Fisheries Bill

John Hayes Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Wednesday 21st November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sue Hayman]

Yes, my hon. Friend makes an excellent point. I can confirm that we will absolutely look at this matter in Committee.

We are asking for more detail about discard charges as well as the environmental and sustainability objectives around maximum sustainable yield fisheries management. Labour would go further on environmental protections than the provisions outlined in the Bill and would categorically oppose any move away from a science-led, ecosystems-based approach. As my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Owen Smith) mentioned, there is only a vague reference to MSY in the Bill, and no clear roadmap on when and how this can be achieved. We would like to know whether Ministers are still committed to it as we leave the EU. We believe that stocks should at least meet this standard by 2020 and will seek to bring that into the Bill if the Government do not.

Will the Secretary of State respond to the concerns of environmental groups such as Sustain that are worried that the Bill’s objective to gradually eliminate discards is far weaker and slower than the EU’s commitment to end discarding completely within a set deadline? This is an important point.

[Mr John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

I think it would be reassuring to the House to know that the Opposition share our disdain for the common fisheries policy, which has allowed foreign potentates to devise a policy, paradoxically, that is simultaneously bad for fishermen and bad for fish. The Secretary of State set out his view about how we can improve on that. Presumably Labour would want to join us in condemning the CFP.

[Sue Hayman]

I am trying to make it clear that we are not opposing the Bill; we really do want to work with the Government to improve it and make it better for both the fishing industry and coastal communities.

Importantly, we have been told that environmental standards are not going to be weakened after Brexit. However, we are concerned that the Bill could allow the UK to fall behind where we would be as a member of the EU, so we want to ensure that this is tightened up and clear. On the international level, we would boost support for an ambitious new UN treaty for the high seas. The Government must stand up for our sea life by leading efforts for large-scale international protection—a goal that has been limited to date by the ineffectiveness of the existing regulatory framework. British diplomacy is vital to fill this gap, and I hope that Ministers are taking this very seriously.

As we leave the EU, it is right that we put in place the framework to ensure that any deal on fishing can be implemented, but, as have I said, we have concerns that the Bill falls short in a number of areas. There is no strategy to redistribute our existing quota so that the small-scale, often family-owned, boats can get a fairer slice of the pie. There is no provision for dealing with future trade uncertainty, nor any mention of customs or border arrangements. And despite the Secretary of State’s assurances, the Bill does not set out the full details on how we will manage our seas more responsibly. Without sustainable management of operations, there will be no fish and no fishing industry, so it is disappointing there is no commitment to getting stocks to a maximum sustainable yield by 2020.

What we are discussing today is fundamental to the future of British fishing, and it is crucial that we get the Bill right. I hope that the Secretary of State will take on board the real concerns that I have outlined. Earlier he mentioned the opportunity ahead of us to refine and improve the Bill. I would ask that he works constructively with the Opposition to make those improvements.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil Parish]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. This is about how we help these fishermen. Can a certain amount of help be given regarding the fuel needed to bring back the fish? What is the value of the fish when it is brought in? Is it going to be sold on the open market, and do we then put a super-levy on it so that bringing it back is not too attractive? These are some of the issues that I am sure that our Fisheries Minister and Secretary of State will deal with in due course, if not necessarily in the Bill.

[Mr John Hayes]

My hon. Friend is displaying that his grasp of fisheries is at least as great as his grasp of farming. As he develops this thesis, which is essentially about replacing discards and quotas with closed areas and other measures to preserve fish stocks, will he say a word about industrial fishing? While it is true that fishermen should be able to keep what they catch, industrial fishing sweeps the ocean floor, and the CFP has been singularly ineffective at dealing with its environmental consequences.

