UK Fishing Industry (Hansard, 29 June 2004)

§ Mr. Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)
It is a rare occasion indeed on which you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, the Minister and I are of a single mind, as we find ourselves to be in relation to the participation of the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond).

It is both a pleasure and a slight irritation to have this debate here and in these circumstances. It is a pleasure because to my constituency and many other fishing constituencies, this matter is of exceptionally high importance. It is an irritation because it is at least three months since the report was published and a 30-minute debate—in fact, it is a 33-minute debate, courtesy of the Minister who spoke previously—in Westminster Hall does not do justice to such an important subject. I hope that this debate might be a taster of a longer and more substantial debate in the not-too-distant future on the Floor of the House.

I welcome the news that the Minister is to visit Shetland towards the end of July. We look forward to seeing him there. I have already had correspondence with him regarding his itinerary. As well as meeting the usual suspects, if I may bracket them like that—the local council, the local fishermen's organisation, the salmon farmers association and the other commercial agriculture interests—all of whom tend to come through London, where he could no doubt see them all if he chose to do so, I hope that he will meet some others. The real benefit of his visiting Shetland is to meet not just those people, but some of the heavily fishing-dependent communities in Shetland.

I have already referred in correspondence to the community of Whalsay, which is perhaps one of the most fishing-dependent communities anywhere in Scotland by virtue of its economy and geography. If the Minister can find time in his programme in Shetland to visit Whalsay, it would be greatly valued by people there and throughout Shetland. It would be seen as a practical example of his finding out for himself the impact on communities and families at the sharp end of some of the things that we occasionally tend to discuss in the abstract.

The Prime Minister's strategy unit report is a substantial piece of work running to some 217 pages, and I welcome a lot of it. A work of this nature that aims to be substantial and comprehensive is long overdue. Due to the time constraints, I will concentrate on the negatives of the report, but I want to stress that there is a great deal that is good and that the Government are to be commended on having undertaken such an exercise.

Since three months have passed since the publication of the report, what I would like to hear from the Minister today is: where is it going now? Who in Government has ownership of the report and what is their road map for implementing it? When the report was published, the fishing industry raised a number of substantial and fundamental concerns about some of its contents. I presume that he has been in dialogue with the industry about that. and I hope that he will tell us exactly what the Government's view is at this stage.

One of the most substantial areas of concern was the report's calculation of the size of the white fish fleet. The significance is that certain assumptions are made about 66WH future decommissioning and tie-up that are based on the purported size of the fleet. I submit to the Minister that, if we start from the wrong base and try to decommission further, we will end up with a white fish fleet that has fallen beneath the critical mass that is needed for a recovered industry.

The report calls for 69 trawlers to be scrapped and another 160 to be tied up for four years. Given that the industry estimates that there are 120 white fish boats in the fleet, one can see the significance of the report's calculations. At the time, it was speculated that the strategy unit's over-estimate of the size of the fleet was caused by the inclusion of prawn boats in the figures, because they often catch white fish as a by-product.

At the time of the report's publication, Mike Park, then chairman of the Scottish White Fish Producers Association, said: They have assumed everyone holding a white-fish licence is fishing for a targeted demersal fishery, which is utter nonsense. The majority of vessels within Scotland with a category A licence catch prawns, but they need the licence to land white fish as a by-catch. There are only 120 dedicated white-fish vessels left in the Scottish fleet compared with 290 three years ago. Hamish Morrison, the chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen's Federation, estimated that the size of the entire UK white fish fleet could be no more than 250 trawlers and not the 1,012 claimed by the strategy unit.

That is obviously fundamental, and it underpins everything else in the strategy unit's report. Where there is such a wide divergence of the views and figures held by the industry and the strategy unit, unless or until the matter is resolved, the credibility of the report in the fishing industry will be seriously undermined.

One suggestion made at the time by the chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen's Federation was that the National Audit Office should look at the methodology and conclusions of the strategy unit with regard to the composition of the white fish fleet. Will the Minister tell us today whether the Government are prepared to undertake that? I suggest to him that the National Audit Office brings with it a degree of independence and a reputation for objective scrutiny that would be of immense assistance to all of us who wish to see the good points of the report advance.

