Marine Environment

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Tuesday 14th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

The hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) spoke of his love of the poet John Clare. He was a great poet whose poetry is uplifting to read, but he could at times verge on the pessimistic. He once said,

“I am the self-consumer of my woes.”

That is a particularly apposite quotation for this debate because we—humankind—are the self-consumer of the woes we have created in terms of our management of the seas. There is a massive lightbulb moment going on around the world. We are seeing at last, as the hon. Members for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) and for Huddersfield pointed out, marine conservation on a global scale, which is something to applaud.

I was extremely pleased to see President Obama with John Kerry, his Secretary of State, at his side announcing a marine protected area around Hawaii. It was fantastic that they did that. By comparison, Britain announced an area the size of India, vastly larger than the United States marine protected area, but it was sort of put out as a press release on a Friday night when no one was looking, as though it was the love that dare not speak its name.

Blue Belt is an outstanding policy that we should all be hugely proud of. I am glad that senior members of the Government, including the Foreign Secretary, came to the launch of my pamphlet, “Blue Belt 2.0”, which shows that the Government have at last grasped the fact that they have in their hands something really extraordinary. We can create a gift to the world from our imperial past; a necklace of marine protected areas around our overseas territories—or the confetti of empire, as somebody once called them. We can be extraordinarily proud about that.

I do not have time to go into all the many recommendations in “Blue Belt 2.0”, but it suggests to the Government how they can take things further, and address issues affecting the South Sandwich Islands. Britain is responsible for a quarter of the world’s penguins. That is a bit of information to win a pub quiz with. There are problems with what we are doing in areas such as Ascension Island. Our ambitions must keep in parallel with the innovation we have seen with the Catapult system that monitors those overseas marine protected areas. Then we can really succeed in the delivery of a proper marine conservation.

More than that, as with President Obama, what we do can be more than an act of environmental responsibility; it can be an act of global leadership. We can start to re-engage, post-Brexit, in organisations such as regional fisheries management organisations, from which Britain has had to withdraw, because the EU—rather badly—takes part in them. I have the scars on my back from the International Whaling Commission. I had to sit in EU co-ordination meetings, where I found that Britain’s very pro-whale conservation measures were watered down so that there could be a single EU view. Now we can open our shoulders like a batsman at the crease, and start to make a difference to the delivery of marine conservation.

I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Wells (James Heappey) about the On the Hook campaign. The Marine Stewardship Council is the only show in town in terms of accreditation of sustainable fisheries. It is a UK-registered, UK-based charity, so we are right to hold it to account. It has messed up, and there is a good chance that it could re-accredit an unsustainable fishery. That must stop, and I applaud colleagues who are taking part in the On the Hook campaign; we must continue to raise that.

There are many other areas where we can and should do more. The clean growth plan recently announced by the Government, with its real understanding of the need for a proper circular economy, addresses many of the issues that we have concerns about. It is vital to encourage industry to be innovative and to create markets that do not currently exist for recycled plastics in particular, but also for other manufactured products that end up in the oceans and the food chain, destroying the quality of the marine environment and our health. Government must nudge industry to deal with those things, and to get an understanding of what a circular economy is.

My final point is to ask, please, in the remaining months for which we are in the EU, that we hold it to account to make sure that pulse fishing is banned. It is a bottom trawling system using electrical pulses and is not at all selective. I applaud the Bloom Association and other NGOs that are campaigning hard on it.

I shall finish where I started, with John Clare. He said,

“I found the poems in the fields

And only wrote them down”.

He was saying that the natural world can influence our cultural and societal beliefs and values. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the oceans.