Brexit: Fisheries (EUC Report)

Lord Trees Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Trees (CB)]

My Lords, I join others in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, for his excellent chairmanship of our committee and this report. I echo the thanks of several noble Lords to our clerk and policy analysts for a fantastic job in pulling together a huge amount of evidence, analysing it and writing it up in a very digestible form. They are at the minute doing something like a PhD thesis every three or four weeks and are to be much commended for their efforts.

In 1833, William Forster Lloyd, an economist, wrote an essay in which he used the example of the unregulated grazing of common land to describe a situation where individuals acting out of self-interest in exploiting a common resource will tend to deplete that resource contrary to the common good. This “tragedy of the commons” has been mentioned by several noble Lords already, though it was more than a century later, in 1968, that the concept became widely known following a much-cited publication by the ecologist, Garrett Hardin.

Apart from economic situations, the concept applies to many biological, environmental and ecological situations and is especially relevant to fisheries. Indeed, it is even more complex for fisheries than Lloyd’s example of a piece of grazing land that is geographically fixed. In the seas, fish are not only a resource potentially accessible to many but they move around and migrate, spawning in one area and perhaps growing and feeding in another. Although post-Brexit we will have control of our exclusive economic zone, fish do not and will not respect such boundaries.

Others in the debate have already discussed this issue and many like it that must be considered in negotiating with the EU 27. However, the tragedy of the commons also applies to how, within the UK, we will manage our EEZ among the devolved nations. A coherent plan of how, post-Brexit, we want to manage our fisheries within UK waters is an essential prerequisite to how we approach our external negotiations. The fishing industry has particular and significant social and economic importance for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in different ways and in different parts of each of those countries. The economic importance of fishing to rural and coastal communities in particular is much greater than its overall contribution to UK GDP suggests. The particular needs and concerns of the devolved Administrations are important.

Several of our witnesses emphasised that Brexit provides an opportunity to design a UK-based fisheries policy better suited to UK needs. As Fishing for Leave argued, the UK could,

“implement a decent, fit for purpose management policy for the benefit of the whole UK industry ... and the coastal communities that depend upon it”.

This is a great opportunity, but equally our evidence indicated the variable priorities of the devolved nations. The importance of resolving and agreeing within and between ourselves what in toto best suits the component parts of the UK was accepted by our witnesses. Mr Bertie Armstrong of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation told us that the size of the UK EEZ,

“creates a critical mass that gives ... a very powerful negotiating position, which we would wish to retain and not have diluted by any—what you might call arm wrestling north and south”.

It is thus regrettable that, quite recently, following the latest quota negotiations in Brussels, the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations, which represents fishermen in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, has been publically critical of our Fisheries Minister, George Eustice, for what they regard as an unfair quota concession in favour of Scotland, to the disadvantage of the Humberside-based Fish Producers’ Organisation.

I am not competent, nor is it my role, to comment on the rights or wrongs of that particular issue, but I suggest that washing our proverbial dirty domestic linen in front of the EU is not likely to be to our collective advantage. As John Donne famously said, “no man is an island”. Ironically we are an island kingdom, but in the forthcoming negotiations we will still need to recognise the relationships with neighbouring states both within and outwith the EU, and with the adjacent parts of the UK. One hopes that before negotiations get serious, we will have worked out an optimal plan among all parts of the UK for how we are sustainably to manage the fisheries within our UK EEZ for the collective and long-term benefit of all the UK. Finally, what mechanisms have been set up to ensure that all the devolved nations have adequate input into formulating a UK negotiating position, a position that, by inclusivity, they can all support?