Brexit: Fisheries (EUC Report)

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2017 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Teverson]

That the Grand Committee takes note of the Report from the European Union Committee Brexit: fisheries (8th Report, HL Paper 78).

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, this is the first debate on a series of Brexit reports produced by the Sub-Committees of the European Union Committee. If you are here, you know that it is about fisheries, but I stress that these reports are about identifying the challenges and opportunities of Brexit: they are not about defining what the future detailed policies in these areas should be—we leave that to our more boring colleagues at the other end of the building to sort out. We are at the front end of this, and this report therefore does not go into detail about management regimes or any other such thing.

Fisheries is different from the other subjects in a number of ways. Perhaps I could go through some of them. First, the great reform Bill will be important to regulation of fisheries, but it will in no way be sufficient. Why is that? Because the moment we leave the European Union, the EEZ will become our exclusive economic zone, exactly as it says on the tin. There will be no automatic right for us to fish in other people’s EEZs; nor will there be any automatic right for other nation states to fish in ours. We will be excluded immediately, if we have not renegotiated access, from agreements with Iceland, Norway and the Faroes, which are particularly important to our Scottish fleets. Fisheries is also all tied up with the maritime environment—the sea and the oceans—which is shared with all our neighbouring littoral states. Fish and other forms of sea life do not tend to know boundaries, so we will not have exclusive control over our stocks of biomass, even though we may have control over the EEZ boundary itself.

Importantly, in comparison with many of the other industries that are talked about in terms of Brexit—financial services and the motor industry—the fisheries industry accounts for a full 0.5% of UK GDP. You might think that that does not necessarily give us a lot of leverage in this area, but it provides the livelihood of 12,000 fishers in this country and jobs for 14,000 people in the fish processing industry. It is particularly important for coastal communities across the United Kingdom, especially in Scotland and the south-west of England—elsewhere as well, but it is concentrated in those areas.

One issue with fisheries is the curse of the commons, in that if there is no regulation, whether international or national, people are incentivised to go out to catch whatever they can while they can, before the person in the next port or in the next nation state manages to catch those fish first. Immediate individual welfare challenges long-term community welfare. That is why, wherever we live on the globe, fisheries management is an important and difficult issue. When we talk about the number of fish caught in particular EEZs or nations, we must remember that life cycles will change from area to area. For instance, it is pointed out that sole tend to spawn mostly outside the British EEZ, even though most stocks are caught within it. So we have complex systems that makes this area difficult.

When we launched this report and issued a press release, many people assumed, given my stance on the referendum, that the report would look upon fisheries as simply challenges and threats. In fact, fisheries is one area where there are perhaps good opportunities for rebalancing the UK’s position. Much of that will depend on negotiations, and I will return to that later.

One thing is certain: as we say very strongly in the report, we must have a management system. Indeed, we probably agree with the Minister on this. In many ways, I praise the appearance of the Minister, George Eustice, before the Committee. Frankly, my experience of other Ministers—I am referring, of course, not to the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, but to other Ministers from the Commons—is that they have often avoided questions or not gone into much detail. George Eustice did quite the opposite. He was well in control of his subject and gave a good indication of where the Government might go on these issues.

One area on which we agreed with him entirely is that we continue to need management systems. Almost certainly, they will be based on quotas. That is not the only way things can be done; it is the way our coastal neighbours, including non-EU states such as Norway and Iceland, operate, so it would be very difficult and probably counterproductive to come out of that system, certainly in the short term. We agree with the NFFO that it would be possible to change the regulations to make them far more specific to the needs of the UK national fleet. Changes to technical regulations could happen, and the committee hopes the Government will address that in the right way: not deregulation but different regulations to make sure they reflect the needs of the fleet.

Our most important recommendation is probably that quotas and management be based as much as possible on scientific evidence, rather than on political decisions. In the past the CFP has been based too much on politics, rather than scientific evidence. Scientific evidence on fisheries, as on all marine areas, is not perfect, but we should remain a member of ICES, we should use that evidence and we should continue to move towards sustainable seas. I am sure the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, will talk about maximum sustainable yield and other issues, but basically, we must continue with scientific evidence.

I pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Scott of Needham Market for the work the committee has previously done on regional fisheries policy. We feel very strongly that, because fish know no boundaries, we must try to keep regional co-ordination with EU and non-EU states, particularly in north-western waters and in the Celtic Sea with the Republic of Ireland and others. That must continue.

Turning to international agreements, we will have to have follow-on agreements with the EU, but if we wish to have an overall plan, control and management with nations that share our stocks, we need agreements with Norway, the Faroe Islands and Iceland. They have agreements with the European Union, which are very important, for Norway in particular, and we have an agreement with them for the Scottish fleets. We will leave that, so we have to make sure that we negotiate those relationships as well. As I said, that means concluding an interim or a permanent agreement before we leave in April 2019, as it is reckoned to be. Indeed, in leaving the common fisheries policy through Brexit, we have what is rightly named a cliff edge—a sea cliff edge—if we do not sort out international agreements. That is particularly true outside international waters and in the area of the North-East Atlantic Fisheries Commission, one of the regional organisations. Although we are a member of it, we have to become an active member, as we will not have the European Union working with us, although we very much led those negotiations at the time.

