I beg to move,
That this House has considered post-Brexit fisheries management.
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Mundell, and to welcome the new Fisheries Minister to his position. He and I have worked together in previous roles in the House, and I am delighted that we have the opportunity to continue working together. I have always found him to be a straightforward and decent man to deal with, and I hope he will continue to take that approach to his new responsibilities. It is not always the easiest or most attractive brief to take on in Government, but for communities such as mine in the north-east of Scotland and for many small coastal communities around our country, it is an enormously important one. I hope that he will find he gets good assistance and mature co-operation from around the House, as has generally been the practice over the years on fisheries matters.
I think it would be appropriate to pay tribute to the Minister’s predecessor, the hon. Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis), who took on the brief and managed it through, let us say, a tricky time. She did not always deliver everything we wanted—she would have been the first Fisheries Minister to have done so had that been the case—but she was sincere in her commitment and we were impressed by her engagement with the industry and by how generous she was with the time she gave to MPs with a fishing interest. We wish her well as she undertakes her new responsibilities.
If we look at the current prospects of the fishing industries, we will see that there is still some cause for optimism. The fundamental proposition of the UK fishing industries is a sound one, but it is also fragile at the same time. It has to be said that the industry is facing severe challenges. There is the rising cost of fuel. A lot of the boats, particularly in fleets such as mine in Shetland, are already subject to significant costs from interest payments on loans for their purchase, and if interest rates go up, that will be challenging. Of course, like every other industry, they have the challenges of wage increases and general inflation. While the prospects are good for an industry that is in a strong position and fundamentally sound, there is no room for complacency and it has to be accepted that these prospects are somewhat brittle.
In the medium to long term, some of which I will deal with today, the industry is increasingly concerned about a number of different threats, some of which will, if they are not addressed now, be existential for the industry or parts of it. I am thinking in particular of the pressures of spatial squeeze, with other industries having grown over the years. We have seen the coming of oil and gas industry pipelines, electricity cables, fibre-optic cables and now the growth of offshore renewables, such as electricity generation. If nobody acts now and we do not find a proper strategic approach to this issue, all of those things will squeeze fishing to the margins.
The first challenge to which I want the Minister to apply his mind is more immediate—namely, the availability of crew from outside the United Kingdom. This is a matter on which I and others in this House have been fighting for years, and it sometimes feels like we get one step forward only to then go two steps back. There is no arguing with the proposition that we would like to see fishing boats in the United Kingdom crewed by local crew—this is an important source of employment for many fishing communities—but we have to be realistic about the fact that for decades many young people in our schools and colleges have been told that the industry has no future for them and have been gently discouraged from going into it. It will take a long time to turn that around, and to allow young people to see that it is an industry with great opportunities for them and in which they can have a future—a future that, in turn, will be there for their children when it comes to that time. In the meantime, however, we need a sensible immigration policy that will allow us to get the crew who are needed to keep the boats going, especially, but not exclusively, for the inshore fleet.
At the moment, the bigger boats that are able to operate outside the 12-mile limit can bring in non-European economic area nationals on transit visas. That route has been employed for years now. Frankly, it is an abuse of the transit visa system, although I do not say that as any sort of criticism, because, in fact, it has been the only route available to skippers wanting to bring in non-EEA nationals. The way in which transit visas work—they are usually intended for merchant ships to take on crew coming in through United Kingdom ports—leaves those who fish on UK vessels but only through the means of a transit visa without the protections of minimum wage, health and safety, and the general employment conditions that we would all expect of any other sector. There have been some well-documented abuses of crew who have been brought in this way, although that is by no means a universal. I would like to think that such cases are still the exception, rather than the rule, but we do need a working visa scheme.
We first did battle on the issue through the Migration Advisory Committee, which for years denied that it could deal with the matter, because the job was not listed as a high-skilled occupation. We eventually persuaded it to change the advice given to Ministers. As a consequence, the Home Office brought forward a scheme to allow a number of non-EEA nationals to work on UK vessels. In fact, however, the way in which immigration rules work is such that very few of those visas have been able to be taken up—principally because very few of those who would be coming to work under that visa scheme are able to meet the English language test requirements. It is a particularly narrow definition of what it is to be a skilled worker that says that someone has to obtain that level of English language skill. Surely it would not be beyond the wit of man for someone in the Home Office to design a scheme—the principle of which already seems to have been conceded and the advice on which is consistent with that of the Migration Advisory Committee—which would allow the industry to get the access to the crews they need.
The shellfish boats in my constituency in particular—Orkney has a significant brown clam fleet, of which I will speak later—do not fish outside the 12-mile limit for the most part, so they are not able to use the transit visa route. As a consequence, those fishers are left unable to operate the boats that they have committed to and taken finance on, and ultimately they will not be able to make a living. If they go, the shoreside jobs in processing and exports go. The Government claim to care about growth, but who profits from that particularly unhelpful and narrow interpretation of what is required? I am sorry for labouring the point; it is the luxury of having the time to do it.
