Fisheries Bill [HL]

Lord Lansley Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 2nd reading (Hansard)
Tuesday 11th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I do not want to embarrass the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, but I thought that was an excellent speech. It reminded me of an important point about the drafting of legislation. As the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, may recall, when one asks any administration to adhere to a series of duties or objectives, the more one adds in, the greater is the difficulty in the administration thereof. And, indeed, the Bill before us is different from the Bill as introduced in the other place, and has further objectives. Until the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, drew our attention to it, I had not noticed that even the sustainability objective has more than one objective within it. There is a heaping up of objectives, which is why either we would have to put into the Bill some kind of hierarchy of objectives—as noble Lords will recall, that has been done in relation to other regulators—or the Government and the fisheries administrations would have to proceed to a joint fisheries statement that provided clarity to all concerned about their balancing of the several objectives at an early stage. The noble Lord helped us greatly by what he said about that.

I share with the noble Earl, Lord Devon, the fact that I am no fisheries expert, but I do have to declare an interest: my wife’s company in Brussels is a partner to an agency that has UK Fisheries as one of its clients. I would not want anyone not to recognise that I have that interest to declare—although I have received no briefing particular to me in that respect, and what I say is not derived from that.

I share with many of my noble friends a feeling, expressed admirably by my noble friend Lord Dunlop, that expectations about our establishment as an independent coastal state from the beginning of next year are, justifiably, high. They ought to be high. If leaving the European Union is intended to deliver significant economic benefits to the United Kingdom, they should be visible—hopefully, dramatically visible—in relation to the fishing sector, perhaps before any other.

How is that to be achieved? I shall focus on two points. One is about how the Bill takes account of the interests of the fishing industry and secures them. The second comes back to what the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, referred to earlier—something in which I am interested by virtue of our previous discussions on the Trade Bill and other legislation—and that is the question: how shall we here go about scrutinising and contributing to the exercise by the Government of their prerogative powers to make treaties?

On the first point, it is not clear how the Government will consult, beyond consulting the other fisheries administrations. Devolution is a central factor here, but all those administrations must understand how to balance a range of interests. We need to see in the Bill how those interests can be taken on board. For example, what Schedule 1 says about consultation on joint fisheries statements is, essentially, that the Government can consult pretty much anybody they regard as an interested person simply by publishing the document to the general public. Nothing more is required. In our discussions on the Bill, we must require more. We must require the Government to take specific account not only of the scientific evidence but of the views of those who can bring that evidence to bear. They should also take on board the views of the various fishing sectors—not only those of people who, rightly, expect more quota and a greater share of the allocation of catch in coastal zones and in our own territorial waters, but also the interests of the distant waters fleet. Last year, I had the privilege of being on the “Kirkella”, a trawler out of Hull, with two crews overwhelmingly based in Hull and Humberside, that sails great distances. As the Minister rightly said, the resilience of the fishing fleet is much to be admired. They travel a great distance to bring back fish—in their case, generally cod—for us to consume here. Their interests, as well as those of the coastal fishers, must be taken into account.

That brings me to my second point, about treaties and agreements. We are proceeding on the basis that, in an ideal world, in July we will arrive at a fisheries agreement that will, presumably, give us a greater share of the catch and quotas in UK territorial waters, our exclusive economic zone, and the European Union will just say, “Fair enough—that’s not how it’s been in the past, but clearly that’s how it’s going to be in the future, and we’ll leave it at that”. However, there is no evidence that the EU will leave it at that. My noble friend quoted the draft negotiating mandate presented by the European Commission, which, I remind noble Lords, proposed that fisheries should

“build on existing reciprocal access conditions, quota shares and the traditional activity of the Union fleet”.

The Commission has moved from that draft in the past few days and, significantly, replaced the words “build on” with the word “uphold”. The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, will know more about that than I do, but it is a hardening of the Commission’s position, not a softening.

We are trying to separate market access from access to waters. They are different things. In an ideal world, access to waters would be subject to one agreement and market access would be as liberalised as we could possibly make it, with zero tariffs and zero quotas. That, doubtless, is our ambition. But let us imagine that we were in a bilateral agreement—with Norway, for example—whereby the Norwegians had access to our markets but we did not have access to their waters. Would we say, “Fair enough—those are entirely separate things and we won’t regard them as even remotely interconnected”? But they are interconnected, and they will be interconnected in the minds of European Union negotiators. It would be unrealistic for us to imagine otherwise.

In terms of treaties, Clauses 23 to 25 are pretty critical. There is a legal structure governing everything else, which is terrifically important, but it could all be overruled by the nature of the agreements that the Government enter into with the European Union, and other bilateral agreements. Clearly, we shall not issue a negotiating mandate for the negotiations, and I do not seek one. None the less, we have a legitimate expectation that those treaty negotiations with the EU, and bilaterally with other coastal states, will be based on a joint fisheries statement that we have examined and considered, and that the Government will give Parliament, along with other interests, a substantial opportunity to comment on the Government’s understanding of what their objectives should be—in the same way as I hope we shall, in due course, be able to do in relation to other treaty negotiations. The Government should at least tell us what their objectives are, so that we can contribute, and hope to hold them to account for their achievement, or otherwise, of those objectives.

That said, expectations are high. The Government have brought forward a Bill that, as I think the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, said, looks pretty good on the face of it; when I went through it, much of the structure seemed entirely logical. It is just that, when it comes to the actual substance beyond the structure, we need to put much more into it to make it work.