The committee was quite surprised to learn from our academic experts that there is no obligation on us internationally to continue to respect historic rights. However, when we change the quota allocations, which have been quite negative for parts of the United Kingdom, particularly in the Channel area, we have to make sure that we take historic rights into consideration to a certain degree, not least in trade, to which I am about to turn. Quota-hopping is more a matter of business ownership, rather than the common fisheries policy itself.

Trade is one of the last major areas of discussion. It is often said that we export 80% of the fish we catch, and some 60% of that goes to the European Union, and we import 80% of the fish we eat. That is more in value terms than in volume. So trade is incredibly important, and there are various tariffs on fish products. Some are set at zero, going up to about 25% for farmed salmon; that will probably present a great challenge to the Scottish industry. That is why Norway tends to inward invest in Scotland, to keep within the customs union. So we need to make sure that we maintain access to the single market and our broader international economies, which have trade agreements with the EU, as well as our ability to import to satisfy our own needs. In trying to readjust what is called relative stability—the amount of fish stocks that we catch in our own EEZ—making sure that we keep market access is equally important.

I have a couple of other important footnotes. Fisheries, like agriculture and environmental policy generally, is a devolved subject. The details of the management regimes will fall to the Scottish Government, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as to Defra. We think it important that some framework be maintained, but it is particularly important that the devolved nations be kept very close and involved in the Brexit fisheries negotiations. That is paramount, particularly as the Scottish industry is the largest in the United Kingdom.

In many ways, Defra has the greatest challenges in the changes arising from Brexit. Agricultural policy has to be redesigned and the fisheries policy dealt with through a number of international agreements. Then, there is the whole issue of the environment, given that some 80% of UK environmental legislation comes from Europe. So Defra must be well resourced and informed, and it must play an important part in the Brexit negotiations.

When I was an MEP, I was extremely critical of the common fisheries policy, which I felt did not succeed in its conservation aims; it was not particularly fair to the United Kingdom, and there were a number of other issues. The irony is that, through the great work the British Government have done over the last few years, we have regionalisation and the banning of discards, and European fish stocks are moving much closer to sustainability. Much of that work was done by the British lead on the CFP negotiations, and it showed that that change was possible. The committee thought it was important that, although there are many opportunities for further change to make the common fisheries policy work better for the United Kingdom, we should not throw away the advantages we have gained.

Lastly, despite the fact that the fisheries industry represents only a small amount of GDP—it is important to certain regional communities—for environmental, economic and cultural reasons it is vital that it not be used as a bargaining chip and then forgotten, compared with the United Kingdom’s other great industries. I beg to move.

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[Lord Teverson]

I apologise to the Committee that I forgot to declare my interest as a board member of the Marine Management Organisation. That must be recorded.

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[Lord Teverson]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for a very thoughtful reply and as I said, I also thank the Minister in the other place, George Eustice. In this area we have had more back from the Government in terms of intention, if not so much of evidence, than we have in many others. That is valuable and will help the industry to be more hopeful and confident about the way things might turn out.

Like others, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Selkirk, for again bringing to our attention the fact that this is the most dangerous industry in terms of lives lost and injuries sustained. I have known people who have suffered in this regard.

The common fisheries policy is one of the most technical policy areas, and I thank everybody who has contributed to the debate for getting underneath its skin. Believe me, it makes the common agricultural policy look easy, and there are not many things you can say that about. The Minister mentioned quotahopping—Defra may say, “That is not our problem, it is BEIS’s problem”—and historic rights, which are very much a constitutional area. Those issues will have to be resolved but that will be very hard to do, and we do not necessarily know what is happening about that.

I particularly thank the non-committee members who have contributed to the debate—the noble Baronesses, Lady Jones and Lady Bloomfield. It is good to have a Welsh input, because I have to admit that we did not have a strong Welsh input on the committee. I also thank the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley. I absolutely agree about information technology and fisheries, but sometimes it is the other side which resists that in practice, not the bureaucrats. I say that from the heart. I of course thank our clerk, Celia Stenderup-Petersen, as has everybody else, who drew the report together excellently.

Finally, it seems to me there are two fundamental challenges. First, the fishing industry should not be forgotten about again. There was little forgiveness the first time that happened: if it happens a second time, there will be no forgiveness whatever. The second issue concerns a point made by our Norwegian witness. The noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, mentioned individual transferable quotas, which I have long advocated to a certain degree. Some time ago I visited New Zealand, which has some of the best regimes, as does Iceland. Both those countries operate that system. However, if you do not stratify those regimes, you have a total concentration of the industry. It always helps if you have your own continental shelf, as those two nations do. However, New Zealand probably has about four fishing companies with about six vessels each. It is a fantastically successful industry but with very few participants. I am not against that but, as our Norwegian colleague said, the Government need to decide what sort of policy they want. Do they want a policy like Norway’s, that looks after coastal communities, or one like Iceland’s, that looks for total efficiency and GDP? That decision will have to be made.

Motion agreed.