I know this is not the Minister’s responsibility, but in addition to his direct ministerial responsibilities, the industry looks to him as its advocate in Government. I hope he will pursue that case as vigorously as he can with Home Office Ministers. It should have been sorted years ago, and it is nothing short of a scandal that it has not been.
The other issue of particular concern to me—I have spoken about it in the past, and it is of growing interest to my constituents—is the industrial-scale gill netting that we still see around so much of our waters. For us in Shetland, it is a particularly acute issue. Spanish boats, in particular, regardless of where they are flagged, come in with gill nets that run to several kilometres in some cases. They exclude local boats, especially whitefish boats, from grounds they have fished for generations. It is a particularly environmentally and ecologically unsustainable way of catching fish. It is also a major contributor to plastic pollution, because the nets are often just cut adrift and left on the bottom of the seabed to be caught up by others in the fullness of time.
My frustration is that we have nobody else to blame now. For years, we could look to Brussels and say, “We’ve got to let the Spaniards in because we are part of the European Union, and they can do this and that,” but we no longer have anybody else to blame. It lies within our own control. It lies within the control of the Minister here and his colleagues in the devolved Administrations. The inability, or the lack of political will, to tackle something so fundamental is really frustrating the industry and the fishing communities that are most directly affected by it. There have been demonstrations in the streets in Shetland about gill netting.
Last week, the local newspaper, The Shetland Times, carried a comment that sums up the lack of urgency around tackling this issue. It states:
“The Scottish Government responded with an unattributed statement”
—not something that got anywhere near a Minister—
“which said: ‘We take protection of the marine environment seriously and are clear that any form of dumping and other illegal activities is completely unacceptable.
Gill netting is a legitimate form of fishing activity permitted within Scottish waters.’”
Think about that for a second. An official Government spokesperson from the Government in Edinburgh describes gill netting as a legitimate form of fishing activity permitted within Scottish waters. I suppose that, legally, that is a justifiable statement, but in terms of displaying an understanding of what gill netting is about, and given the way in which it is used on an industrial scale and the impact it has on our local fleets, I think that was a shockingly complacent thing to say. The statement goes on to say:
“As with all forms of sea fishing, gill net vessels must comply with all applicable rules, regulations, and technical standards, when carrying out their fishing operations.”
We are also told:
“The safety of our fishers is of paramount importance and any allegations of behaviour that risks the lives of fishers and the safety of vessels are very serious.”
We know that, because we have seen quite shocking examples of Spanish gill netters forcing Shetland boats off their fishing grounds, which has sometimes come very close to having tragic consequences.
If we are talking about a form of sea fishing that must
“comply with all applicable rules, regulations, and technical standards, when carrying out their fishing operations”,
why have we not introduced regulations that state simply that any boat carrying out gill netting—if we continue to allow it—has to declare the number of nets on board when it comes into our waters and the number of nets when going out? We could then see that there is no mismatch. We could control the fact that the nets are being left at the bottom of the sea. That is the very least that we should be doing, but even that seems to be beyond the political will of the Governments.
The Minister’s predecessor, the hon. Member for Banbury, undertook a piece of work when I brought to her attention the situation faced by the skipper of the Alison Kay in Shetland. He very nearly came to grief as a consequence of the actions of a Spanish trawler, the Pesorsa Dos. The hon. Member for Banbury got together all the various parts of Government. There was quite an impressive number of civil servants and lawyers on the call, but it seemed that everybody was looking for an excuse—for why it was somebody else’s problem. Everybody acknowledged that the situation should not be allowed to continue, but nobody was prepared to find a working solution to it.
I say to the Minister today that that piece of work remains live. If we do not do it, the situation experienced by a number of Shetland boats in recent years will only get worse. I can guarantee that eventually somebody will end up at the bottom of the sea. There will be a tragedy, and then there will be a rush to find a solution. Why not accept that this is a dangerous practice and that proper action is needed to deal with it now? Get the different devolved Administrations, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, and the Department for Transport around the table, and find a way to offer our fishing boats proper protection when they absolutely need it.
As I indicated earlier, spatial squeeze continues to cause great and growing concern in the fishing industry right around the coastline. If the Minister has not yet read the work done by the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation and the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations, I would certainly commend it to him. That work first tracks the position from 2000 to today, and then it looks forward to 2050. In 2000, fishing boats were excluded from less than 1% of UK waters. The SFF and the NFFO estimate that by 2050 we could see fishing effort excluded from no less than 49% of the exclusive economic zone around the UK as a whole. In Scotland, the figure could be as high as 56%, and that is before we know the actual extent and meaning of HMPAs—highly protected marine areas. It seems inevitable that there will be further restriction.
