UK Fishing Industry

Sheryll Murray Excerpts

Thursday 7th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Sheryll Murray (South East Cornwall) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the UK fishing industry.

It is a tradition that MPs debate the UK fishing industry at the beginning of December. Such debates give us the opportunity not only to raise matters relating to the UK industry as a whole, but to reflect on proposals for the following year’s total allowable catch, which are discussed at the December Council of Ministers. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting time for this very important debate, and for holding it in the Chamber, because we have on occasions had this debate in Westminster Hall.

Fishing is a dangerous practice, and my thoughts are with the fishermen and their families who have suffered loss and injury during the past year. I thank those in the rescue services, including the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, the coastguards and National Coastwatch Institution volunteers, for their selfless service to sea rescue. I also thank the Fishermen’s Mission and the Apostleship of the Sea for their work to support fishermen and their families at times of hardship.

The result of the EU referendum was well received by our fisher folk. Whoever I speak to says that they view the future with optimism. Indeed, Toms boatyard in my constituency informs me that it has many orders for vessels on its books. We have heard the Minister and the Secretary of State confirm on numerous occasions that, at the end of March 2019, the UK will leave the common fisheries policy. As a result, the Minister will be able to make decisions about the marine environment and catches of species without attending the meeting in Brussels and haggling with 27 other member states.

[Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Lady reaffirm that, on the day we leave the EU, there will be no more negotiations and no more trading off, and that we will be out of the common fisheries policy so that we can decide for ourselves how we co-operate with other countries over our fishing? Will we take back control of our fishing on the day we leave?

[Mrs Murray]

As far as I am aware, when we leave the EU, we leave the common fisheries policy.

The UK has given notice that it will withdraw from the 1964 London convention, which gave some nations restricted access to the 12-mile limit. The UK 200-mile or median line limit is prescribed in the Fisheries Limits Act 1976 but, once we leave, the rules for the management and conservation of fish stocks, and indeed the amount of fish that can be taken, will be governed by the UN convention on the law of the sea, particularly articles 61 to 63. There is a clear distinction between UNCLOS and the CFP in as much as the UK will be free from the principle of equal access to a common resource on which the CFP is based.

[Mr Charles Walker (Broxbourne) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend accept that that will allow us to manage better our sea bass stocks for both commercial and recreational fishermen?

[Mrs Murray]

I thank my hon. Friend, who will be interested to know that I will come on to that point.

It might be worth considering UNCLOS in more detail. Article 61 says we must be responsible for setting conservation measures, taking account of the scientific information available. Such information often comes from the well-respected International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, with which the UK scientific body the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science works.

In short, article 62 states that the coastal state—in our case, the UK—shall set the amount of fish that can be taken in our exclusive economic zone and determine whether our fleet can catch it all. If it cannot, we can offer the surplus to other nations, which must comply with any conservation measures that we have set. Interestingly, paragraph 4(h) of article 62 says that the coastal state can set laws concerning

“the landing of all or any part of the catch by such vessels in the ports of the coastal State”.

It is worth noting that, in some instances, that could have a real economic benefit to the UK. Article 63 says that when a stock occurs in an adjacent EEZ, each coastal state shall work together to set conservation measures.

Zonal attachment is used by many nations to manage their fish stocks while ensuring economic benefit to the coastal state. A good example of zonal attachment is that of a farmer harvesting crops in his fields who does not invite his neighbours to come in and take those crops free of charge. According to a report by the University of the Highlands and Islands in 2016, EU boats overall landed 10 times more fish and shellfish—six times more by value—from the UK EEZ than UK boats did from the EU EEZ. For most individual member states, the imbalance was even greater. Iceland retains about 90% of the benefit from its fisheries in its attached zones, while the figure for Norway is 84%. In contrast, the UK secures a mere 40%, which can be attributed to the common fisheries policy. We give away—free to other nations—60% of the fish in our zone.

Has the Minister ensured that the historical catch data from all EU vessels that have fished in the UK EEZ has been collected? That could provide the basis for increased benefit in the UK zone once we leave the European Union. While any surplus quota that we are unable to utilise could be offered to other member states, meaning that some economic gain for the UK might be obtained, we must make sure that UK fishermen come first.