[Neil Parish]

My right hon. Friend makes an interesting point. We were talking earlier about pulse fishing, which is used in particular by the Dutch. That causes huge damage to not only the seabed but, potentially, fish stocks. I often think that going out to fish should be much more a question of licking a finger to see which way the wind is blowing, but it does not work like that anymore. We use huge sonar equipment so that we know exactly where the fish are, and we can hoover them up in massive amounts. As we fish, we therefore have to be careful that we keep the stocks sustainable. I always say that the difference between fishing and farming is that with farming, we can at least replace the stock if we want to, but fish are a wild stock and must be bred in the sea, so we cannot take out too many fish if we want to keep the stock sustainable. Those are very good points.

You probably do not want me to go on for too much longer, Madam Deputy Speaker, so I will do my level best to move on quickly. We need more clarity in the Bill about the practical arrangements, which we have talked about a lot, and I look forward to seeing more detail. In particular, I am concerned that fisheries might get bogged down in unnecessary bureaucracy. Many of these companies are made up of five employees or fewer, so we must ensure that the burden of bureaucracy is as small as possible.

There are concerns that once we have left the EU, we will no longer have an automatic right to land fish in any EU ports. That interesting point has already been raised today. While I am very enthusiastic about our getting out of the common fisheries policy and getting back these stocks of fish, we have to ensure not only that we have access to EU markets, but that too much of our fish is not landed in EU ports, because we have to make the best of the processing. All these things are essential. I know that some of them are not covered in the detail of the Bill, but they need to be recommended.

I feel that we can do a much better job with our own Fisheries Bill and by taking back control of our waters. Our fishermen, fish processors and anglers can and must have a better deal. I am sure that the Secretary of State and Ministers are aware that there is a huge expectation that we are going to do much better as an independent coastal state than as part of the common fisheries policy. Let us welcome the Bill, make a few little alterations that might be necessary, and do a much better job than has been done in the past under the CFP.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Paterson]

I remind the hon. Gentleman that this Green Paper was the policy on which we fought the 2005 general election, and his party opposed it. I will have no more humbug from the Scottish National party. We are sick to death of hearing from a party that supports the EU and then tries to weasel around on the CFP. The fishermen listening to this debate will be sick to death of this petty party political bickering. We have seen catastrophic damage to our most remote coastal communities, which could really benefit from a wonderful resource. We are world leaders in this area, yet we have allowed foreign fishermen to come in and take that resource. This resource could be a massive benefit to some of our most remote rural communities. We currently only take £900 million. That could go up to £1.5 billion to £2 billion, and if we processed the fish we could be talking about a £6 billion to £8 billion boost. That is a massively disproportionate benefit considering the remoteness of many of these rural communities.

[Mr John Hayes]

My right hon. Friend has highlighted the role that he played as shadow Fisheries Minister, and he did a great job. I was his predecessor in that job, and throughout the period that he described, the Conservative party was resolutely and entirely convincingly—to most people at least—hostile to the CFP, when parties sitting opposite had not woken up to the problem. The Conservative party has opposed the CFP consistently; other parties have failed to wake up and see the writing on the wall.

[Mr Paterson]

Let us move on to what we proposed in that Green Paper, on which we fought the 2005 election. There are a whole range of points, and looking at the clock, I see that I do not have time to go through them all now, but one is absolutely key.

First, there is the insane hostility of the European Union to modern technology. In Manomet in Massachusetts, I saw really interesting work on selective gear, but when I went back to Kilkeel, I found that that was being stopped by EU regulations. That is something that we really should look at.

The other issue is the insanity of discards. What is wicked is trying to fix a really local activity at a continental level. Someone mentioned that the data on which the European Union makes its annual decisions is guaranteed to be completely inaccurate because of discards and is probably six months to two years out of date. We do not know the level of discards—it is thought to be possibly 25%. It is absolutely disgraceful.

I remember going out on a trawler from Fleetwood and seeing baby plaice being cast back, because the mesh sizes were wrong. I went with the Secretary of State to North Shields not long ago. We saw baskets of whiting—completely healthy fish—that had to be cast back. I remember during the referendum campaign going to Looe with my hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall (Mrs Murray), who is a witness to the terrible suffering in the fishing industry when people cannot afford enough labour—her husband died because he was alone on a boat. We should not forget that. We saw on the harbour wall a drawing for tourists of lots of different fish, but the one fish that was not there was haddock, and what is the problem off the coast? Her constituents are catching masses of haddock, because the fish have moved, but they have to be cast back. It is absolute insanity to have a bycatch problem and to address the discards without addressing the cause of it, which is the quota system.

