Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Kevin Foster and Scott Mann

Wednesday 10th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Scott Mann]

Cornish minority status was granted in 2014. The Minister will be aware that the Office for National Statistics is resisting giving Cornish people the ability to recognise as Cornish on the census. The six Cornish MPs will be submitting an amendment to the census Bill. Will the Minister apply pressure on the ONS to ensure that Cornish people can recognise as Cornish?

[The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Kevin Foster)]

I recognise the passion with which Cornwall’s champions in this House put the county’s case, but the Government will be guided by the ONS’s recommendations to Government and Parliament regarding the demand for particular questions in the next census.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Kevin Foster and Scott Mann

Wednesday 5th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Foster]

I always welcome the determination shown by my hon. Friend to be a strong Cornish voice for Cornwall in the Chamber and to put the county first on the agenda. The Government will be guided by the recommendation of the Office for National Statistics to the Government and Parliament about the demand for particular questions when we lay the census orders before Parliament later this year.

[Scott Mann (North Cornwall) (Con)]

One of the best ways in which the Department could recognise Cornish minority status is to drop the ludicrous suggestion of having a Cornwall-Devon boundary review. Will the Minister commit to giving the Cornish the same rights as the Welsh and the Scots?

[Kevin Foster]

The boundary review is independent, and in due course we will bring the orders before the House so that it can make a decision.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Kevin Foster and Scott Mann

Tuesday 17th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Scott Mann (North Cornwall) (Con)]

16. What steps he is taking to support small and medium-sized businesses in the south-west.

[Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)]

20. What steps he is taking to support growth in the small business sector.

Recreational Sea Bass Fishing

Debate between Kevin Foster and Scott Mann

Thursday 11th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Scott Mann]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. Locally caught sea bass has a premium price. It can be sold in local restaurants, and local businesses can make a profit from it.

I want to point out the madness of the current situation. Recreational sea anglers are members of the public who equip themselves with the tackle and knowledge necessary to access and enjoy public fishery resources. They selectively retain some fish for their own consumption, just as other members of the public enjoy Dartmoor, the New Forest or the Forest of Dean to forage for wild mushrooms, nuts and so on for their personal use. I believe that the EU is preventing our UK anglers from exercising their right—the right of our ancestors—to claim fish for the table, which is very wrong.

My hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) made an interesting point about tourism, something I want to comment on. The Invest in Fish project, which was funded by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, was launched in 2004 and ran until 2007. It was a multi-stakeholder steering group that included fishermen, restaurants, fishing producers, merchants, recreational anglers and a number of other organisations. The objective was to examine ways in which fish stocks might be restored. In the south-west, it covered Bristol, Cornwall, Weymouth and Dorset.

The project involved numerous work packages, one of which was a study of the demographics and economic impacts of recreational sea angling. I will give some of the figures. The south-west has 240,000 recreational anglers, who cumulatively spend £110 million on their pursuit. In addition, some 750,000 days are spent at sea and the visitor spend is about £55 million. Recreational sea angling across the south-west therefore generates a total of £165 million of expenditure on bait, clothes, charter boats, boat ownership, fees, travel and accommodation.

Some places have recreational angling only, and I want to outline the benefits that that has brought. In the USA, the striped bass recreational fishery attracts anglers from all over the world and makes an estimated economic contribution to the country in excess of $2.5 billion. We must learn from the good practice in the USA and elsewhere, which delivers agreed resource sharing by species in line with fishery management advice, the best scientific evidence and economic objectives, as was said earlier.

There are jurisdictions in the British Isles, such as Ireland, that have fishery management policies that operate in favour of the most sustainable forms of bass fishing and the conservation of stocks. Bass has been a recreation-only species since the 1990s in Ireland, as was illustrated by the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards). That delivers an estimated €71 million to the Irish economy annually and supports 1,200 jobs. The Isle of Man is about to change the legislation covering sea bass to include a ban on all commercial bass fishing within 12 miles of the coast. Changes are happening around the world and we seem a bit slow to keep up.

Many of the fishing ports of north Cornwall used to be utilised regularly for fishing. In Padstow, back in the ’80s and ’90s, many people used to sit around rodding and lining off the pier. We do not tend to see that as much nowadays.

There are huge economic benefits to recreational angling. There are almost 900,000 recreational anglers in the UK and they pump £1.23 billion into the economy. There are almost 11,000 full-time jobs in sea angling alone. The “Sea Angling 2012” report found that the direct expenditure of sea anglers, after deductions, was £831 million. English anglers pay as much into the Treasury as the entire value of English fish landings, but receive no consideration in the reallocation of resources.

[Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. Does he agree that we must consider not just the direct value of angling, but the wider impact on the economy? For example, those who come to Torbay for the sea angling will not only stay in a hotel, but buy a scone done in the correct way.

Great Western Railway Routes

Debate between Kevin Foster and Scott Mann

Monday 8th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Foster]

Absolutely. I do not want to get involved in a cross-Wiltshire debate about tunnel openings and people’s birthdays, but it is important to think about the communities along the route. One reason why the theme of resilience is so important is that having a station is great, but if a train does not run at certain times, people do not have the service they want.