As I said, following on from the assessment of the size of the fleet, there is a worrying recommendation for further decommissioning. The figures suggested by the strategy unit are that there should be a further 13 per cent. of decommissioning and that 30 per cent. should be tied up for the next four years. As I read it, the report says that 13 per cent. decommissioning would cost some £50 million in public spending, but that there would be no money available for Government support for tie-up. The report goes on to state that the industry itself cannot afford to tie up for that length of time, so I do not understand how the Government will square that circle. Perhaps the Minister can explain today his thinking about the situation.

I cannot envisage further decommissioning within the Shetland fleet and the communities that I represent. The Shetland white fish fleet has fallen from 27 trawlers to 14 in just over two years. Given that about 30 per cent. of our local domestic product in Shetland is dependent on fishing in one way or another, we must question what critical mass would remain for the white fish industry 67WH and, following on from that, for Shetland as a whole. If the critical mass is lost in the fishing fleet, the onshore processors, engineers. chandlers and everyone else who depends on fishing will be lost, and once that happens, a substantial proportion of the community will be lost.

Once those jobs are lost in a community such as Shetland, people will not sit around waiting for things to change and get better; they have skills, and they will move on to make a living elsewhere. Such losses are never reflected in our unemployment statistics, because when people lose their jobs they leave the community. As the constant threat in a community such as Shetland is one of depopulation, the stakes for which we are playing in this matter are exceptionally high.

§ Mr. Alex Salmond (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)
Would the hon. Gentleman, who shares my experience, care to reflect on how little—indeed, it is none—of the economic help through decommissioning, for example, feeds down to the supply-based businesses that are the lifeblood of his communities and mine?

§ Mr. Carmichael
I have been a supporter of decommissioning, inasmuch as we all have, as there was clearly a need to help people to leave the industry with some dignity, because the alternative was decommissioning by bankruptcy, but the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right: there has been no trickle down. In fact, the net gainers from decommissioning have been the clearing banks. It is unfortunate that more could not have been done to maintain the position of the ancillary businesses to which I have referred.

The other aspect of the report that I wish to consider today relates to the Government's suggestion that we should adopt an aim of progressively regionalising the management functions of the common fisheries policy. The Minister knows that, like many people who deal with the fishing industry, I am sceptical about whether the common fisheries policy is capable of reform. We went through the whole process that ended up with the Fisheries Council in 2002, which gave us the curious creatures called regional advisory councils. That is not regional management, and it is certainly not what I wanted to see when I stood on a platform of regional management in the CFP in the last general election. Nothing that I have seen since makes me think that there is any political will in the European Union, and in the Commission in particular, to devolve power for day-to-day fisheries management to anything resembling regional management councils.

We have at last got a blueprint for the establishment of regional advisory councils. It is estimated that the first plenary council of the North sea regional advisory council will meet in November, about six weeks before the December Fisheries Council. I wish the regional advisory councils well, but I am sceptical, as I do not believe that they have the necessary powers. I fear that they will comprise stakeholders whose views are already nominally listened to but then ignored, and that all we will do is move from a process in which those people's views are informally listened to and ignored to one in which their views are formally listened to and ignored. That is not the progress that I want.

The Minister must realise that there is a degree of scepticism. What plan does he have to achieve the stated aim of a progressive regionalisation of the management functions of the CFP between now and its next reform in 2012? A pious hope was perhaps good enough in the run-up to the 2002 Fisheries Council, but I am afraid things have moved on to such an extent that that will simply not be enough anymore.

Finally, I want to deal briefly with a couple of issues that are not in the report. First, the report's conclusions and recommendations make no mention of the importance of sea food processors. That sector is also under the cosh, not only because of the situation in the catching sector, but because of importers. Given that the sector accounts for 10,000 jobs in some fragile and vulnerable communities, we need to see some clearer thinking from the Government on that front.

