Fisheries: EU Landing Obligation (European Union Committee Report)

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I feel something of a fraud being the person to bring this up, as I am probably one of the most junior members of this committee. Where my noble friend Lord Teverson leads on environmental matters, I am afraid I have a habit of following. The previous committee that I served on was the one that looked at the future of the Arctic region, and a huge amount of the work that we did was on fisheries. One of the issues that follow through from that report to this one is that, as has been stated, fish ignore our ways of travelling. Fish could not care less whether we have decided that this is our water or someone else’s.

There is environmental change at the moment, which all but a tiny minority accept as a fact of life, and it means that practices regarding breeding grounds make this matter even more complicated than it was already. We have a long tradition of taking fish more rapidly than the fish can breed. Fishing is probably the only activity where we take something wild, so we are effectively hunting, and expect to go back to it again and again. Taking fish out of your local river since the pre-dawn of history—in many places fishing in rivers is a very important facet, though not so much here—shows that you can overdo it. We have to start regulating now while we have the capacity to catch fish. We must remember that we have the capacity now to make our oceans deserts. We are putting technology designed to destroy submarines on boats to catch fish, and the fish cannot compete. It is about us showing restraint here. If we do not, we are going to run out of fish and all the social consequences that we have just heard about will be there. However, those social consequences are built on a fallacy; we cannot take all the fish that we want. We have to intervene.

The basic point behind this debate is that, if you have a system to stop overfishing, you have to monitor it and enforce it. Unenforced laws become jokes and farces. We all know that; we have all seen it happen. We must put effort into making sure that, when the choke problem arises, those fish are landed and we are monitoring. Effort is required by the Government, and it all depends how they do it. Putting cameras on boats seems an obvious thing to do.

We can now get more aggressive. Even the enthusiastic Europeans on these Benches would agree that not everything about the common fisheries and indeed agricultural policies was a total blessing. However, we must actually get out there and start saying that we have to conserve these fish stocks and the environment that they come from. There can be very few other natural environments where we are prepared to do the same amount of damage that we do in order to take away these species. Unless we start doing something positive about enforcing the laws we have agreed we should pass, and which our neighbours and allies—hopefully still allies—have agreed to, we will get into trouble.

My questions for the Government are as follows. What is the enforcement strategy? What are they doing to make sure they go out there? If fishermen are simply getting cleverer about landing only the right fish, knowing this and passing it on would be a good idea. I rather doubt that that is the case, but hey, let us be optimistic. If we have found a way of going forward that does not damage the environment, great. If not, somebody should be held to account.

There is no point in Members of this House and the other place standing around discussing this and wringing hands if we are not prepared to take some action. I am afraid we are going to have to offend a few people. As my noble friend said, fishing is one of the hardest and most dangerous professions going. If we are going to take fishing communities’ livelihoods away, they should at least know why this is being done. Indeed, if the Government are not prepared to enforce and help them, I suggest they would face a slight complaint when another way forward is being offered to agriculture.

What are we going to do here? That is the question that comes back again and again. We can all agree that there is a problem—virtually everybody has—but unless we are prepared to take some action now, we have left ourselves in a situation in which we can all take a big slice of the blame, because we have all been part of the problem.