§ Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Goodlad.]
10.25 pm§ Mr. Austin Mitchell (Grimsby)There could not be a more important debate for the fishing industry at the moment than this brief Adjournment debate on fish imports and their effect on prices. Nor could there be a more graphic demonstration of the level to which the industry has been reduced by the imports and their effect on prices and the importance of the problem than last week's collective refusal by British fishing vessels to put to sea. The refusal is still being maintained in Scotland. It ended in Grimsby only last Friday, with an undertaking that if the Government had taken no action in eight weeks it would be resumed.
The situation is desperate. The industry is staggering towards bankruptcy. The reason is not that its catches are down in a major way over the past couple of years but that its receipts are down. It is therefore not able to pay the increased costs, particularly for fuel, and interest rates. Every issue of Fishing News reports that receipts are down. In 1980, Peterhead's two top trawlers dropped £100,000 each. The average earnings of the majority of vessels there dropped 20 per cent. in 1980. I have a host of settling sheets for Grimsby vessels that show similar results. Even the receipts for quite good trips are down.
If the crew share the profit of the catch, they also share the loss, and at the end of the trip they are in debt. The debts range from £10 to £200. The picture is one of accumulating debt in the industry. The debt falls on the skipper who has borrowed to pay for his boat, the crew who are struggling to pay the debts accumulated on various trips, and the agent who carries the debts of the crew. The industry is moving rapidly into debt.
I am pleased that the fish market is a free market. Sometimes it moves in a mysterious way. At a time of low landings vessels that come in late can get surprisingly good prices for their fish. To some extent, the market is inevitably a lottery. The basic point is simple. A skipper yesterday told me that last year his receipts were up £1 a kit. However, even when receipts are up, they are not sufficiently large to cover increasing costs—and fuel costs rose 20 per cent. last year—and in most cases receipts are substantially down. The fishermen are in serious difficulties.
I have here receipts for two typical Grimsby vessels for various parts of the season. In December 1978, the "Betty Anne" pair trawler was making, on average, 51p per kilo. By last November that was down to 37p. The "Mary Ronn", a seine netter, in November 1978 was making 58p per kilo. By November last year, that was down to 38p per kilo. Out of that people are expected to pay the steadily increasing charges on the industry, the interest charges and all the other costs which have been rising.
It is because the fall in prices has been associated with a long-term surge of imports rising steadily each year—even last year, although they did not rise much, they held their own in a depressed market—that the industry blames imports for its present predicament. In particular, it blames the surge of imports occurring in the early part of each year and bringing down prices.
If the Government are committed, as apparently they are, to work within the EEC, it is essential that the 113 Common Market, which has done so well for agriculture and in maintaining the standard of living of agricultural producers, should extend the same service and the same rule to the fish producers and the fishermen, whose standard of living is steadily being squeezed and steadily suffering. If the Common Market is so adept at providing orderly marketing of agricultural products, it should guarantee the standard of living of the fish producers by providing the same kind of orderly marketing for fish products, so that the industry will no longer be in its present situation of going steadily bankrupt because its receipts are down.
The first requirement is orderly marketing. The Scottish fishermen preferred to go about this by means of a minimum price scheme. But this broke down in Scotland last year, just as it broke down in Grimsby last year.
Apart from not being in the interests of Grimsby, I believe that such a minimum price scheme has three serious disadvantages. First, it can work only when there are local minimum prices. It does not work very well on a open market such as Grimsby's. Secondly, it is payable to imports as well as to domestic landings, whereas the whole aim of such a procedure should be to help the domestic producer rather than the importer. Thirdly, it tends to lead to fishing for compensation, so that vessels are out catching small fish—what the industry calls "rubbish fish", although it is put more graphically than that—just to get the income from the minimum price scheme.
It is far better to go for a deficiency payments scheme in which there is a Government guaranteed minimum price which is set on the actual costs of fishing. When the market price falls below that Government guaranteed price, a deficiency payment is made to the producer. The deficiency payment is made only to the local producer, the British fishermen, not to imports, and is differentiated according to size and quality. There is thus no incentive to go on remorselessly catching small fish and dumping them on the market just to get a return.
The industry's best interests are therefore served by a deficiency payments scheme backed by the Government which brings the guaranteed price into line with the actual cost of fishing, because if the prices obtained by the industry do not reflect costs, in any marketing system in which the minimum prices, whatever they are, do not reflect costs, everything else is purely cosmetic.
