Common Fisheries Policy

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Monday 17th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Richard Benyon]

I know where my hon. Friend is going with this. I am obsessed with an ecosystems management of our fisheries. Fish do not have passports; they do not understand lines on maps, and they may spawn in one country’s waters and mature in another’s. Therefore, whatever our status within the EU, we need to have a system, and that means we have to talk to all the countries who have responsibility for that ecosystem, and some of them in the North sea are not members of the EU, yet we talk to them and we work with them. That is the way to manage conservation properly.

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

As a firm supporter of the Fish Fight campaign, I take great pleasure in the Minister’s statement and welcome it; I applaud him on his considerable achievement. Does he agree that his success demonstrates that the UK can work constructively with our European partners by seeking allies and making sure that we make a case for reform where necessary, and that that is how the reform of the CFP, first entered into by the UK in 1982, has been done?

[Richard Benyon]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. Interestingly, in these negotiations I was sometimes the first British Minister in Brussels and would follow a speech by someone from another country who was much higher up the pay grade than me. People in this country were saying, “The UK is going to be marginalised,” but that was absolutely not the case. We were front and centre in driving this reform. We built alliances, particularly, but not exclusively, with big-voting countries such as Germany and the other northern European countries. By being diplomatic and working hard with people, we can reform some of the worst policies the EU has come up with. That bodes well for the future.