Fishing Industry

Luke Pollard Excerpts

Thursday 29th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Murray]

I completely agree that all conservation measures that are set for UK fishermen should also apply to other member states’ vessels and that they should be enforced.

A further matter I wish to raise concerns the implications for the fishing industry of the “work in fishing” convention 2007, which resulted from the International Labour Organisation conference of May 2007. I accept that this is not within my hon. Friend the Minister’s portfolio, but I ask her to urgently speak to the shipping Minister about the requirements for fishermen to have a medical carried out by a GP. The draconian measure being introduced will prevent fishermen and fisherwomen going to sea if they do not have a medical by November this year. I can understand why that is necessary on large vessels, where operations are similar to those of other large merchant vessels, but to apply the requirement to small inshore fishing vessels is in my opinion an unnecessary and unacceptable expense.

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that the way that the regulation has been implemented has caused enormous stress and anxiety to an industry that already feels that regulations do not apply to them properly? The catch app and the roll-out of I-VMS—inshore vessel monitoring —have caused real distress to the sector. Does she further agree that the deaths we have seen at sea have come not from poor health, but from vessel instability and the lack of lifejackets being worn, and that Ministers should focus on where the risks are and where the experience is rather than going after a form of regulation that is just causing anxiety to our fishers?

[Mrs Murray]

I do agree with the hon. Gentleman. I will come on to express my personal experience on that.

Furthermore, it places a disproportionate financial burden on small inshore fishing vessels. Article 10, paragraph 2 of convention C188 provides for exemptions from the requirement on the basis of

“size of the vessel, availability of medical assistance and evacuation, duration of the voyage, area of operation, and type of fishing operation.”

Sadly, all those have been ignored by the Department for Transport. The shipping Minister has allegedly refused to engage with industry representatives, and, indeed, refused to listen to cross-party MPs when we met last week. Some are here today.

As someone whose fisherman husband paid the ultimate sacrifice while striving to bring this valuable source of protein to our table, I fully support sensible safety measures being introduced. Indeed, working with the previous shipping Minister—I have told him I will mention him—my right hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning), we were able to successfully find grant funding for the voluntary introduction of safety stop buttons for deck equipment aboard fishing vessels. I will be forever grateful to him for assisting me with that positive measure. However, fishermen do not need to prove their fitness to undertake their occupation. I know from 24 and a half years of being married to a commercial small boat skipper-owner that fishermen are simply not as stupid as the Maritime and Coastguard Agency would have us believe. My late husband suffered a heart attack and was stopped from fishing for a number of weeks while he recovered. He could not go back to sea until the Regional Fisheries Group was happy that he was medically fit to return. Why should he have had to undergo an unnecessary medical?

I looked at the incident reports on the Marine Accident Investigation Branch website, because they are all there. As far as I can see, there were no occasions when a medical condition was identified as a cause of an accident. Even our Royal Navy personnel, who must comply with specific fitness tests periodically, do not need a regular medical certificate from their GP. This is just another in a long line of complaints that I have received about the way that the MCA causes financial hardships and stress to the fishing fleet, which remains very close to my heart.

I end with the case of a 15-metre trawler based in Cornwall, primarily fishing out of Newlyn, and partly owned by one of my constituents. It suffered a catastrophic main engine failure on 19 April while steaming back to the Newlyn harbour from its fishing grounds, and was safely towed in by another vessel. The vessel underwent inspection by a local marine engineer, who deemed the engine beyond economic repair, resulting in the need for a replacement engine. Current regulations set by the MCA state that the company would have to replace the current engine, which is classed as tier 1, with a tier 3 engine that complies with emissions standards in place for new vessels.

The company appreciates the reasoning behind the regulation and the need to reduce emissions, but it is not always practical given the supply chain timeframes for such purchases and deliveries of tier 3 engines, especially in emergency circumstances where there has been unexpected engine failure. The engine must be swiftly replaced to get the vessel operating, back at sea and making an income rather than being out of action for around half a year. The MCA offers a process to request exemption from having to install a tier 3 engine, which the owners submitted with good reasons for their request and asking to install a tier 2 engine, which would allow the vessel to return to sea and ensure that the business remained viable.

Unfortunately, the exemption request was rejected by the MCA, which leaves the business in a very precarious position. The MCA offered the option of a temporary dispensation, which would allow the installation of a tier 2 engine until a compliant unit became available. However, that is not financially viable, as the total cost is likely to exceed £100,000 in machinery alone, excluding additional liabilities and lost time at sea for two engine installations.