A significant central feature of moving towards fishing our zonally attached fish will be increased catching opportunity. Once achieved, that opens up the happy possibility of managing fisheries innovatively, looking to optimise benefit for our nation and its communities across the seafood supply chain. The range of options is huge, and can be properly discussed once the enabling opportunity is secured. In the words of Bertie Armstrong, chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation:

“don’t stress over choosing the wallpaper before we’ve bought the flat.”

Let me turn to effort control in place of quota. Under the CFP we have a management system that comprises quotas and effort control in the form of kilowatt days. Will the Minister confirm that once we withdraw from the CFP, he will move away from that confusing system of fisheries management and put in place a something simpler? Many fishermen I have spoken to are not in favour of a days-at-sea scheme, but that warrants further investigation. Has the Minister spoken to his counterpart in the Faroe Islands, which operate a days-at-sea system, to find out how their management system works? Has he asked for the views of CEFAS on the days-at-sea scheme versus the use of quota?

Many inshore fishermen have expressed concern about access to the UK’s six and 12-mile limit by other member states fishing for certain species. There appears to have been disproportionate access to those limits for more than 40 years, and that must stop. A lot of inshore vessels are unable to migrate and have found themselves competing with many larger vessels from other nations in the same waters. Will the Minister give due thought to exclusive access for small UK fishermen to our 12-mile limit when considering any post-CFP management regime?

Turning to this year’s Council of Ministers meeting, it appears that an uplift of total allowable catch is proposed for a number of species. As a consequence, the available quota for the UK fleet will increase. It is also heartening to know that the serious uplift of opportunities that arose from the EU-Norway talks has resulted in better quotas. However, in areas VIId and VIIe off the south-west coast, I am surprised that the quota for Dover sole has not followed ICES recommendations. The uplift of quota proposed by the Commission is less than scientists have suggested. The South West Fish Producers Organisation has also expressed concern about sprat stocks in that area.

ICES advice still points to the bass stock being outside safe biological limits—that issue was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker)—and I have two concerns about bass stock. My constituent, Mr Chris Newman, contacted me last August after hauling in his trawl to find around 1,000 kg of bass. The bass was in abundance at the time because it swims with mackerel, and I had already heard that there was an abundance of mackerel locally. Because of how bass management currently works, Mr Newman would have had to catch 33 tonnes of species to legally land his bass, so he ended up having to discard much of it. That is disgraceful, not only because he was denied around £10,000 of income, but because much of that bass would not have survived once it was discarded.

It has been reported on social media this week that another fisherman in Plymouth was denied a similar income because he had to discard bass that he was prevented from landing. When will the EU realise that fish cannot be told not to swim into a trawl? The Secretary of State has described EU bass management as a “blunt management system”. Will my hon. Friend the Minister confirm that our post-CFP management of fisheries will be flexible enough to prevent such situations by invoking emergency measures?

Secondly with regard to bass, I want to make a point on behalf of recreational sea anglers. They have been allowed to keep a single bass from each year’s angling. It appears that, if implemented, the European Commission’s proposal for 2018 will prohibit a recreational hook-and-line bass angler from taking a single bass for the entire year for personal or family consumption. That is unacceptable and I ask the Minister to make representations at the Council of Ministers in support of those recreational fishers. A lot of young people go angling, and many of them would not recognise if they had a bass on the end of their line. How will we police that?

[Mr Charles Walker]

It is simply madness to suggest that someone in a west end restaurant can sit down to eat wild bass caught by a commercial fisherman, but that one of my hon. Friend’s constituents, or one of my constituents on a day out at the beach, cannot keep a single fish that they catch off the beach or on a boat. That is simply not tenable.

[Mrs Murray]

I take a different view. I think that there is a place for commercial fishermen and recreational sea anglers to work together with us. A lot of people who go into a restaurant and think they are buying British bass are actually ordering farmed bass that has been imported from abroad. We need to make sure that we have a flexible management system that accommodates everybody.

I would describe any possible transition period after March 2019 as a bridge. Nine months is all that is needed at the very most. Looking forward to December 2018, assuming that we get a satisfactory trade deal, will the Minister make it clear at the Fisheries Council negotiations that the UK will be introducing its own management system from 1 January 2020 at the very latest? After all, the necessary processes and coastal state arrangements already exist. We can ensure, from that date, that zonal attachment of fisheries will apply to the UK, as it does to many other nations around the world.

