Westminster Hall

Wednesday 3rd December 2014 Westminster Hall

Wednesday 3 December 2014

[Mr David Crausby in the Chair]

UK Sea Bass Stocks

Wednesday 3rd December 2014 Westminster Hall

Motion made, and Question proposed, That the sitting be now adjourned.—(Harriett Baldwin.)

09:30

[George Hollingbery (Meon Valley) (Con)]

I am grateful to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Crausby. It is a pleasure to be here debating the important subject of the management of sea bass in the UK.

For many years, those involved in sea bass fishing in the UK have warned that the stock has been left increasingly vulnerable by weak management tools and practices. Now, almost too late and certainly with far too little, the European Union and others have woken up to the potential for a total collapse in the sea bass population in our domestic waters. Some may say that I am being overdramatic, and some may say that we have all been here before and that it will all get better in due course. I say they are wrong. This is happening now, it is happening to us and it needs to be dealt with.

In 2013, the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, which advises the European Union on the strategies needed to exploit our fishing resources safely, proposed a 36% reduction in the catch of sea bass. That proposal was not acted upon. Now, less than a year later, ICES advises an 80% reduction. We only have to look at the Irish experience of the early 1990s to know what comes next if we hesitate: a total failure of the stock and a total ban on all forms of bass fishing. The tragedy is that we do not need to go there. We need only grip the problem here and now, to a scale and design that will make a real difference.

The question is: how on earth did we end up here in the first place? By any reckoning, we now pursue bass much more actively and much more successfully than in the past. The exploitation of sea bass has increased hugely across all areas, and current landings run at a level roughly four times that of the early 1990s. In addition, fishing activity is now often targeted at spawning aggregations. Studies show that bass spawn offshore in the English channel and the eastern Celtic sea from February to May, and as they do so they become sitting ducks for pair trawlers, which ruthlessly exploit them. New spawning aggregations in the English channel are being discovered and targeted, including some inside the 12-mile limit off the Kent and Sussex coasts.

On top of all that, nothing like the number of fish that should be reaching breeding size actually do so because of a farcically low minimum landing size. Bass are a slow-growing species, and female bass do not become sexually mature, in UK waters at least, until they are at least 42 cm in length, and some estimates put the figure as high as 46 cm. The current minimum landing size is an absolutely ludicrous 36 cm. That was set back in 1989, when even the Department’s own estimate said that the maximum sustainable yield for sea bass would be reached if the minimum landing size was 50 cm, yet still we sit here with the level at 36 cm.

An increased minimum landing size for bass, coupled with a corresponding increase in mesh sizes, would be a huge positive for the UK bass fishery. Over the years much time has been spent on trying to convince those in charge to increase the UK MLS. The right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw), who is here today, nearly managed to implement the reforms when he was Fisheries Minister in 2007, but alas, just before he could pull the lever, he was replaced and the whole thing dropped through the floor before it could reach the statute book. Unfortunately, his successor did not carry on with the implementation, which is a tragedy. We are now living with the consequences of that change.

In 2012, the then Fisheries Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon), who is also with us today, initiated a further review. That the study is still in train was confirmed by the current Minister in 2013, although it has yet to be published; hopefully we will hear a little more about that later. Technical papers suggest that the main benefit, at least in terms of yield, of management aimed at protecting juvenile sea bass, which increasing the MLS would do, chiefly accrues to fisheries operating within the six-mile zone. The implication is that there is every reason to increase the MLS here in the UK unilaterally, whatever happens at EU level. We will benefit, whatever the rest of Europe decides to do.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I am pleased that my hon. Friend has secured this debate, because this is a big issue in my constituency. Does he agree that enormous damage is done to the feeding and spawning beds of sea bass by pair trawlers, which drag the bottom of the oceans and take away all the seaweed? Does he acknowledge that one solution might be to restrict sea bass to sea anglers? It has been calculated that in Sussex the value of sea angling is more than £31 million, including tackle, accommodation and boats. That is more than three times the value of commercially landed fish stocks. Such a measure would go a long way towards conservation, too.