I thank the Minister and the Fisheries Minister, the right hon. Member for Sherwood, for their support for our fishing industry. I welcome the Fisheries Minister’s comments and commitment, but I am asking that he speak to his colleagues at the Department for Transport to ensure that it matches that support. At the moment that Department appears very uncaring and with an attitude towards the industry—which is vital to the food security of our country—that could almost be described as contempt.

--- Later in debate ---

[Anthony Mangnall]

The hon. Gentleman makes the point perfectly. If the exemption is there, let us use it. It takes nothing other than the Minister standing at the Dispatch Box to say that regulation 14 will be used. I get the sense that there may be some cross-party support on this issue.

[Luke Pollard]

I was in that meeting as well. I do not wish to add to the piling on of that Minister, but there is a point to make about how regulations should be implemented, and there is a real problem with how this particular regulation is being implemented. Does the hon. Member agree that the way to build trust with the sector, which feels put on and over-regulated, is for the MCA, the DFT and possibly DEFRA to ensure that there is renewed trust between them and the sector? The absence of trust will not deliver the regulatory outcomes that the Minister wants and will only further corrode the already tense relationship between the fishing industry—especially those using small boats—and those who seek to regulate them.

[Anthony Mangnall]

The hon. Gentleman makes a fantastic point. Communication is key. We are not trying to overload the sector. We want to make sure that we take all the steps in the right way, but that means that organisations such as the MCA and DEFRA have to be very clear and concise. I say this to the Minister, and I am sure that the Fisheries Minister is watching: they have been proactive in engaging with us and very clear about this, so this is not me having a dig at them.

[Anthony Mangnall]

I absolutely agree. As ever, my hon. Friend adds huge weight and knowledge to the debates on this topic. I hope that officials and Ministers across all Departments are listening to the points that we are making.

I am taking up far too much time, but I will just make three other quick points. I should also mention that my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Cherilyn Mackrory) cannot be in this debate but wanted to emphasise that her view on medical certificates is very much aligned with those that have been expressed across the House.

Another concern about the fishing sector relates to the I-VMS—the inshore vessel monitoring system. That has been a difficult programme to roll out. We have to ensure that the MMO has learned from the shambles of the type approval process and does not repeat that. As the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) said, the MMO has to be open and transparent and must communicate in full with fishermen and the fishing community.

That brings me on to the catch app. I am perfectly willing and happy to accept that modern technology has a place in how we fish and farm, and that we must use it to our full advantage, but the app is still not functional. People still cannot enter some port locations or species or differentiate between male and female crabs. The computer literacy and, indeed, connectivity in some places across this country are of hugely varying quality, so there needs to be a bit of understanding. I have seen fishermen in my community suddenly being issued with non-compliance letters many months after the alleged incident happened. That only adds to the stress of those in a sector that is really under the cosh at the moment and which needs more support.

[Luke Pollard]

The catch app and the type verification for I-VMS are two good examples of over-burdensome regulation. The threat of criminality if someone cannot successfully weigh a fish—within 10% of its weight—while at sea without marine scales seems to be home-grown, massively over-burdensome and costly red tape that creates additional stress. Does the hon. Member agree that there must be a better way of doing this to ensure that fishers can be taken with the Government when they change the laws, not pitched against them?

[Anthony Mangnall]

Yes. Where we have seen huge progress is that the Fisheries Minister has been extremely proactive on this. I hope I am not speaking for him when I say he has told me that he agrees with the points we are making. It is about how the MCA is putting this in and regulating it. We have to make sure that what we say in this Chamber and what is being said in Departments is translating through to the organisations that enforce it. If we get that right, we can suddenly do all the things that the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport and Conservative Members are saying.

We have spoken a little about Brexit. There are huge opportunities outside the common fisheries policy, and Brixham in my constituency is a fantastic example of a fishing port that has had record sales since 2021. In 2021, it sold £43 million, in 2022 it sold £60 million, this year it is on course to sell £63 million and next year it is forecasting £67 million. By 2027, it expects to top £100 million-worth of sales. Brixham prepared for Brexit, and it is taking advantage of it. New boats are coming on line and being built, and the Government’s capital allowance is a huge support to the sector. Do not think we are being doom and gloom about the sector; it is about ensuring that we recognise the difficulties of gold-plated legislation, rules and regulations and try to unlock them to make it easier and simpler, and about ensuring that we really talk up the sector.

We need to talk a lot more about food security in this country, and we need to talk about how we can be more self-sustainable. Our coastal waters offer that opportunity. We must make sure that, when we come back with the three-yearly reports on food security, fishing and aqua- culture are fully embedded to help us answer the call for better food security and better local food on our plates.