I learned a clear lesson in the Faroes. The situation has been modified since, using techniques such a catch composition, but I ask the Minister to promise that we will do some pilots around the coast on catch composition-based effort control, because it means working with the grain of nature. It was mandatory in the Faroes to land everything. The Fisheries Minister there said, “You may not like what you find, but at least you know what’s going on.” Our scientists do not know what is going on because we discard so much. Technology has advanced enormously, as I saw at Succorfish in North Shields, which used modern equipment to track not just the boats, but soak times, catches, and so on. If we did this using modern technology, we could monitor every single fishing boat every hour. Every fishing boat would become a scientific vessel sending back data.

I saw that in Iceland years ago now. Fisheries management there would send out radio signals, and boats around Iceland would be told to move on because there were too many discards. Way back then, the UK was doing it in the Falklands—the same management based on accurate, instant data. I appeal to the Minister. I am not thrilled with clause 23 on discard prevention charging schemes—those will be good, healthy fish that should be sold to consumers. We should work out pilot schemes for mixed fisheries. I admit that Scotland is different—pelagic fisheries probably need a quota system—but I really make that appeal.

Probably the most important issue is whether we really will take back control. That was the promise in the referendum and in our manifesto, in which we made it clear that we would take back control:

“When we leave the European Union and its Common Fisheries Policy, we will be fully responsible for the access and management of the waters where we have historically exercised sovereign control.”

I would like the Minister to address this point. He is being bombarded with a helter-skelter of questions, but I ask that he take careful note of article 56 of the UN convention on the law of the sea, relating to exclusive economic zones—as he knows, those are 200 miles or the median line. Article 56(1) reads:

“In the exclusive economic zone, the coastal State has…sovereign rights for the purpose of exploring and exploiting, conserving and managing the natural resources, whether living or non-living, of the waters superjacent to the seabed and of the seabed and its subsoil”.

Can the Minister absolutely guarantee that every decision affecting our marine environment, as well as that which lives in it and that which is extracted from it, will ultimately be decided by sovereign UK politicians who come to this Dispatch Box and answer to this House? Can he think of any circumstances after we have left the CFP—I would like him to tell us exactly when that will be—in which decisions would be imposed on our fishermen that ideally our politicians would like to resist? That is the nub of the CFP.

The most shocking mismanagement has been imposed on this wonderful industry and these incredibly brave people because we have always been outvoted. When I was Secretary of State—we have discussed this in respect of the common agricultural policy, too—my right hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon), who has just left his place, bravely did his best, but we were outvoted. I want an absolute guarantee that article 56(1) of UNCLOS will prevail and that the Minister will be able to come back and be answerable to every one of us for fishing decisions. There must be no circumstances in which appalling decisions can be imposed on us once we have left. That cannot happen. If it does, we will have let down the 17.4 million, as well as the 16.3 million who voted for us in the general election, and all those Labour voters—do not forget the 85% who voted in the general election to take back control. Can he please guarantee that?

[Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for North Shropshire (Mr Paterson).

I speak as a former shadow Fisheries Minister, a member of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, and someone who—as some Members who are present already know—grew up in Grimsby. I remember it as a bustling fishing port when I was a girl; moreover, it was the biggest in the world at that time. I remember the numerous trawlers in the docks, and the sense of pride among workers who were doing something that they knew was incredibly important: providing the nation with one of its favourite foods.

However, I also remember the decline that followed the so-called final cod war with Iceland. The devastation that it wreaked both economically and socially was vivid. I was a teenager at the time, but I remember areas, particularly around the docks—such as Freeman Street and East Marsh—suffering disastrous consequences. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn) will refer to that later. Gone, too, are many of the food processing plants that lined Ladysmith Road. Findus has gone. Birds Eye has gone, no longer anchored by the town’s status as one of the greatest food towns in Europe.