[George Hollingbery]

I agree with my hon. Friend. I will allude to the study that he is referencing a little later in my remarks. On the ecological damage done by pair trawling and indeed by other sorts of trawling, including otter trawling, there is no doubt that it is very destructive to the environment. Although it is effective and useful for commercial fishermen, all of us interested in sea angling should look to do something about it more generally than just with specific reference to sea bass. That is an important issue.

Finally in the sorry tale that I was outlining, the average recruitment—the number of sub-one-year-old fish being added to the fishery—between 2008 to 2012 was less than a quarter of the long-term average. We are fishing more, we are increasingly targeting sea bass, we are specifically fishing out breeding shoals and we are not allowing the young stock to reach spawning age. How much more is there to say other than that, in an ecosystem that is supposed to be carefully managed, such practices are, to use an American phrase, as dumb as dirt? I do not know how else to describe the situation. There could not be a worse way of managing a fishery that we apparently want to keep for the longer term.

Before looking more closely at the current policy proposals for managing the problem, it is worth spending a bit longer talking about the economics, to which my hon. Friend just referred. There is a crucial difference between the returns in the commercial and recreational sectors. If we are to reach a sustainable, long-term solution, it is critical that we understand that well. The best data we have on the catches of the commercial and recreational bass fishing sectors in the UK are in the “Sea Angling 2012” report published by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. That study modelled the recreational share of the total as being somewhere between 20% and 33% of the retained catch landed in the UK, but it is clear about the lack of statistical certainty in the data on recreational catches and angling activity:

“Respondents were self-selecting and unlikely to be representative of all sea anglers. On average they were more avid and successful anglers than those interviewed in the other more statistically designed Sea Angling 2012 surveys, reporting higher catch rates, more days fished, and higher membership of clubs and national angling bodies.”

In short, there are good reasons to believe that the likely level of recreational landings is much lower than the report suggests, or is, at the very least, at the bottom end of the report’s estimate.

It is also clear that the economic activity generated by recreational angling dwarfs that of the commercial sector. “Sea Angling 2012” shows that there are 884,000 sea anglers in England. They directly pump £1.23 billion into the economy, and 10,500 full-time jobs depend on that spending. Indirect spend is equivalent to £2.1 billion and 23,600 jobs. Those figures are direct from the Department.

[Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. On a day when we are celebrating our long-term economic plan, does he agree that we need to support individual anglers and the economic activity he describes? If we need evidence of the difference he proposes, we can look to our hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon), whose actions in government have directly caused an increase in economic output off the north-east coast by reason of the salmon that is now seen in the Tyne.

[George Hollingbery]

I agree completely. It is always difficult to quantify exactly the economic benefit of fishing done for fun, but all the evidence points inescapably towards it being an extremely important stream of revenue, in particular for less economically advantaged areas, of which there are a great many in the south-west and the part of the world that my hon. Friend represents.

It is also worth noting that the VAT alone that is collected from sea anglers dwarfs the entire first sale value of all commercial fish landings in the UK. That demonstrates the scale of the economic benefit of recreational angling. That was further reaffirmed by a detailed study released last Friday, to which my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) referred, by the highly respected Marine Resources Assessment Group on behalf of the Blue Marine Foundation. The study took a detailed look at sea bass fishing in the Sussex Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authority—a control area for fishing—and its conclusions are nothing short of startling. Its low-end estimate was that the economic and employment benefit per tonne of fish removed by recreational bass angling was more than 40 times that of commercial fishing—a pretty extraordinary statistic in anybody’s book. Despite the much smaller weight of fish removed by recreational anglers in the Sussex IFCA, the total benefit to the local economy of recreational angling was still, as my hon. Friend said, more than three times that of commercial fishing.

We know for a fact that recreational bass fishing is worth far more to the economy than commercial fishing, and is a great deal more sustainable. That is one of many reasons why the current EU proposals are puzzling to the point of bewilderment. As the Minister knows only too well, they propose limiting recreational anglers to only one fish per day, despite the fact that, as far as I understand it, the EU has no competence over people who go fishing for recreation, and, indeed, the pretty skimpy evidence that recreational anglers are the problem. For one spawning area, area IVc—I will happily share the map of the areas with colleagues who wish to see it—the EU makes an as yet incomplete proposal to limit the daily amount of fish taken during the spawning period by a certain number of vessels. We genuinely know no more than that. How that is supposed to make a meaningful difference to the current situation is, frankly, anybody’s guess. In my view, it is the political equivalent of trying to stop your house falling down by painting it a different colour.