It is a privilege to speak on behalf of the fishing community in my constituency and to know that so many colleagues on both sides of the House share similar views.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ruth Jones (Newport West) (Lab)]

I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael), who cannot be here today, for securing this important debate and I thank the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (David Duguid) for filling in for him today.

As colleagues can see and will know, I am not my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner), the shadow Fisheries Minister; my hon. Friend has asked me to send his apologies to the House for not being here, so I am also filling in. However, as the Member for Newport West I am very proud of the port in our city and of the coastline and marshes further down the constituency, so talking water, fishers and our environment is very important to me.

I want to start by remarking on how consensual and agreeable the debate has been today. That is quite surprising, in my experience, but I hope the Minister will take away the fact that there has been so much cross-party agreement on the problems and the way to go forward on them.

I pay tribute to the fishers up and down the country who go out in all weathers, day after day. While there are many different sectors, often with competing and conflicting views, in all cases it is clear that they are extremely hard-working people in the UK’s most dangerous peacetime occupation. Too many lives are still lost and too many life-changing injuries still occur. During the pandemic and the lockdown periods, our fishers worked hard to support their local communities and to keep them fed, and we know they are all hugely valued.

However, I am sad to say that, for all their value, fishers have been sorely let down by this Government. The fishing industry, like so many UK sectors, was made a lot of promises in the run-up to 2016. It is fair to say that many feel that those promises have been broken or, at the very least, are yet to bear fruit.

At the end of 2020, Parliament passed the Fisheries Act 2020, which gave the Government the authority to act for us as an independent coastal nation outside the EU and outside the common fisheries policy. It allowed us to embark on bilateral agreements with our closest neighbours and potentially to negotiate much more favourable fish quotas for UK fishers.

The outcome of those negotiations was a huge disappointment and was greeted with widespread dismay. Under the terms agreed between the UK and the EU in the trade and co-operation agreement back in December 2020, the Government ceded access to fish in UK waters to EU vessels for six years and failed to establish an exclusive 12-mile limit. That result is a long way off taking back control of our waters. The financial consequences of those deals are far-reaching. The NFFO has calculated that the sector will see losses of £64 million or more a year, totalling more than £300 million by 2026 unless changes are secured through international fisheries negotiation.

The English distant fleet has, to all intents and purposes, been sold out. Jane Sandell, the chief executive officer of UK Fisheries Ltd, is exasperated. Referring to the deal with Norway as

“yet another body blow for fishers in the North East of England”,

she explains:

“The few extra tonnes of whitefish in the Norwegian zone won’t come close to offsetting the loss in Svalbard due to the reduced TAC. Defra knows this and yet they simply don’t seem to care about the English fleet.”

As a consequence, she has had to lay off 72 people in the last 18 months. I hope the Minister will be able to explain why the English distant fleet has fared so badly, and what she plans to do about it. I am talking particularly about the English fleet here, but I am concerned about DEFRA and the devolved Administrations working together. The Scottish and Welsh Governments have their roles, but DEFRA has a dual role and it needs to get it right.

The joint fisheries statement and the fisheries management plans pose additional challenges. Their objectives are certainly positive. We all want the UK to develop a

“vibrant, modern and resilient fishing industry and a healthy marine environment.”

I also recognise that it is no easy task to balance the need to produce a plentiful supply of food in the UK with our aspirations to ensure sustainable stocks and to protect, and repair the damage inflicted on, the marine environment. All three objectives are crucial. Maintaining stocks must be a primary goal for the fisheries management plans. It is in the interests of all concerned. Sadly, stock levels of cod in the west of Scotland have declined by 97% since the 1980s, and trawlers continue to operate in 98% of offshore protected areas.

[Luke Pollard]

My hon. Friend is making a good speech, and the many technical experts in the room will congratulate her on it. Does she agree that a good step to protect stocks and support UK fishing would be to ban foreign-owned super-trawlers that fish in our marine protected areas but do not land their catch in the UK and so do not create jobs in our country?

[Ruth Jones]

My hon. Friend is a doughty champion for the industry. He has made that point perfectly well—as have many other Members—and yes, of course, I agree with him 100%.

Bycatch remains a serious problem. The Future Fisheries Alliance highlights studies that show that bycatch is responsible for the catching and killing of around 1,000 harbour porpoises, 250 common dolphins, 475 seals, and 35 minke and humpback whales in gill nets and other fishing gears in UK waters every year.

