Inshore Fishing Fleet

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2022 Westminster Hall

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Diolch yn fawr. It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Sir Charles. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) for securing the debate.

Vessels under 10 metres compose over 92% of the Welsh fishing fleet, and fishers in Wales are historically dependent on shellfish, crustacea and non-quota species, such as bass. Indeed, the town of Nefyn where I live was once so famous for its herring catch that its people were known as penwaig Nefyn—penwaig being herring in Welsh—and its coat of arms is three silver herring set on a blue background. Sadly, perhaps as a message to us, the herring catch collapsed in the middle of the last century, even though herring remain on the town’s coat of arms.

While the greater part of fishery matters is devolved to the Senedd and managed by the Welsh Government, the key role of the UK Government in negotiating quotas and in interventions such as the UK seafood fund behoves me to stand here and argue the case for Wales’s communities, where fishing was historically of immense importance and where fishers still need support in the here and now to grow an environmentally sustainable and locally rooted food-producing industry in the future.

Let me summarise the present issues. The first is the markets. I am told that the cost of living crisis is knocking consumer confidence and affecting leisure activities, such as eating in restaurants, particularly for high-value produce, such as lobsters and crabs. That is having a direct effect on some of the fishermen local to me. There is also the fact that we still cannot sell mussels and other bivalves to EU countries, which again is affecting aquaculture industries. Fuel prices have already been touched on. In rural Wales, prices stand at between £1.90 and £2 per litre. We are very much aware that although there is a standard charge of 57.95p per litre and 20% VAT on top of that, there is still room for the Treasury to do more.

Some 83,000 tonnes of fish and shellfish are caught in Welsh waters annually, but only between 5,000 and 8,000 tonnes are landed by Welsh vessels. Our communities therefore see little economic or social benefit from Welsh fish stocks. The UK Government have made much of the significance of zonal attachment as the basis on which to agree fishing opportunities with the EU. The same principles could well apply to intra-UK allocations. That would help to reduce the overdependency on a small number of species in Wales, thus reducing the risk of overfishing.

It might be argued that the present capacity of the Welsh fleet is insufficient to warrant allocating all quotas located in the geographic region to that cohort of vessels, which does not presently have the capacity to utilise those stocks, but such an approach would be short-termist and serve only to perpetuate Wales’s present disadvantages. One practical solution would be to lease out any surplus from year to year within the developing workforce fleet and infrastructure systematically to maximise the economic benefits for Wales.

Fishery negotiations with the EU resulted in an increase in the number of vessels from France, Belgium and Spain with the right to fish in Welsh waters. Historically, only 10 vessels fished in Welsh waters, but 76 extra vessels now have the right to fish there. To summarise the present issues, the lack of local infrastructure, particularly in Wales, means that we need to develop the means to make the most of the local catch and keep the value local.

I will touch briefly on a few local initiatives that have shown how to face adversity. In Lockdown Lobsters—the name says it all—Siôn Williams of Sarn Meyllteyrn works with a London photographer called Jude Edginton to bring lobsters here and ensure that he still has a market. The Menai Seafood Company of Porth Penrhyn in Bangor was set up by Mark Gray and James Wilson, who have worked together since 2014. Their business, Bangor Mussel Producers, was hit hard by the ban on the export of live bivalves, but they have now set up a really good local business that processes and sells food. Môr Flasus, which sort of translates as “taste of the sea” but plays on the words “so tasty” in Welsh, was launched by Sian Davies and Dyddgu Mair of Nefyn. They serve street food from an Ifor Williams horse trailer, including lobster cooked in Cwrw Llŷn’s Largo lager, which I absolutely recommend—people travel for it.

In the little time I have left, I will suggest some solutions. There should be a rural fuel duty rebate scheme for Wales, because we are hit by the fact that we are within 10 miles of the fuel refineries, but it does not affect the price at the pump. The Welsh Government should have a role in identifying quotas in Wales, which does not happen presently. I suggest that we should have infrastructure improvements to give Wales greater means of processing locally. Finally, what the Crown Estate has done with offshore wind in Scotland has enabled Scotland to invest far more in local infrastructure, and the value of the Crown Estate is going up incrementally because of those developments. Why can we not do that in Wales?