We all know what needs to be done. The French know it, the Dutch know it, we know it—everybody knows it, so for goodness’ sake, let us get on and actually do it, finally, for once. We have to drastically reduce the amount of fish taken. We have to allow fish to reach sexual maturity. We have to stop most, if not all, fishing in the spawning season. We have to do a better job of protecting and enhancing nursery areas. Finally, we have to grasp the undeniable reality that converting the fishery to one dominated by recreational fishing is the only long-term solution that will protect our economic interests and give the fish a future. Any solution that markets itself as long-term but does not deal with all those issues will fail; of that there can be little or no doubt.

[Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend not only on securing the debate but on making such a powerful case. Does he agree that the Government must also ensure that the IFCAs properly engage with recreational anglers? When I go to IFCA meetings, I see that the commercial fishermen have a far greater influence in the workings of the IFCA than the recreational anglers. That problem must be addressed if we are to get the changes that my hon. Friend rightly identified.

[George Hollingbery]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, but that will only happen when the IFCAs and others understand and accept the importance of recreational angling and see the Government outline a direction of travel. Only then will the recreational anglers get a proper bite of the cherry, and only then will the IFCAs and others follow that course. The Government must lead from the front.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on the quality of his opening speech and on raising this subject. In Essex, we have a lot of recreational anglers who provide a great deal of employment and generate a lot of tourism, but we also have very small-scale inshore fishermen who catch sea bass. Do they have a future in my hon. Friend’s scheme, or will they be squeezed out by the ban on commercial fishing?

[George Hollingbery]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. It is a vexed issue. There are people who make a very small-scale living out of bass fishing. My belief is that it is likely that in the near term, as has happened in Ireland, the north-east coast of the United States and a great many fisheries where proper regulation has been put in place, people who run sub- 10-metre boats will find that they make a much better living from taking out and guiding recreational fishing than from trawling for a few vulnerable sea bass out in the ocean. Although I would not condone any policy that forced people who fish at that scale from one to the other, particularly in inshore waters, I think that reality will dawn and that most of them will end up in the recreational sector.

In concluding my remarks, I hope you will excuse me, Mr Crausby, for asking the Minister a series of detailed questions. I have given him notice of some of them because they are quite complex, but I would appreciate answers to as many of them as possible.

To protect breeding fish, will the Minister follow the proposals made by the Angling Trust and others and seek a ban on targeted fishing based on catch composition or sufficiently restrictive vessel catch limits to make the fishery unviable from January to May inclusive, to apply to areas VIId, e, f and h and IVc in offshore fisheries beyond member states’ six-mile zones? For the benefit of other hon. Members present, I am simply asking for proper fishing restrictions to be put in place in pretty much all the coastal waters where we find sea bass, and certainly where they breed.

Will the Minister take on board another of the Angling Trust’s proposals and pursue catch limits for all registered EU vessels fishing for bass in areas VII and IV to cap effort, with limits set at a level that reduces fishing mortality by at least 40% across all member state fleets? I have apologised to the Minister for not giving him notice of that question.

To allow fish to reach breeding age, will the Minister work to ensure that a minimum landing size of 46 cm or over is adopted for sea bass at European level? Will he undertake to impose such a limit unilaterally on UK landings in any event? At the very least, will he confirm that the review of the minimum landing size for bass started by his Department in 2012 is still progressing, and will he undertake to publish the results as soon as possible? To help protect the recruitment stocks, will he undertake to look again at the extension of bass nursery areas?

Finally, does the Minister agree that the development of sea bass fishing as a recreational activity is the best long-term solution to both the ecological and the economic sustainability of the fishery, as proved by the Irish sea bass experience, the striped bass fishery of the north-east coast of the US and many other examples?