A guaranteed deficiency payments scheme has the advantage of bringing up the price. That is the crucial factor, because it edges up the whole structure of prices. It edges up the guide price. If that is brought into line with the actual cost of catching the fish, we can bring up the reference prices and the withdrawal prices so that all will come into line with the cost of catching the fish.
The second need, apart from a deficiency payments scheme, is to restrict the flow of imports, particularly frozen imports. The present situation is potentially disastrous, in that those countries which have had the good sense to take 200-mile limits and to build up their stocks with conservation measures behind those limits are likely, within the next few years, to be in a position to swamp our market with their growing export of fish.
The market must be protected from that threat, which is building up. There is already talk of Canada sending us 30,000 tonnes per year for the next three years. Such an 114 influx would be a disaster for the domestic industry. It is vital, therefore, that we have some regulation of imports, if that will not ruin our industry.
There is no doubt also that, as well as third party imports, a good proportion of the problem is now caused by the EEC itself, specifically Holland and Belgium. Dutch and Belgian fish—fish apparently caught beyond the quotas that those countries are permitted, and not counted towards those quotas—is coming into this country, some of it detoured from the Market, and ruining our prices. It is encouraged by the high pound and it is helping to ruin our industry.
There is a problem with the pound and with the cheap transport costs, but the basic problem is the flow of cheap imports and the effect on prices. Something is drastically wrong with the fact that fish from the Netherlands can be sold at up to £1 a stone less than the EEC minimum on the Grimsby market.
We seem to be moving towards a fish merry-go-round, just as we have a merry-go-round with pigs and butter. We have reports of Polish fish caught in the Baltic and going into Denmark and Holland before coming on to the British market in containers from those countries. There are also reports of British fish being sent to Norway and then coming back from Norway. I gather that some of it is due to arrive on the Grimbsby market this week, presumably collecting an import-export subsidy from somewhere, either from Norway or from the Common Market. There must be some incentive to send the fish on its merry-go-round way.
This kind of Common Market folly, and the over-fishing that it helps to encourage and to maintain, will ruin the industry if it is allowed to carry on. It is no use the Government saying "Give us the examples and we shall follow them up". The industry cannot keep track of all that is going on, and it is vital that the help of Government Departments—particularly the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and the Customs and Excise—should be invoked in producing examples.
In order to solve problems of this kind it is right for the industry to ask for an emergency levy on all fish imports, from the EEC or anywhere else, to help give us what is so essential in the industry—a managed market, an orderly marketing system, in which the British producer is not forced into bankruptcy by the remorseless flow of imports.
It is no use simply saying that we have problems with the EEC. Of course we have problems with the EEC. But the EEC has failed to act. It has failed to put up the official withdrawal prices on the Continent to a realistic level. It has failed to enforce proper quotas. It has failed to bring about orderly marketing. Indeed, the EEC has the provision in the basic marketing regulation, 100/76, and in article 22, that if a crisis develops the Commission "shall", at the request of a member, take the necessary measures in 24 hours. Why has not a request gone from our Government for the Commission to take what measures it can to deal with the position?
§ Mr. Albert McQuarrie (Aberdeenshire, East)I am following the hon. Gentleman's case very carefully because, as he rightly says, the position is urgent. He will agree that one of the biggest problems is not only the quantity of fish that is imported from the EEC but that which comes from other countries. From the EEC in 1980 there were 109,486 tonnes, and from countries outside the EEC there were 132,211 tonnes, making a gross total of 115 241,687 tonnes, at an approximate value of £18 million. This, as the hon. Gentleman rightly says, is the problem with which the fishermen have been confronted. There has been this mass of imports. I am not saying that there should not be any imports, because obviously the processors must have some, but somebody will have to get to grips with the present position if the fishing industry is to be saved.
§ Mr. MitchellI am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for those figures, because it is important to have them. The scale of the problem is as he has described it. Although the interests of the processor have to be safeguarded, it is important that we have the market more managed than it now is, because the scale and flow of the imports is proving unpredictable, particularly in the first few months of each year, and because it is unpredictable the effect on the prices is disastrous.
There is an urgent need for an aid package for the industry. In this mounting crisis of debt, aid is necessary to show that the Government still have confidence in the industry. At present the fishermen are in debt to the agents, the agents are in debt to the banks and the skippers are in debt to the banks. They are all pressed by the mounting burden of interest, and they are all in danger of closure if the situation continues or becomes worse.