Let us be candid: this is the positive story of a network that stretches from London to Swansea, that runs through Cheltenham and Bristol, and that goes down to Penzance. It revolutionised a whole region that had been fairly isolated until the trains went through.

Over the past few years, we have seen huge growth in rail travel across our region, with many branch lines, particularly in Cornwall, seeing passenger levels that have not been seen for decades. All that is being delivered with the well-known limitations of the network in the area: the relatively old rolling stock, some of which has seen better days, and issues with the network in terms of resilience, signalling and other things that I will come to in a minute.

The point of this debate is not to share jokes or reminisce about poor train journeys, but to say that there could be an even more positive story in the future that would boost productivity and deliver more jobs and investment.

[Scott Mann (North Cornwall) (Con)]

My hon. Friend’s constituency is very similar to mine in that it is very tourism-based. Does he agree that the more trains and branch lines we have in such areas, the better it will be for the tourism economy of the south-west?

--- Later in debate ---

[Scott Mann]

Thank you—likewise!

Millions of people from across the world saw the scenes of the railway hanging into the sea at Dawlish. At that time, we were reliant on the one arterial road that comes into Devon and Cornwall, and that was difficult. We saw the orange army out working—they did a huge job for us, and I am very grateful—but I feel that we should explore other opportunities and other branch lines that might well help us out. An Okehampton link on the line from Exeter to Plymouth would be viable, and it would bring benefits to tourism not just in North Cornwall but in the area represented by my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Peter Heaton-Jones) and in other parts of the region. I am sure that Great Western Railway would welcome the opportunity to serve more stations and facilitate the return of trains to North Devon. That would help thousands of people right across North Cornwall and North Devon, many of whom have to travel huge distances to access trains.

I might be the only speaker in the Chamber this evening who does not have a branch line running through their constituency, and I would very much like one, so I am going to make another case—for a Bodmin central branch line. There are only two standard-gauge railway stations in North Cornwall, both of which are served by the Bodmin and Wenford steam railway, which runs to Boscarne and is fantastic. However, Bodmin Parkway is located about five miles outside the town centre, which means that it is not easily accessible if there are roadworks or problems on the roads. I would therefore like a proper dedicated mainline link to be implemented between Bodmin Parkway and Bodmin General. The steam trains do a great job in the summer, but we need a 365-day-a-year link. I would welcome Great Western Railway considering putting in a link to connect Bodmin town up to Bodmin Parkway.

[Kevin Foster]

Does my hon. Friend agree that what he is saying about where train services could be developed shows the latent demand in the south-west region, particularly on the peninsula, for the creation of additional services not just on the Great Western Railway route but through the further extension to Okehampton of the old Southern route that still exists between Exeter and Waterloo?

[Scott Mann]

I do agree. The more branch services we get, the better. Our public transport system in Cornwall and Devon is not great, and we struggle to provide sufficient bus services. As my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Moor View said, if we make these investments, that will drive jobs and drive the economy in our areas.

I thank the Minister for the investment that has already gone into the south-west, including in the points systems in Penzance, the new bimodal Hitachi trains, which will be ready for use by 2018—that is a fantastic investment and we are grateful for it—and the sleeper trains. I talked earlier about being rocked to sleep on the sleeper trains, which are a fantastic service. A gentle relaxation and a rocking to sleep is a lovely feeling, and it takes six and a half hours to get from Paddington to Bodmin Parkway, so I look forward to those sleeper trains coming online.

The bimodal trains will reach Cornwall faster, so we could do with them. It is also imperative that we look at electrification and line speed improvements. I know that is not going to happen overnight, but I would like the Minister to consider it. The sleeper train is an integral part of south-west connectivity. With the region being three to six hours away from London, night sleeping is important because it means you can have a restful night’s sleep and then get to work first thing on a Friday morning.

I thank the hon. Members for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies) and for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), who is no longer in her place, for raising the Heathrow proposals. For me, Heathrow is not a London issue; it is a countrywide issue. Linking up areas such as the south-west means faster journey times to Heathrow and it connects us to onward travel. I am grateful to the hon. Members for pointing that out. In 20 years’ time, we could be living in a region that has direct flights from Newquay to Heathrow, and direct trains from the region to Heathrow. People from Cornwall could then fly to Heathrow in an hour, and people in east Cornwall and Devon could hop on an electric GWR service and alight at Heathrow in under three hours.

Tax Credits

Debate between Kevin Foster and Scott Mann

Thursday 29th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Scott Mann]

I would indeed welcome that. We have heard nothing from the Opposition to illustrate how they would deal with the £30 billion deficit.

[Kevin Foster]

Does my hon. Friend agree that those comments were surprising because Labour has voted against every welfare change made over the past five years?

[Scott Mann]

Absolutely correct. It is ultimately our responsibility to look at all the financial provision that we make as a Government and ensure that that money is distributed to people who are trying to do the right thing.