With the right measures in the right place at the right time and in the necessary proportion, we can make our fisheries policy work for us and for future generations. I hope the Minister will offer us all hope that such a prospect can be realised.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr David Crausby (in the Chair)]

There are six Members who wish to speak. I would appreciate it if Members could keep their remarks below 10 minutes, so we can get everyone in. I intend to call the Front Benchers at 10.40 am.

09:48

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

I warmly congratulate the hon. Member for Meon Valley (George Hollingbery) on securing this debate and on his excellent speech, in which he outlined his case.

I do not intend to repeat the detail of much of what the hon. Gentleman said. I see my role, as a former Fisheries Minister, as being to stiffen the Minister’s resolve when he negotiates in Brussels in a couple of weeks’ time and with the self-appointed representatives of the commercial fishing sector. I warn him from my experience that if he and the Council do not make tough decisions now, he or his poor successor—perhaps my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith)—will have to make much worse decisions in a year or two’s time, as the hon. Member for Meon Valley outlined. It is far better to make tough decisions now. If the Minister caves in to the self-appointed representatives of the commercial sector, our bass fishery will be doomed. I therefore urge him to go to Brussels and negotiate hard on behalf of the fish stocks. In the end, it is the fish that matter for everyone, including the commercial sector if it is to have a future.

I also want the Minister to be aware that in the view, probably of most people in Westminster Hall today, and certainly of most people in the country who have an interest and knowledge in this area, the current proposals by the Commission are not only wholly inadequate but totally imbalanced in favour of the commercial sector and against the recreational sector. One of his first tasks, apart from ensuring that we get much more meaningful and drastic action, is to rebalance those proposals in the other direction.

The Minister will know the value of the recreational sea-angling sector, and not only because his hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley reminded him of it, but because his own Department conducted research into it in 2012; I think I can recall earlier pieces of research into it, too. The Department’s research in 2012 found that the sector’s income for the country was £2.1 billion, it sustains 23,000 jobs, and as I think the hon. Member for Meon Valley said, the VAT receipts alone from the wealth and activity generated by sea angling dwarf the income from the commercial fishing sector. As I said, the Minister’s first task is to rebalance this inadequate plan from the Commission.

The Minister’s second task is to grasp the nettle on minimum landing size. I commend to him an Adjournment debate that was held in the main Chamber in 2007, between the then hon. Member for Reading West—Martin Salter, who was a great champion of sustainable fisheries and the sea-angling community—and my successor as Fisheries Minister, Jonathan Shaw. In that debate, all the arguments about minimum landing size were rehearsed. As the hon. Member for Meon Valley has reminded us, when I was the Minister I took the decision to increase the minimum landing size, to 40 cm as a first step, then to 45 cm after a period of review. Tragically, however, that decision was reversed by my successor who, as is often the case, came under pressure from the very powerful self-appointed commercial fisheries spokespeople.

That was a disastrous decision. If people look at that debate, they will see that the reasons given by my successor as Minister for not proceeding with the increase was that the bass stocks were in decent shape. Well, look at them now. All I can say to the current Minister is, “Please learn the lessons of that mistake and go for an increase in the minimum landing size.” It is absolutely insane that we allow people to catch the vast majority of bass before they even reach spawning size: that is my second message to the Minister.

My third message is to have a look at what I still consider to be the best Government strategy on fisheries published in the past 20 years—a document called “Net Benefits” that was published in 2004. It was commissioned by the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, in 2002, because of the disaster facing the North sea cod industry and the repercussions, not only on cod stocks but on fishing communities around the North sea. It took two years to develop what I believe still stands as the best long-term fisheries strategy for this country. I commend that document to the Minister and to my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge, the Opposition spokesperson, if she has not read it already; I hope that she reads it before she gets the job of Fisheries Minister, because it is the best policy document that I can remember.

In that document, the Government at the time said:

“We should review the evidence supporting arguments for the designating of commercial caught species for wholly recreational sea angling, beginning with bass by the end of 2004.”

That document was published in 2004, 10 years ago. Here we are now, with the bass stocks at risk of collapse, and far too little has been done in the meantime.