Finally, there is the question of industrial fishing. The Government have had a lot to say about what we should be doing in terms of decommissioning and further tie-up, but the strategy unit report does not seem to address the fact that substantial harm is being done to the ecosystem in the North sea by industrial fishing, particularly by the Danish fleet and by other countries that are now involved in multiple rig trawling. Such conservation issues have to be taken seriously, but there seems to be no place for them in the strategy unit report.

In order to allow the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan to make a short contribution and to hear what the Minister has to say, I conclude my remarks.

§ Mr. Alex Salmond (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)
I warmly congratulate the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Carmichael) on winning this debate and thank him for his courtesy in allowing this short contribution. In return, I endorse every argument that he has put forward to the Minister.

Given the time constraint, I want to touch on only one point, which is what the hon. Gentleman called the "pious hope" in the strategy unit about regionalisation of the common fisheries policy. I put it to the Minister that that is totally incompatible with the Government's allowing exclusive competence over the bulk of fisheries policy to be enshrined in the European constitution.

I do not have time fully to go through the history of how we got into this disastrous position, but it is reasonably well known that during the accession negotiations in the early 1970s, the Government of the day effectively gave away the central legal title over the fisheries policy of this country. That was followed by court judgments in 1976, the first of which was the Kramer judgment, in which the European Court of Justice indulged in Euro-creep and pooled exclusive competence into the purview of the European Commission.

That was a court judgment based on a treaty of accession. What the proposed constitution does is to sanctify and entrench that in one of only four exclusive competences of the European constitution. Those are proposed to be: monetary policy for those in the euro; the customs union, the very foundation of the common market; the commercial policy of the single market; and the conservation of marine biological resources under the common fisheries policy. Everything else— 69WH agriculture, energy, social policy—in the full range of European Union policies has to be a shared competence, but not the bulk of the common fisheries policy. The importance of that is twofold.

First, anything that is a shared competence comes under the protection of subsidiarity. A point that the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister have made much of recently is that shared competences actually give an avenue and a protection for powers to be returned to member states; indeed, for member states to have pre-eminence where they can act better than the Union as a whole. Specifically in the European constitution, exclusive competences are removed from the protection of subsidiarity. I seriously doubt that the Prime Minister was even aware of the importance of what he signed up to. In an exchange in the House on 20 April with my hon. Friend the Member for Moray (Angus Robertson), the Prime Minister said: Fishing is still a shared competence, and we happen to believe that is right."—[Official Report, 20 April 2004; Vol. 420, c. 171.] Presumably the Prime Minister could not possibly have been misleading the House, so we must assume that at that stage he was not even aware of the importance of fishing as an exclusive competence of the European Union.

Secondly, the Fisheries Minister told us on 11 March in a Standing Committee that he was not an enthusiastic supporter of the common fisheries policy."—[Official Report, Standing Committee A, 11 March 2004; c. 19.]

The strategy unit has held out hope of the regionalisation of management functions of that policy. Our point today is: how is that compatible with a European constitution, which entrenches fisheries as an exclusive competence of the European Union? If there were a genuine desire and move to return at least some control of fisheries to the states—to the fishermen, the people who depend on the resources, and the communities for whom it is their lifeblood—that would not have appeared in the European constitution. The Government, unlike that of 30 years ago, would have made some attempt to defend the rights of our fishing industry.

I should like to make one final point. I am a vice-convenor of the European movement. I support the European cause and have done so throughout my political career. However, I shall not join the long litany of political parties and politicians who will sacrifice and jeopardise this vital industry on the altar of their politics. It is high time that the industry was given the priority in Government policy to which it is not accustomed, but to which it is certainly entitled.