Many people have raised concerns about whether we could enforce any UK-set rules on fisheries, including on access. Will the Minister confirm that the UK already polices our 200-mile limit under the CFP using different tools? Fisheries protection vessels from the Royal Navy for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the inshore fisheries and conservation authorities, and the Scottish Fisheries Protection Agency are all at sea making sure that the rules are enforced. Other enforcement tools include the electronic vessel monitoring equipment on board many vessels and observation aircraft. The UK will continue to enforce any rules it sets after we leave the CFP, as we have done for years.

I would like to raise briefly the Merchant Shipping Act 1988 and the Factortame case. Will the Minister confirm that we will be able to redo our economic links, unfettered by that EU ruling? Nobody else permits foreign rights to national resources and assets to the degree the UK was forced into.

Finally, fishermen have always felt that their industry was sacrificed when we joined the European Economic Community. It is therefore necessary that we have a separation of catching opportunity/access, and access to the EU market. Those are separate subjects. Norway never let them be mixed. Indeed, there is no international precedent or supporting economic reasoning for doing that. For example, if France wants to sell us its wine and cheese, it must buy our fish. That is common sense. Will the Minister confirm that he will not sacrifice access to fishing resources for access to markets in any negotiation?

I wish my hon. Friend the Minister well in his negotiation next week. I know that he, like me, knows how important fisheries are to our coastal communities and that, like me, he is optimistic for the opportunities our fishermen will have after we leave the common fisheries policy.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Bradshaw]

Indeed I was. Thankfully, plastics are one of the more visible aspects of marine pollution, because we see them washed up on our beaches and the Government are taking action, but a great deal else that goes on is still invisible.

There is another big difference between land-based and sea-based environmental degradation. The sea is a place where the ancient human activity of hunting and gathering continues, and continues apace. As has just been pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn), other human activity, such as the use of plastics, has its impacts, but much of it is invisible. Man-made climate change is leading to the warming and acidification of our oceans, with yet unknown consequences. It does not affect just marine life—including fish, as an edible resource—but the roles that the oceans themselves play in regulating our climate, our oxygen levels, and basically everything that makes human life on earth possible.

For most of human history, oceans and fish were simply plundered. That did not matter when there were relatively few human beings and fishing technology was relatively antiquated, but in the last 100 years or so, population growth and technological progress have completely changed that equation, with, in some instances, devastating consequences. We all know the story of the near eradication of bluefin tuna, turtles, cod off the north-east coast of the United States, and, in our own case, cod in the North sea. However, things have changed. Because of what was going on in the early noughties, politicians began to take notice and take action. There was collective endeavour, and it has worked. North sea cod has made a fantastic recovery, thanks to the difficult measures and decisions that I took as a fisheries Minister, which were massively criticised by the fishing industry at the time. There has even been progress on the high seas, which is much more difficult because of the lack of an international legal framework.

As anyone—I hope—can appreciate, managing our seas and fish stocks sustainably demands that countries work together. As has been said so often during our debates over the years, fish do not respect national borders; they swim about. Unlike the hon. Member for South East Cornwall, I have real concerns about the potential of Brexit to reverse the welcome progress that we have seen in the last 15 or 20 years. Let us be honest: the status quo is not a disaster. The hon. Lady herself spoke of recommendations for increased catches at this year’s meeting of the Council of Ministers. I wonder why that is the case. My local ports, Brixham and Plymouth, have just reported their best years in terms of the value of their catches. Species such as cuttlefish are doing incredibly well, and are being exported straight to markets in Italy, France and Spain. Our crab and lobster are also valuable exports.

[Mrs Sheryll Murray]

Is the right hon. Gentleman seriously saying that British fishermen want to stay in the common fisheries policy?

[Mr Bradshaw]

Some do, but they tend to be quiet, because they are shouted down by Members of Parliament like the hon. Lady. If she has honest conversations with sensible fishermen who care about the long-term sustainability of their stocks, she will find that not all of them share her views, and it would be inaccurate to suggest that they do.

As I was saying, some of our most valuable catches—and we in the south-west have enjoyed a record year in that regard—are exported straight to the markets of the European Union, tariff-free, while we are in the common fisheries policy. As a nation, we also depend on imports for 80% of what we consume, because of our taste for cod and haddock. So what will happen in the event of a bad deal or no deal, in terms of tariffs on these vital exports and the vital imports on which our producing and processing sector depend, and about which my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby will speak later?

