Shellfish Aquaculture

Simon Fell Excerpts

Wednesday 15th March 2023 Westminster Hall

[Simon Fell (Barrow and Furness) (Con)]

It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon); I have never done so before and it has been on my bucket list for a while. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) on securing this important debate. I chair the all-party parliamentary group on shellfish aquaculture and he is its treasurer. He is definitely the Dastardly to my Muttley, which makes him the more intelligent one.

The Chamber has heard from Members from Devon, Cornwall, Yorkshire, Essex and Northern Ireland—and is now hearing from me, a Cumbrian. My home looks out on to Morecambe Bay, where hundreds of small fishers operate. There is a large oyster farm off Walney, and in Barrow, quite surprisingly, we have one of the largest producers and conglomerators of live bivalve molluscs in the UK.

The sector is struggling, but it does not need to. There are huge opportunities; if it is managed well and given the tools it needs for growth, it could be a great British success story. It offers an almost unlimited and sustainable source of protein for us and for export markets. It offers a boon to our coastal communities—many of which, as we know all too well, are struggling—and it could be a guarantor of marine biodiversity. But it is hamstrung and held back. The tools to unlock it are within our grasp, and I urge the Minister to enable us to grasp them.

I would like to focus on three areas. My hon. Friend the Member for Totnes has covered them all, but I have learned during my two and a bit years in this job that original thought does not get you anywhere in this place, so I will repeat them. The areas are live bivalve molluscs, highly protected marine areas and pacific oysters. If we can unlock those three, the sector will be flying.

I turn to live bivalve molluscs. We operate under the same water testing rules as the European Union, but many of our European friends clearly interpret them differently. The trade and co-operation agreement means that we are unable to export grade B live bivalve molluscs without their having undergone depuration. That holds back the sector tremendously—when I talk to them, businesses in my area say that it is what they are most concerned about.

Of course, we can build up our home-grown depuration facilities. In fact we do, and I am grateful to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs for extending funding to some aquaculture businesses for that purpose. However, we really have to grip the core issue: the Food Standards Agency, which has taken an incredibly bureaucratic view of the testing regime. That is holding the sector back and has led to stagnation over the years. We have the same system and rules as elsewhere in Europe, but the UK interprets them the most strictly.

There is no evidence that our more restrictive system does any better in protecting public health. Given that measurements can change by the hour, the system of taking them monthly means that many fantastic local businesses are one bad measurement away from closure. That speaks to the really parlous state of the industry, and it needs to change. Our waters are not poor, but our system of measurement, and our ability and willingness to measure quickly, are poor.

We need to look at how our colleagues in Europe are interpreting exactly the same rules and to unashamedly copy them. Kingfisher Seafoods—the business in Barrow that I mentioned—supports about 100 family businesses in Morecambe Bay. The economic impact of failing to get this issue right will be devastating not just for that business, but for the 100 family fishermen, who have been operating for years.

The excellent Benyon review suggested that highly protected marine areas should not include commercial fishing. I strongly agree, but I do think that aquaculture businesses should be permitted to operate in them. Their inclusion in highly protected marine areas would aid biodiversity recovery as well as acting as an effective carbon sink. We should consider that closely; to my mind, it is a win-win.

The third point is about pacific oysters, which make up 95% of all UK-grown oysters. For some time they were classified as invasive but, as we have heard, they have become naturalised due to their prevalence. There is almost no chance of ridding our coastal waters of them and we would not want to. Our waters, of course, are linked to our European neighbours, who have correctly recognised pacific oysters as naturalised and started harvesting them. What is the result? As my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes said, France’s aquaculture sector produces 145,000 tonnes per year, compared with our 2,680 tonnes. The delta is enormous. By simply looking at this in a different way, we can see the scale of the growth on offer.

If DEFRA were to recognise Pacific oysters as naturalised across the UK, businesses such as the excellent Morecambe Bay Oysters on Walney in my constituency would be able to scale up. Others that are currently at risk of closure would be able to continue to operate and to leave the parlous state they find themselves in now. If we do not grasp this issue and change the language and terms that this sector operates under, we risk many of the most innovative businesses in the UK closing within the next few years. We have it in our gift to enable a viable and sustainable aquaculture sector, on which thousands of new jobs could rely and which would promote biodiversity and offer considerable trade opportunities.

Although I am too cheap to copy my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes and invite colleagues and the Chair to lunch, I would encourage them to take up his offer, because this is a story we should tell people about and that they need to learn about. It is a good news story waiting to happen. I hope the Minister will listen to the cross-party consensus on supporting this sector and help get things moving for it.