It is my witness of this decline, and the fact that my father was, for a period, a deep-sea fisherman—fishing off the coast of Iceland, at Reykjavik—that gives me an understanding of why our coastal towns and fishing communities matter more than their contribution to our national GDP would suggest. At this point, I want to pay tribute to all those who died serving the fishing industry. In Grimsby, every time a trawler went down or men were washed overboard—that was the commonest cause of death—the children in their primary schools would repeat the “Fisherman’s Prayer” and sing “The Fisherman’s Hymn”. It was all too common, particularly in the 1950s, for those children to have to sing that hymn and say that prayer.

Let me now deal with the Bill. I have a number of concerns about it. First, the Government’s stated aspiration is to develop “world leading fisheries”. Clause 1 sets out how this would be developed, including objectives such as creating a sustainable industry. We would all support that, but, unfortunately, the light-touch duties placed on the authorities potentially undermine the delivery of those aspirations. For example, while the Bill rightly contains an ambitious objective to ensure that all harvested stocks are recovered to, or maintained at, a biomass above that capable of producing maximum sustainable yield, the Bill places no duty on regulatory authorities to ensure that fishing pressure is managed in a way that delivers on that objective.

We have to ask whether the Government are really committed to restoring stocks, or whether they will put political pressures first, at the expense of the science and the data available. There is a history of those pressures leading to that kind of over-exploitation of our stocks, not just in our waters, but throughout the waters of the European Union.

Secondly, there are concerns in relation to our marine environmental regulations. The fisheries White Paper acknowledged concerns about a possible “governance gap” which could threaten accountability for the implementation of the regulations. It also suggested— as have consultations on the proposed environmental principles and governance Bill—that a new independent environmental regulator should have a role in relation to the marine environment. As things stand, this Bill is opaque about how the forthcoming environment Bill will protect our marine environment and how the “governance gap” will be closed. Clarifications of those issues would be welcome as the Bill proceeds, and I hope that the Minister will comment on them when he winds up the debate.

Clause 28 will give new powers to introduce financial schemes to promote sustainable growth and to improve the marine and aquatic environment. They will replace existing powers and allow new funding schemes to replace funding currently received under the European maritime and fisheries fund. However, as the clause is currently drafted, those grant-making powers do not reference clause 1’s sustainability objectives, such as an ecosystem-based approach. That strikes me as rather strange and concerning, and, again, I would welcome clarification. I understand that the fisheries statement will reference clause 1 and the powers will come under the remit of the statement, but clarification would be welcome.

My final point relates to the very important fact that the fishing industry is not just about the catching side; there is still a very important processing and aquaculture industry alongside it, most of which, unsurprisingly, is based in or nearby fish-landing towns such as Grimsby and Immingham. Indeed, 21% of the industry is in Yorkshire and the Humber. It is an important provider of jobs in those areas, and for my home town of Grimsby, it is still an important source of employment, with some 4,200 jobs dependent on the sector. These processing plants also export much of their product into the EU, in a market worth £1.3 billion, where we still enjoy a trade surplus. It is therefore vital in the drive to create world-leading fisheries that processing is not forgotten, as so far it has been in this debate. Full tariff-free access to the single market must be retained for the industry.

[Mr John Hayes]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right about processing, and it also requires concentration on productivity, investment in technology and making sure our processing industry is as competitive as possible. I hope that can be debated during our deliberations on the Bill and included in the Government’s objectives.

[Angela Smith]

I do not disagree with the right hon. Gentleman. Grimsby makes some of the very best premium products in the world. One of the local fish-finger producing plants can take the fish from the moment it has landed at Immingham and have it in the lorry going to the supermarket in six hours. One of the reasons why that is possible, and why the time from the moment of departure from Iceland to getting the product in the shops is concertinaed into a minimum, is the single market. That fish is as fresh as possible and those products are as good as they are because the single market has made it possible to ensure guaranteed standards while at the same time maximising productivity.