I spoke in a recent debate about marine protected areas as an important tool in safeguarding our ocean’s future. I am deeply concerned about the ecological state of our seas, rivers and lakes, and the innumerable threats that they face from human activity. This House has been made well aware of the shockingly poor quality of the water in many parts of the UK, and of the Government’s negligence when it comes to cleaning and protecting our waters. Indeed, poor water quality is a major threat to the livelihoods of our shellfishers in particular. Shellfishers in West Mersea made it clear to us that it is an all too regular occurrence that effluent being discharged into the sea has meant that they have had to stop work. Maintaining a healthy, pollution-free environment can also be in the best interests of food producers.

As I said, I welcome the joint fisheries statement and the fisheries plan, but I just do not think that they provide the answers required to create a thriving and sustainable fishing industry. We need a more strategic solution to balancing the need to produce food, maintain stocks and protect the marine environment. The NFFO is understandably concerned about the spatial squeeze. The Government need a robust response to the potential displacement of fishing areas as more marine protected areas are introduced and more offshore wind farms are proposed. However desirable MPAs and wind farms are, they literally reduce the size of the pool for the catching sector, as the hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) highlighted.

Questions remain about how UK fishing plans will interact with third countries, the extent to which plans will be based on data, and how fisheries management is simplified in future, not made as complicated as under the CFP. Is there not a danger that Brussels red tape will simply be replaced with UK red tape? While our competitors have developed strategies to bolster their fishing industry and ensure that they have the best possible chance of selling their produce abroad, our Government seem intent on making life more difficult.

The shellfish sector offers several examples of that, as the hon. Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) highlighted. Whereas numerous other European countries actively support the farming of Pacific oysters because they represent a sustainable method of producing high-quality marine protein, our Government actually hamper efforts to farm them—so much so that David Jarrad, chief executive of the Shellfish Association of Great Britain, has resorted to asking:

“Do we actually want a UK oyster industry?”

Moreover, our fishers are being held by UK regulators to much higher standards than their competitors when it comes to the system of testing our shellfish for E. coli levels. Of course, we all want to be assured that our food is safe, but surely the same standards should apply to imported goods. Our fishers are simply asking for a level playing field. To add insult to injury, the catching sector has been on the receiving end of additional regulation that is heavy-handed and disproportionate. The catch app, the inshore vessel monitoring system, and boat inspections by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency have been exacerbating the stress our fishers are experiencing. The medical fitness certificate is a particularly good example of the proliferation of red tape that has swamped the small fishing businesses under this Government. The hon. Member for South East Cornwall (Mrs Murray) spoke eloquently about that.

Safety will always be a top priority, but insisting that all fishermen and women over the age of 50 fall below a certain weight is an expensive, onerous and hugely anxiety-provoking solution to a problem that does not exist. It is hard to find any accident in the reports of the Marine Accident Investigation Branch that has been caused by a fisherman or woman being overweight.

Those challenges are enough to be grappling with, but the industry faces a range of other problems, including the fight to keep afloat against the rising tide of rocketing fuel costs and rising interest rates that devalue the pound; labour shortages, which have been exacerbated by the covid-19 pandemic, and stricter immigration rules. It is little surprise, then, that the overall picture for fishing is causing concern—it is not the thriving industry we want to see. Preliminary economic estimates by industry body Seafish, reported in Politico, show that the number of active fishing vessels and full-time equivalent fishing-related jobs fell 6% in 2021-22 compared with 2019-20, continuing a decade-long trend.

It is no wonder that many of our brave fishermen and women are suffering from poor mental health. Those factors constitute an existential threat to hundreds of livelihoods. There has been plenty of lawmaking but no clear vision and no substantive answers to the challenges that the fishing industry faces. The Conservative approach to trade deals and negotiations with countries in distant waters is too often naive and amateurish compared with our long-experienced and wily competitors. What is the plan? Where is the vision? I hope the Minister can enlighten us today.

The Labour party takes a different view. We think that knowing our destination makes it more likely that we will get there. A Labour Government will take action on three priorities for the fishing sector. We will back our British fishing industry and work together to see them get a fairer share of the quota in our waters—more fish caught in British waters and landed in British ports, supporting British processing jobs. We will work with fishers themselves to deliver improvements in safety standards and make our regulatory approach proportionate and risk-based. We will ensure that foreign boats that are allowed to fish in our waters follow the same rules as British boats. We will use the many frameworks and conventions already in place to ensure that we have a sustainable marine environment that is safeguarded for future generations, while ensuring that our food security needs are met.

The task is not a simple one—nobody says that it is—but our fishermen and women deserve to be truly valued and supported for all the invaluable work they do.