Common Fisheries Policy

Richard Drax Excerpts

Thursday 15th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Richard Drax (South Dorset) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North Tyneside (Mrs Glindon), who sits with me on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee.

As I think most of the House knows, I have a healthy disregard for anything to do with the EU, and the CFP—which I would describe as a disaster—is no exception. To use “Dad’s Army” lingo, hopefully both the EU as it stands and the CFP are doomed. I entirely concur with my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Oliver Colvile). I will not rest until our waters are back under national control and those who want to fish in them are given licences by our country, so that we can control which stocks are taken from our waters. Sadly, however, that is a dream, and I have to deal with reality.

I congratulate the Minister—my good and honourable Friend on the Front Bench—on his valiant and continued efforts to ensure that the CFP is reformed, and reformed it desperately needs to be. He is right that the CFP has failed to maintain healthy fish stocks and deliver a sustainable living for our fishing industry. His demand for genuine reform of what is a broken policy must be supported. Fishing is vital to our coastal communities. I represent the coastal community of South Dorset. Fishermen there are part of our DNA, providing the lifeblood of the coastal settlements, and probably their very origins. Today, like the fish they catch, those fishermen are hopelessly enmeshed—in a net of bureaucracy, struggling against the ever-tightening rules and regulations imposed on them by a distant and unresponsive EU. Designations, quotas, fuel costs, environmental concerns, discard policies, types of tackle to be used—it all adds up to one huge snarl-up, from which they despair of escaping.

[Oliver Colvile]

Does my hon. Friend agree that as this issue affects the whole of the British isles, including Ireland—as well as the Isle of Man and Scotland, and, of course, the rest of England and Wales—it should therefore be considered by the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly? I am a member, and I am very willing to take the issue back and encourage the assembly to consider it.

[Richard Drax]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. I would welcome any means whereby the people of this great United Kingdom could sit down and discuss how we should control our waters—so, yes!

The endless red tape is particularly difficult for fishermen working in the smaller inshore fleet, of whom we have a preponderance in South Dorset. In fact, it is impossible for some of our small fishermen to make a living. The result is a healthy scepticism, and compliance among those with the greatest stake in the process—that is, the fishermen—is perhaps not full as it should be. In constituencies such as mine, we operate small boats, as we have done for generations. Such communities have nurtured, loved and cared for their fishing areas, because to do otherwise would be to destroy their very livelihoods. There is no doubt that there is a high level of distrust between fishermen and those who we in the press used to call the suits.

[Sheryll Murray]

Does my hon. Friend believe that that is because a lot of the people representing the industry in the past have in fact represented the larger boat owners, and because the small boat owners have always felt that they did not have a voice?

[Richard Drax]

I entirely concur with my hon. Friend. Let us hope that, through people like us and others, the small fishermen will have a bigger voice in future. It will be important for them to do so.

Among the fishermen I speak to, the environmental lobby—of all kinds and colours—appears to hold sway. That is the perception. I know that my hon. Friend the Minister is aware of that, as I have written to him about this on many occasions. Indeed, he has visited my constituency on more than one occasion, for which we are all grateful. We all know that we should not plunder our seas, but we must go forward working on the basis of fact, not fiction. I am encouraged that the motion mentions the need for

“more scientific research to underpin decision-making”.

Hurrah! I welcome that.

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Richard Drax]

I am not allowed to; I have given way twice. I hope that my hon. Friend will forgive me if I struggle on, although I can assure him that I am not going to go on for another eight minutes and 44 seconds.

Scientific research is in the interests of all fishermen, whether from the warm Mediterranean or the icy sub-Arctic. If we do not protect our fisheries now, we will not have a fishing industry. That is a fact. Much attention has been paid to the campaign to end the practice of fish discards, in which perfectly good but dead fish are thrown back into the sea in order to meet arbitrary quotas. The rules are endlessly bent, however, because the targets are so unrealistic. I applaud the Minister’s efforts to tackle that problem on a local basis.

I acknowledge, just for once, that the European Commission has recognised the failure of the CFP and set out a series of proposals. However, the Select Committee has pointed out that the Commission is embarking on the journey without a clear plan—nothing new there! I know that the Minister has already fought off proposals that would have damaged our national interests, and I am confident, as are my fishermen, that he will continue to do that. I am also confident that our fishermen respect his work, and it is a tough job to gain the respect of fishermen, but the Minister is operating with his hands tied behind his back. Once again, our national interests are threatened by those of a much bigger entity, which purports to act for us but fails to do so. None of this comes as any surprise to those of us who are familiar with the workings of the European project.

The motion invites us to call on the Government

“to use the current round of Common Fisheries Policy reform to argue for a reduction in micro-management from Brussels”,

and, of course, I agree with that. It must be no secret by now that I would like the Government to extend that goal far, far beyond fishing. I know that the Minister will pass on that message to all the relevant people. I urge him to continue to stand up for our downtrodden fishermen around the country and, of course, those in South Dorset in particular.

--- Later in debate ---

[Martin Vickers]

That is a very good point. It stands to reason that those who are involved in the fishing industry and who know how to manage stocks should manage those stocks.

It is interesting to note that all three Members whose constituencies are bounded by the River Humber—the hon. Member for Great Grimsby, my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy), and me—oppose our membership of the EU. The Grimsby-Cleethorpes community has never really recovered from the decline of the fishing industry, which was sacrificed in the original negotiations for entry to what was then the Common Market. The scars run very deep, and I would be failing in my duty if I did not represent those feelings in the House.

[Richard Drax]

Is not the use of the expression “common resource” disingenuous and misleading? I do not see how the fish in our waters can possibly be a common resource for others to tuck into whenever they want.

[Martin Vickers]

That is an entirely valid point.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil Parish]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Austria receives probably the largest amount of rural development money of any EU country. I suspect it has traded many times with the Commission to achieve that situation, by agreeing to go along with what the Commission wants on fishing. We must sort that out.

Not only should we manage our waters in a way that enables us to act quickly from a conservation point of view, but we also need the fishermen to sign up to the regulations. The CFP is a little like communism: there is a lovely warm feeling that we are all going to work together for the greater good, but in reality nobody does that. Our fishermen try to conserve fish by doing all the right things such as reducing the size of their nets and reducing the number of discards, but then they are terrified that the Spanish or others will come in and hoover up the fish whose stocks they have conserved through their actions. That highlights a key problem with the CFP.

[Richard Drax]

Does my hon. Friend think the Europeans would care one jot if local fishermen such as mine in Dorset disappeared entirely?

[Neil Parish]

No, I do not think they would. They offer great platitudes to those who go out of fishing, but all they are interested in is having a centralised policy whereby the total amount of fish caught within the EU meets their targets. They are not actually worried how many fishermen there are to do the fishing, even though they will tell people otherwise. This, again, comes back to the problem of managing things from Brussels, so we have to deal with the principles of the CFP.

I suspect that the Minister may well not be able to come back with a 200-mile limit yet, but we have great confidence that over a period of years he will achieve that. I say that because of what we are doing now with this limited resource: we are throwing it into the sea, dead. A lot of those fish actually putrefy on the sea bed. Local fishermen tell me that a lot of sea lice attack the dead fish and that when they catch fresh fish that are alive they often bring up in their nets some of those dead fish, which contaminate the healthy fish. Is this situation logical? Is it right? No, it is absolutely wrong.