Fisheries Bill (Tenth_PART2 sitting)

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Committee Debate: 10th sitting (part 2): House of Commons
Monday 17th December 2018 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Mr Lefroy, you look as though you are trying to get my attention, or the Minister’s attention. If you wish to speak, you can just stand up.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Gray; I was not sure whether I could come in once the Minister had finished. The new clause comes to an important point regarding both fisheries and agriculture. Until now we have had one line on the budget, something like £8 billion to £10 billion a year net, that we have been paying to the European Union. That includes subsidies in fisheries, agriculture and many other areas, such as regional funds. All those budget lines will now be on the national budget, and they will not be guaranteed in the same way that they were before, through the mechanisms of the common agricultural policy or the common fisheries policy.

I think there is a justifiable concern across the fisheries sector and across the agricultural sector that, because these budget lines will now be subject to Treasury action—hopefully positive Treasury action, but not necessarily—there will therefore potentially not be the same kind of long-term commitment to fisheries and agricultural funding that we see under the CFP and CAP. Would the Minister very kindly give us some fairly strong reassurances on the record about the Government’s intentions on fisheries funding for the medium to long term, and not just in the short term? Obviously the CAP is ultra vires here.

[George Eustice]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. I understand his anxiety; this is the first time in half a century that we are taking control of these policies. I will simply say that the point he raises could be applied to any other area of Government spending. We could argue that there is no guarantee that we will increase spending on the national health service or on schools, and yet we do, because of political pressure brought to bear by hon. Members on both sides of the House, not least on this side. Of course, it is always open to hon. Members, if there is a Budget put forward on the Floor of the House with which they disagree and which does not contain the elements they seek, to vote it down. When we leave the European Union, new checks and balances will come in, and those checks and balances will be the opinion of hon. Members such as him, not the European Union.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

My hon. Friend is right, but he knows perfectly well that we are not the Bundestag, where they go through budgets line by line; in this House it is in effect an all or nothing thing. Nobody is going to put a Budget in jeopardy over an area such as fisheries, which—absolutely vital though it is—is a relatively small part of the Budget. That points to a real problem that relatively small areas of public expenditure, which are nevertheless extremely important, have in the way we deal with budgets.

[George Eustice]

I understand that point, but conversely, one could say that the DEFRA budget is small compared with other Departments such as the Department for Work and Pensions or the Department of Health and Social Care. Big changes to our budget actually make a small difference to the overall maths, so far as the Treasury is concerned, so that argument can be made either way.

As I said earlier, we also have the levies, charges and tender incomes referred to in earlier clauses. I gave an undertaking that, on Report, we will seek to give more clarity to hon. Members about how those funds might be deployed to support our fishing objectives.