Fisheries Bill (Second sitting) Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateMike Hill
Main Page: Mike Hill (Labour - Hartlepool)Department Debates - View all Mike Hill's debates with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
(5 years, 8 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesQ
Jerry Percy: There are a number of global examples where you can retain quota as a national resource without allowing its sale. There obviously needs to be flexibility in-year to move quota about, to ensure that those people benefit from it. It is not an easy situation to resolve, but there are global examples of what can be done to ensure that almost half of our national resource is not in foreign hands, as has happened here.
Q
Jerry Percy: It is not just ports; there are harbours, coves, small areas and small coastal communities. It would be dozens, if not hundreds. Going back 40-odd years, I can remember fishing out of Lowestoft as a boy fisherman. There were myriad groups of small boats all the way up and down the coast, all providing a significant benefit to those local communities. They may not show up on an economist’s spreadsheet, but those people are nevertheless paying their mortgage, taking their kids to school and keeping the local infrastructure going. I am not exaggerating; it could certainly be in the hundreds that we could revive and have some level of renaissance. There is no doubt whatever.
Q
Jerry Percy: Well, why should they get more? To an extent, it is based on greed. They already have approximately 98% of access to the quota, 50% of which is in foreign hands, and a very significant proportion is in the hands of the five richest families in this country. It has become a fundamental nonsense and is grossly unfair socially, environmentally and economically that nearly 80% of the fleet in the UK has access to only 2% of the quota. The idea or argument that any additional quota should be allocated according to the existing fixed quota allocations frankly is just grossly unfair. There is no sensible economic or social reason why that should be the case.
Q
Phil Haslam: The power in the Bill gives us the ability to regulate who comes into our waters by granting permission. I do not think the conditions of permission need to be explicit in the Bill, but they can be part of that, among other things that we would require any vessel within our waters to comply with.
Q
Phil Haslam: There will be a cut-off of who actually gets fitted with it, because the point is to try to develop a picture of what is the main input into the fishery in terms of effort on vessels out there. There will be some vessels—there will be a line below which we will not need to go. At the moment we are looking to catch—not catch, that is the wrong word—fit IVMS to the active fishing vessels.
Q
Q
Dr Appleby: That is a very good question. I put my amendments together in two parts. The Secretary of State is doing two roles; I am sitting here with two roles myself, so I appreciate that. One is being the Secretary of State on behalf of the UK—he is a trustee of the UK’s public fishery—and the other one is being English Fisheries Minister. That is why I do not like the way clause 20 is drafted, because I thought you would split the functions. The trouble is that it goes into some very difficult water when we start to look at the different devolution settlements.
Q
Dr Appleby: I will take the second question first because the second one leads to the first. How can you define “sustainable” if you do not know what the stock levels are? There is a massive absence of science on this. If we get money back in from the fishery, I would like the commissioning of decent science so we can look ahead and plan forward. We seem to be navigating while looking behind us. We need to get better data to manage the stock. We also need to have a conversation about which stock we want to fish. What are the stocks that live best in our waters that we want to feed the country in the 21st century?