§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr. Ben Bradshaw)
I thank the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Carmichael) for securing this debate on a very important report: the first strategic report on the state of the fishing industry in this country, if not for a generation, then probably ever. He remarked at the outset that he was sorry that the debate was happening in Westminster Hall, and with relatively poor attendance—the business being what it is today—and I, too, hope that we shall have an opportunity to discuss 70WH this further on the Floor of the House. We shall certainly be looking for a slot to do that. I was also pleased that he generally welcomed the Report and emphasised at the beginning of his speech that, as is usual in these cases, one tends to concentrate on the negative, in the hope of getting a response from Ministers.

I also thank the hon. Gentleman for his kind suggestions on how I should spend my time when I visit his constituency, as I hope to do at the end of July. I cannot remember a visit that has engendered so much interest, which is probably a good indication of the level of interest in this matter in his constituency, and of its economic and social importance to his constituents. I look forward very much to my visit, although I fear already that I shall disappoint some people in terms of what I can and cannot do, but I intend to spend a day and a half there, which I hope will give me a good opportunity to see a lot and to meet as many people as possible.

The Prime Minister's strategy unit took a long, hard look at our fishing industry and where we should like it to be in 10 or 20 years. It is timely, because we all know of the difficulties that the white fish sector, in particular, has been suffering for some time. The report paints a very positive message: it says that the industry as a whole, including the white fish sector, has a sustainable and profitable future, provided that we do not shirk the task of addressing certain fundamental problems.

In summary, the basic message of the report is as follows: the industry must ensure the quality of its product and take steps to compete on the global market; some further reduction in the UK white fish fleet will be needed—I shall come on to the controversy about numbers in a moment—to make it economically viable; compliance and the quality of catch data must be improved in the UK and throughout the EU; we must progressively regionalise fisheries management both at the EU and national level and make it more flexible and responsive to fishermen's input; fishing must be integrated more fully into the broader marine management process, with a balanced set of rights and responsibilities; and the Government must adopt policies that recognise and support vulnerable fishing-dependent communities. I do not think that right hon. and hon. Members here today would disagree with any of that.

The Government have already said that they accept the report's broad conclusions, but the detail of how to put them into effect should now be the subject of full discussion among all interested parties, not least because action is required from the fishing industry and the wider range of users of the marine environment, as well as from the Government.

I shall move on to the process of where we go next in a moment, but let me address some of the issues that the hon. Gentleman raised about the strategy unit report. First, he expressed some disappointment with the extent of common fisheries reform so far, and asked whether this was the end. It certainly is not, and we are thinking all the time about how we can push CFP reform further. We achieved a significant reform in the Council the December before last, much of which is only now being implemented. As the hon. Gentleman said, the first regional advisory council for the North sea hopes to 71WH meet this autumn. That was agreed at the last but one Council of Ministers meeting, which also agreed funding for regional advisory councils.

Things are happening, although there was quite a lot of scepticism when the process was set up that it would be just window dressing or a talking shop. I do not believe that the Commission would have agreed to set up such a structure if it was not going to take any notice of it. In the discussions that I have had—I had one yesterday on the issue of extra days for the white fish fleet under the haddock permit system—there is a recognition right at the top of the Commission that business as usual is no longer tenable. As illustrated in the strategy unit report, we would like to have regional managers, responsible for managing the industry in parts of the United Kingdom. Those individuals would be answerable to the regional advisory councils.

The hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond) raised the old chestnut, as he always does, of how there can be any meaningful regional management element to the CFP as long as the part—he generally avoids this point—of the policy relating to the marine environment remains an exclusive competence. I use the word "remains" because it always has been an exclusive competence of the CFP. We are going to have to agree to disagree on what the constitution says and whether it makes any difference. That seemed to me to be the major plank of his party's campaign during the European elections in Scotland, and it did not do him a lot of good.

§ Mr. Salmond
Will the Minister give way?

§ Mr. Bradshaw
If the hon. Gentleman does not mind, I will not. We have all been very generous to him in allowing him to contribute to the debate, and I want to respond to several points that were made by the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland.

The strategy unit suggested a number of other reforms such as setting up a marine agency in the UK. The Government are considering that; it is a medium to long-term measure, but as with other matters, we shall keep the momentum of reform going.