I emphasise that we accept that the Minister has the interests of the industry very much at heart and has worked hard in its interest. I also accept that there is a need for the type of inquiry that the Minister has initiated into the marketing of fish and the advertising and promotion of fish. It is important for the long-term future of the market that we put fish into people's heads as well as into their stomachs in order to regenerate the demand for fish, which has been deficient in the last few years. It is clear that the industry is now facing a serious crisis. It is struggling against bankruptcy because its receipts are down and because the price of fish is depressed by imports as a result of the strong pound and a lack of orderly EEC marketing, which are outside the control of the fishing industry.
The industry is facing a crisis not only this year. The crisis has prevailed for two years running, so the basic facts about what is happening and why are now well known.
The industry desperately needs Government action, orderly marketing and management of imports and aid to keep it going and to help it survive through the crisis. If it does not get that aid, the explosion of hostility and anger that took place last week, not only in Scotland but in Grimsby—the bitterness, arrests and desperation—is certain to recur. The Government must take some action to show that they are as concerned about the crisis as is the industry. If the crisis continues, and if there is another explosion of anger, there will be a breakdown in the control that the fishermen's organisations have been able to exercise over their members, and there will be a breakdown of order that will be far worse than anything we have seen up to now. The industry is going bankrupt and the fishermen are coming back from trips in dept. These people have so little to lose, and they are desperate for action from the Government to deal with the problem.
§ The Minister of State, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Mr. Alick Buchanan-Smith)I am 116 glad that the hon. Member for Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell) has had the opportunity to raise this important subject. I know how difficult it is, because of competition, to obtain an Adjournment debate, and I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on obtaining one on this topical subject.
Because of my contacts with the fishing industry I need no persuading about how seriously the industry views the current events. Anyone who has followed the events of recent days—the blockading of ports, and so on—must be conscious of the deep anxieties and concern amongst many sections of the fishing industry.
Without in any way trying to play down or underestimate the intensity and strength of feeling about the matter, I must say that it was significant that the hon. Gentleman said that this is the second year running in which there has been a crisis. It would be fairer to say that it is one of many years in succession when there has been a problem of imports during the early stages of the calendar year. During the last two years the intensity of the problem, particularly in the face of rising costs in the industry, as in other industries, has become more serious. We must remind ourselves that the phenomenon of increased imports at this time of the year is not unusual. As the hon. Gentleman knows, this is the time of the year when traditionally there is less fish available from our sources of fishing, because of bad weather that affects our grounds more than others.
There is reaction to that in that this is the month when our processors, for fear of disruption of supplies, tend to look overseas for supplies more than they do at other times of the year. At the same time, countries like the Netherlands, who fish in the southern North Sea, where large quantities of fish are available, take greater quantities than they can absorb. In no sense, therefore, of trying to belittle the problems facing the industry, it is worth reflecting that what we are seeing this year and what we saw last year is an intensification of a trend that has taken place for a number of reasons.
I appreciate and understand the difficulties, but the hon. Member for Grimsby might do better if he did not try to talk in headlines about some of the problems facing the industry. Comments such as "staggering towards bankruptcy", "drastically wrong" and "merry-go-round for fish" are good for headlines, but in many ways they do not help to resolve the problems facing the industry. Let me pick up the last of those phrases. The hon. Member said hastily, and swiftly moved on, that this is what the industry says, and that it is up to the Government to discover what is happening. The Government do try to find out what is happening. If there are complaints, it helps the Government, in trying to trace whether the complaints are well-founded, if the evidence, gossip or whatever the allegations are based on can be given to me or my officials. I assure the House that we shall follow them up. But many of them are simply rumours, allegations and gossip.
I remind the hon. Gentleman that Mr. Nigel Atkins, the chief executive of the NFFO, was quoted in The Times of 5 February as saying that in many cases the allegations about fish coming from Holland at below EEC withdrawal prices were "purely anecdotal, nothing else". Mr. Atkins was correct. It does the industry no good if its case is built on allegations or gossip which cannot be substantiated.
It is significant to note what we have read—I am sure that this goes for my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeenshire, East (Mr. McQuarrie), who has shown his interest by attending the debate tonight—of two skippers 117 from Peterhead who visited a port in Holland. I have not spoken to the two skippers, and therefore I am careful in what I say, but the report was in Fishing News, which normally reports with considerable accuracy. They said that there was no indication of any fish failing to reach minimum prices. That was the evidence of two Scottish skippers who had taken the trouble, with the support of their fellow skippers, to visit Holland to learn at first hand what is happening there.