The Brexiteers have sold the idea that if we leave the EU and unilaterally declare these marvellous limits, our fishers will suddenly get all these extra fish and massively increased quotas, our boats, which currently fish in other people’s waters, will be able to carry on regardless, and our vital exports will be completely unaffected. Like so many of the promises made by these modern-day wreckers, this is a cruel deception on our fishers and their communities. We need only look at the problems we have had this week with the Irish land border; imagine what will happen if, as the Brexiteers are proposing, the UK suddenly and unilaterally moves the international marine borders, and, in effect, declares fish wars on all our neighbours, excluding them from fishing grounds they have fished for hundreds of years and stealing the quota they consider legally theirs. It is a recipe for mayhem.

It is also a recipe for environmental disaster. We know from fisheries management all around the world that if international and supranational co-operation and collaboration break down, it is the fish and the marine environment that pay the price. The second cruel deception being played out is the suggestion that the Government are likely to make fisheries a priority. We need only look at our fishing industry’s value to our economy, compared with financial services, pharma and others. Are our Government honestly going to pick a political fight for fisheries, when all these other sectors are worth more to our economy? It is a cruel deception.

I have two further points. First, I ask the Minister to make bass a recreational stock, as Ireland has done, with huge success. I also ask the Minister to keep a place at that negotiating table, and when he goes to Brussels later this month, I ask him to stick with the science: stick with the evidence, and think about the fish and their future, and a healthy future for our fishing industry.

--- Later in debate ---

[Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for South East Cornwall (Mrs Murray) on securing the debate and on her excellent work with the all-party fisheries group, of which she is chairman. I also echo her sentiments about the Fishermen’s Mission and its continued good work supporting fishermen and their families and local communities, particularly those in my constituency.

[Mrs Sheryll Murray]

I do not want to leave out my hon. Friend—the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn)—who is the joint chairman of the all-party parliamentary group.

[Melanie Onn]

A rare moment of cross-party agreement around fisheries. I thank the hon. Lady for those comments.

Today, I want to focus my remarks primarily on the processing side of the fisheries industry. However, before I get on to that, I want to mention the case of a former fisherman from my constituency. In the debate last year, I raised the case of James Greene, and the issue of fishermen missing out on their pensions unjustly, with subsequent Governments failing to properly compensate them for that. Sadly, James Greene passed away last year, but his widow is still waiting for his full entitlement from the fishermen’s compensation scheme. The ship he worked on for 20 years was wrongly omitted from the scheme’s list of eligible vessels. That list has been corrected, but the payments owed to James have still not been made in full.

I have been dealing with this matter through the parliamentary ombudsman, but the most recent correspondence I have had sight of says:

“The matters you have raised are not new as they were not in the scope of the investigation. We did not look at the department’s decision to pay for work on the Thessalonian at the reduced second scheme rate even though it had mistakenly been excluded under the first scheme…As the Ombudsman has already given this matter her personal attention earlier this year and with no new information provided, we would not look at this matter again.”

That is extremely disappointing. For the sake of his widow, for just £3,000—that is all we are talking about—and for the peace of mind of those at the Great Grimsby Association of Fishermen and Trawlermen, who have been fighting for decades for justice, will the Minister please meet me to see whether there is anything more that can be done to bring this matter to a satisfactory close?

The demise of the fishing industry since its peak in the middle of the 20th century has hit my town particularly hard. What we have seen in Grimsby is the transformation of the sector. While catching has severely diminished, in the way the hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) discussed, we are now a hub for the processing, manufacturing, and packaging side of things. We have 75 food sites within a radius of a couple of miles, employing 5,000 people in landing the fish, selling it, smoking it or turning it into fish cakes.

This is necessarily an international industry. The fish caught off our coasts are often not the kind that people in Britain want to eat. Depending on where a catch is landed, the fish that ends up in Grimsby may have crossed the borders of three or four countries on its way to us. Some 270 tonnes of imported fish passes through our market every week, and these are perishable goods. Anything that makes trading harder could compromise the viability of the main source of employment in my constituency.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Murray]

We have heard 18 speeches by Back Benchers from all around the coast. I thank colleagues very much. I am sure that the Minister has got the message. I have one more for him: please do not sacrifice access to resources because you think you might get access to the market.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the UK fishing industry.