DEVELOPMENT OF FISHING (SCOTLAND) (Hansard, 3 March 1970)

§ Mr. George Younger (Ayr)

I beg to Move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to carry out certain of the recommendations in the report of the Hunter Committee to assist in the development of fishing in Scotland. The House will remember that it was as long ago as 12th March, 1962, that the Hunter Committee was set up by the last Conservative Government with a wide remit to review the law relating to salmon and trout fisheries in Scotland. The committee produced an interim report on the subject of drift-net fishing for salmon in the sea on 10th June, 1963, and produced its final report on 24th May, 1965. This was the result of over 50 meetings covering 66 days of work, and ran in all to 109 pages, which have been generally agreed to be a most useful and thorough review of the subject resulting in a considerable number of detailed recommendations.

It is now very nearly five years since the publication of that report and over eight years since the Hunter Committee was set up. Over the past two years there has been growing anxiety among those concerned with the need to develop fishing in Scotland at the absence of any action, or even any clear statement of intention, from the Government on this matter. It is in an attempt to meet at least some of this concern which comes from anglers' clubs, tourist interests and private owners that I am asking leave today to introduce my Bill.

Everyone will agree that the subject is most complicated. There are those who believe sincerely that nothing whatever can or should be done until a complete change of all aspects of fishing has been drawn up and agreed. I can well see the force of this, but I submit that to wait for all the technical experiments which will be needed to form a sensible solution to the problems of fishing as a whole and salmon fishing in particular will be to wait for several more years; and these are years which we cannot afford to waste at a time when leisure for us all is in such need of development and when the true potential of tourism is so greatly hampered by the inadequacy of the law.

274 As I am so well aware of the difficulties, the measures which I shall propose in the Bill are only a very small first step. I do not propose that the fishing of salmon or migratory trout shall be in any way affected. Nor would I propose to bring in any measures affecting rivers, as I think that these must await a fuller implementation of the Hunter Report as a whole. Nor would I propose to include any of the area covered by the River Tweed Commissioners, as they have already introduced by other means their own arrangements, which, I understand, are working satisfactorily.

I propose to confine the proposals in the Bill, which is a difficult matter for a private Member to introduce, to fishing in fresh water lochs which are fairly easy to define. There are approximately 10,000 such lochs in Scotland, according to the best information I can find. Although by no means all of these are suitable for stocking with brown trout, very many of them are.

The problem at present is that in most cases it simply is not practicable to stock and manage such fisheries properly, because the law does not allow adequate protection for the resultant fishing by those who have contributed in some way towards the proper costs of management. This is particularly inhibiting to anglers' clubs which wish to develop such fishing for the benefit of all their members and also to people and organisations who genuinely wish to develop such fishing for the tourist trade, which is a vital earner of foreign currency and which is crying out for expansion.

I shall, therefore, propose in the Bill the setting up of a Scottish anglers' trust, as suggested in paragraph 117 of the Hunter Report but on a smaller scale, to deal only at present with the development of brown trout fishing in fresh water lochs. The trust would be a sort of co-operative of anglers and would be able to register, on request by the owners or tenants, a loch, provided that it was properly managed and that it was properly open for fishing, by members in the case of an angling club, or by the public on some reasonable form of payment in other cases. A loch thus registered would then be entitled to protection by law against unauthorised fishing by those who had not in anyway contributed 275 to the upkeeping of the fishing. Registration would not be granted unless these conditions were met.

Anyone who has studied the Hunter Report will agree that these proposals are modest in the extreme and cannot be a substitute for implementation of the report as a whole in due course.

Nor am I in any way inflexible as to the suggestions I would make in the Bill. I should be glad to co-operate in any alterations which may be suggested either by the Government or by the Opposition. I ask only that we do not allow the complete delay that we have had on any action of any kind for so long to continue indefinitely into the future. In saying this, I am certain that I speak for the vast majority of those interested in fishing in Scotland.