§ Mr. Austin MitchellI accept what the Minister said about the anecdotal nature of the evidence. However, evidence has been put across on television about the Dutch fiddling of the quotas in one specific port, and about the French failure to observe the herring ban. What else can the industry produce but anecdotal evidence? Surely it is the responsibility of officials, particularly in the Customs and Excise department, to keep an organised and controlled watch on this matter—something the industry is incapable of doing. The evidence is bound to be anecdotal. It comes from fishermen, lorry drivers and isolated incidents. The industry just does not have the organisation necessary to maintain the kind of watch that the Government should operate.
§ Mr. Buchanan-SmithI understood that the subject of the debate, and of the hon. Gentleman's allegations, was imports of fish. That is what I was asking for evidence about. Overfishing of quotas or illegal fishing has taken place. We have been given evidence to substantiate allegations and the result has been that prosecutions have taken place in France. Indeed, the Commission has taken action against the French Government in relation to that matter. That bears out what I said. When we are given evidence to substantiate allegations, we have taken action, and we shall do the same with regard to imports.
I am dealing with imports—the subject of the debate. That is why, if there is evidence of illegal imports, I want to deal with it every bit as much as does the hon. Gentleman. I do not want the industry to suffer problems as a result of illegalities any more than the hon. Gentleman does. The industry has enough problems to contend with which are not based on illegalities, but if there are illegalities let us get to the root of them and deal with them. Therefore, if the hon. Gentleman has evidence and believes that there is any truth in the allegations, I ask him to let me have that evidence. In the same way as we have had evidence of breaches of conservation measures and taken action, so we will take action on illegal imports if there is evidence to support such action.
The problems on imports are twofold. As my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeenshire, East pointed out, we have the problem of third country imports. As half our imports come from third countries, obviously we must take very great care. Last year, through the Commission, we succeeded in getting certain tariffs restored to proper levels and we also raised certain reference prices.
We are still not happy about the way that the Commission has enforced the reference price system. Obviously a great deal can be done if we have a new 118 marketing regulation in consequence of a renegotiated common fisheries policy, but I do not believe that the Commission is adequately enforcing the powers that it already has. Our industry has therefore suffered from imports coming in at below the proper reference price.
We have made a number of specific reports and asked the Commission to take action. In January, we sent 22 reports to the Commission and asked for action to be taken. I have raised this matter in the Council of Ministers in the past week, and the Commissioner has given me a personal undertaking that these cases will be investigated. Our complaints have been based on evidence, not on allegations. I assure the House that I shall continue to take action, where possible, in those areas.
However, as the hon. Gentleman said, the real problem is not quite so much imports from third countries as imports from Europe. The main problem is the strong pound. I have taken this matter up with the Dutch Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries. The pound has strengthened 27 per cent. in relation to the guilder from a year ago. Therefore, as the evidence of Scottish skippers appeared to show, even adding on transport costs, fish can come into this country at below the level of minimum withdrawal prices here expressed in sterling. That is the basic problem faced not only by the fishing industry but by other industries in this country.
What should we do? The hon. Gentleman put forward a number of suggestions. There are four areas in which we have taken action. First, as I said, we have taken action in relation to third countries directly with the Commissioner in Brussels. I shall certainly keep the House informed of the outcome in relation to that matter.
Secondly, we have had discussions with the Dutch Government, and they have undertaken to watch the situation to make sure that there are no marketing illegalities.
Thirdly, my right hon. Friend has asked two of his marketing advisers to look into the whole question of fish marketing here. That should help to get at the truth of marketing problems.
Fourthly, as my right hon. Friend announced last week, we have asked the industry to co-operate with us in a specific investigation into what is going on about imports. Tomorrow afternoon my right hon. Friends the Minister and the Secretary of State for Scotland will be meeting representatives of the fishing organisations to discuss precisely how that investigation should be carried out.
In those four ways we have taken action. The results of these actions are still to be seen, and I understand that. But, on top of that, we have brought forward the review of the financial state of the industry, which again we shall be discussing with members of the fishing organisations tomorrow, because we believe that the state of the industry and the financial problems that it is now facing are such that we must bring forward this review and discuss with the industry what must be done to meet what is admittedly a very serious situation.
§ Question put and agreed to.
§ Adjourned accordingly at six minutes to Eleven o'clock.