European decommissioning system, financed by Europe and not by the national Governments, the proposals would throw the problem back to the nations through the transferable fishing concessions. They are an improvement on football clubs owning quotas, which was very odd, and, as the Committee suggested, they could give preference to coastal fishing communities, which certainly should be done. However, we have to phase them in much more slowly than the Commission envisages. The Danish transferable fishing concessions were successful only because they followed several rounds of decommissioning of Danish vessels. It is wrong, therefore, to impose this as mandatory on all states.

On discards, the Commission has jumped on the populist bandwagon and passed the odium back to the member states. Its proposal is that discarding should be stopped between 2014 and 2016. That ignores the fact that most discards are due to CFP measures. If we set quotas and total allowable catches in mixed fisheries, we inevitably get discards because fishermen cannot land anything outside their quota. The proposal also takes no account of the fact that the Commission’s cod plan led to more discards—the cod catch did not increase as the cod stocks grew, so cod was being caught and chucked back. That was a failure to adjust the policy quickly enough.

These proposals also ignore the fact that the industry has already reduced discards by 50% over 10 years. That is the way we have to go. The industry has to do it by technical measures. Square-mesh panels, for example, were a great innovation and helped to reduce discards. Let us work from that path and to a longer timetable, as the report suggests, and not to the too-intense, too-tight timetable in the Commission’s proposals.

The same goes for the maximum sustainable yields. It is a good idea to identify the mortality level that will maintain high yields, but it is crazy to propose that the most vulnerable stock should determine the limits of exploitation for all other species in that area. That is folly. It will place limits on all catches in areas where one stock is threatened. Once again, that decision needs leaving to the regions to develop an approach that is suitable to their areas.

I will briefly mention common fisheries efforts to buy quotas and fishing rights in foreign jurisdictions at our expense—we pay for it. They are usually taken by the Spanish. They have about 400 vessels doing that, whereas we have about nine—so there is nothing in it for us. If the industry wants to buy quotas overseas—it has taken a fairly aggressive approach towards the small fishing fleets of poor nations—it must buy them itself and not use money from our contributions.

I shall wind my speech to a conclusion. These proposals in the so-called non-papers are not what we envisaged. The Minister has to fight against them along the lines recommended by the Committee. I shall conclude with one interesting fact in the representations from the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations. The approach to resource management is on YouTube, so I refer all Members to YouTube for the rest of my speech. It has a presentation by Elinor Ostrom pointing out that when we manage resources, we need the involvement of stakeholders, polycentric governance, which is what we are suggesting on the regional advisory council, and solutions tailored to the specific needs of the area, and the centre should provide oversight only. I recommend that everybody now exit the Chamber and turn to YouTube.