The report mentions processing, but it is largely concerned with the catching sector. It emphasises the economic importance of the processing sector, and its success in various parts of the country, not just in relation to fish caught by the domestic catching sector. We must also bear it in mind that when we discuss the industry, we are talking not just about the catching sector, but about processes, the food industry and so on. Much of that industry is doing very well and, as the strategy unit suggests, a lot of it could do better if we were better at adding value to what is a wonderful, natural resource.

§ Mr. Salmond
North of the Tay, from Dundee northwards, the Scottish National party was the leading party in the European elections, as the Minister knows. He referred to part of the fisheries policy. I have a letter from the Foreign Secretary, dated 26 August last year, which says that fisheries policy falls mostly within the area of exclusive competence.

§ Mr. Bradshaw
Yes, but the hon. Gentleman is aware that inshore fisheries and so on are matters of national competence.

I want to address a point made by the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland about the size of the fleet. There still seems to be some confusion about that because originally the industry was talking about 157 boats in Scotland but, according to the hon. Gentleman, it is now talking about 120, and the official figure from the Scottish Executive was 370. My understanding is that there have already been discussions between the strategy unit and the industry in Scotland, and the reason for what the industry sees as the inflated number in the original report was that nephrops and saithe boats were included. I understand that consensus on numbers has now been reached. If that is not so, I am happy to look again at a possible role for the Audit Commission because it is clearly important that we all base our discussions on similar numbers. What I do not want is to have an argument about boat numbers ad nauseam as a means of avoiding some of the decisions that might have to be made on other issues.

The hon. Gentleman referred to decommissioning, which is a sensitive issue, particularly in Scotland. The strategy unit report recommends further decommissioning, and we shall have to discuss that in depth with the industry before deciding on the details of how to proceed. We shall certainly listen to the arguments of the hon. Gentleman, the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan and the industry, and I shall not prejudge the outcome of those discussions this afternoon. In the end, what happens in Scotland will be a matter for Scotland's Fisheries Minister and not for me.

§ Mr. Carmichael
The Minister will be aware that Jack McConnell, Scotland's First Minister, has already discounted the possibility of further decommissioning. Given the dominance of the Scottish fleet within the white fish sector, does that not mean that it is finished as an idea?

§ Mr. Bradshaw
I am not sure that the hon. Gentleman is giving a fair representation of what the First Minister said, but the strategy unit is clear. We are not discussing anything in the short term and I am about to explain briefly how we will proceed.

We will launch the process of engagement with interested parties very shortly. That will involve three levels of engagement to ensure that everyone with an interest has a way of feeding in their views, concerns and suggestions. First, there will be a system of working groups to enable those with knowledge and experience relevant to particular issues, from outside Government and within, to feed in their analysis and suggestions. Obviously, the fish catchers will have a significant role reflecting their absolutely central interest, but we shall also need significant input from the wider fishing industry and from the wide range of other interests with a stake in or concern for the marine environment.

Secondly, there will be a higher level stakeholder advisory group, representing all interest groups, to enable the members of the entire community of interested parties to add strategic level comments to the work coming out of the working groups. Thirdly, there will be a more general engagement based on a consultation letter and a website where all-comers can check the state of thinking and feed in comments.

What we want to come out of this is a Government response informed not just by the comments of all stakeholders, but by active discussion with them, and an action plan for delivering the changes and improvements highlighted in the report, "Net Benefits".

Obviously, I cannot highlight the details of the response and the action plan now as they must emerge from the comprehensive engagement process that we have planned. We want a plan that addresses the whole range of issues identified by the strategy unit and does not cherry-pick some issues for attention and leave out others. The way forward, when it is adopted, must respect the analysis of the strategy unit and address the 74WH problems that it identified. If the plans adopted are different from what the strategy unit recommends, they must still address the underlying problem.

I and my colleagues look forward to a constructive discussion on the way forward. This is the first time for many a long year that the chance has come along for those concerned about the future of fisheries and their place in our society, economy and the marine environment to come together to create a better future. We must not pass up that opportunity.