It will be interesting to see how that all works. It is not that any individual source is particularly difficult; there is a cumulative effect. We have had the growth of aquaculture and offshore and gas activities. We now have the coming of offshore wind and floating wind. We have significant development to the west of Shetland, and I am keen to see that, but at some point somebody has to say, “There has to be a strategy for managing the marine area”, so that the salami slicing does not continue. As a consequence of the growth of offshore wind, vessels will be excluded from something like 4.28% of the area. In and of itself, that is not unmanageable, but it is 4.28% on top of all the other slices that have already been taken off the joint.
My plea to the Minister is for someone in Government to take control. The growth of offshore wind will result in more cabling on the seabed. Surely it is not beyond the wit of man to find a way to bring all those cables together instead of leaving them like a plate of spaghetti on the seabed. As things stand, nobody has taken charge and nobody is taking an overall, holistic view. As a consequence, we fear that the fishing industries will be excluded.
I will mention in passing a particular concern of ours in Orkney. Our brown crab fishery is very important to us, but the female brown crab is migratory. It goes from Orkney and around to the west coast of Scotland, but its behaviour is affected by the electromagnetic frequencies from some of the cables. The science is in its infancy and there is a lot that we do not understand. In every other respect, we proceed on a precautionary basis, and I hope that some effort will be made to ensure that there is a proper understanding of how these things fit into the wider seabed use.
The subject of scientific advice has long been of concern to the industry. For a number of years, the SFF, NFFO and the Scottish White Fish Producers Association have been calling for another body to sense-check the International Council of the Exploration of the Sea data and the conclusions drawn from it. ICES is the gold standard and we are not seeking anything that would undermine that, but, given its academic rigour, the ICES process is lengthy and the decisions informed by it are sometimes made two years after the data has been gathered.
The Minister’s predecessor set up the UK fisheries science advisory board, which brought together the chief scientists from the devolved Administrations and the UK Government. What is the status is of that board? Is it still functioning and what scope is there to continue to build on its work? There is a wealth of expertise in the fishing industry, and it is willing to contribute financially to the scientific research.
The situation is remarkable. When I was first elected in 2001, I remember being shocked when I was told that monkfish was a data-deficient species. And, well, in 2022 it is still a data-deficient species. It is an enormously important species for the Scottish whitefish industry. It is our most valuable catch, with 12,600 tonnes of it, worth £34 million, landed in 2021, but the ICES regards it as data-deficient. The industry actually offered Marine Scotland and the Scottish Government a vessel and crew to go out and get the data to supplement what the Marine Scotland vessel was getting, but unfortunately that offer was refused because of the covid protocols. In future, I hope that all Governments in the United Kingdom will be more willing to engage with, listen to and accept such offers.
There is a view out there, often expressed by non-governmental organisations and other campaign groups, that fishermen are all hunters who have no concern for the future ecology of the species. My experience is very much the opposite. Most people who work on fishing boats come from fishing families. They have inherited that business from their parents and want to hand it on to their children. They understand that if they are not responsible in their stewardship of it now, there will be nothing to hand on.
Fishermen are thwarted in a number of areas. We hear a lot spoken about bottom trawling and unsustainable fishing practices. I have some sympathy for some of those arguments, but others are occasionally exaggerated or inflated. Almost exclusively, where there is unsustainable practice, it is done by boats that are well away from their own home port. On scallop dredging and clam fishing, the Shetland Shellfish Management Organisation regulates those that fish for those species in the local waters.
The industry can take credit for what it is going to ask for from the year-end negotiations that the Minister is about to undertake. On blue whiting, for example, the ICES advice is for an 81% increase in the total allowable catch, but the Minister will find that the industry is taking a much more cautious approach. The industry’s view is that an increase of 20% to 25% is much more sustainable. To my mind, that demonstrates the industry’s willingness to say, “Actually, we’re not always pushing for more, bigger, faster and better,” and that it is motivated by sustainability.
Given that the Minister is coming into this job at a very important time of year for the industry, I ask of him only that, as he speaks to his EU counterparts—in Norway, the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland and elsewhere—he always has at his elbow somebody who can tell him what the industry is actually thinking. The industry might give him slightly different advice from that which he might get from his officials. He can choose to follow it or not, but he can only make an informed decision if he has access to the industry. In my experience, industry bodies are responsible and reasonable, and, if given the opportunity, they will offer unwary Ministers opportunities to avoid jumping into holes that they might otherwise find themselves in.
I have taken more time than I would usually have taken, but this is a three-hour debate and these issues are important. Given that the Backbench Business Committee allowed us three hours, it is unfortunate that Members were not able to be here today. This debate was held over from the middle of September, when I know there would have been a lot more Members here. However, given that the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) is here, this is definitely and constitutionally a Westminster Hall debate—it could not be one without him. I am grateful to Members for their indulgence of the extra time that I have taken, and I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.