Consequently, the third thing that the Minister can go away and do is a longer-term thing, which is to have another look at designating the bass fishery as solely recreational. That was a Labour policy 10 years ago; it has got nowhere, and we are now paying a very high price as a result. Incidentally, the “Net Benefits” report was endorsed shortly after its publication by the then Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, which also supported re-designating bass fishing as a recreational fishery.

Those are my very short political messages to the Minister. The hon. Member for Meon Valley has done a great job in laying out the detailed case for change, and the challenge that we face. However, my simple message to the Minister is for him to go away, fight for bass and take some radical action, because if he does not do so, he—if he is still in the job—or his successor will have a much tougher job further down the line.

09:54

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to comment on the excellent speeches we have just heard. I compliment my hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley (George Hollingbery) for calling this debate.

The story of the management of this stock has been a very bad one indeed. The high point was the decision by the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) to increase the minimum landing size, and all credit to him for taking it. If we had followed that decision through at the time, it would certainly have made a difference. Why his successor rescinded that decision is something that I could not really determine from reading the excellent Adjournment debate in 2007 to which the right hon. Gentleman referred.

When I was in the Minister’s position, I set about trying to reverse that change in policy, and I tried to increase the minimum landing size. I was persuaded that it was important to do everything to conserve bass at a European level, and I believe that it is right to get agreement among our European partners, because many vessels from other countries fish this stock in our waters. To go to the EU was a sensible piece of advice that I received.

However, if we just left matters to the sclerotic processes of the EU, this stock would crash before we could do anything about it. There is a lot that we can do unilaterally, and there is a lot that we can do in this House and beyond as a sort of club of ex-Fisheries Ministers; I do not know what the collective noun for ex-Fisheries Ministers is, but I think it is an “exhaustion” of ex-Fisheries Ministers. We would all say to my hon. Friend the Minister that he has a much more difficult task this December than the tasks that I faced in three or four years of December rounds of talks. He is a very good negotiator and takes his job very seriously. However, my advice to him would be to take precisely the advice of the right hon. Member for Exeter—that this stock will not exist unless tough decisions are taken.

We now face a collapse in stocks. At times, when we talk about minimum landing size, it seems slightly like fiddling while Rome burns, and that there are more important things that we could do. However, it is still necessary to increase minimum landing size and I hope that the Minister will consider doing that, and take forward the work that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has already done on this issue and act unilaterally.

I take an old-fashioned view that fish should not be harvested until they have had a chance to breed. It is the spawning biomass that is crashing and it is on that issue that action needs to take place. This situation has arisen before; we can look beyond our borders and see where it has happened before. There is a fishery on the east coast of the United States called the striped bass stock fishery, which is now worth a lot of money. I have heard varying figures, including the figure that now, in its healthy state, it is worth $1 billion a year to the state of Massachusetts in terms of tourism and the added benefits that angling provides. I have also heard that nationally it is worth $2 billion a year to the US economy, and possibly more.

The stock spawns in the Chesapeake bay, but in the late 1970s it was overfished and crashed. Immediately, everyone was prevented from fishing it, whether they were recreational or commercial anglers. The stock has now recovered and it is a massive draw. British bass anglers spend all their savings to fly from the United Kingdom to the United States to exploit this exciting fish. It is branded; people wear T-shirts with the slogan, “I’m a striped bass fisherman.” However, British fishermen should not have to do that in US waters; they should be able to do it in UK waters. Similarly, they should not have to go to Ireland, where there is a very buoyant recreational fishery; I will come on to talk about that shortly.

I would love to portray the problem in the simplistic way that some do, which is to say that it is all about the pair trawlers. Well, I am afraid that it is not all about the pair trawlers. In the area from Felixstowe round to Sussex, the use of trammel and drift nets has increased by 20% or 30% in the past year. We need to look at all the activities in this sector. What is really interesting about the Marine Resources Assessment Group study that my hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley mentioned is that it relates to a fishery in Sussex, where every way of exploiting this diminishing stock is used. There are pair trawlers coming over from the continent to exploit it; there are inshore fisheries that exploit it commercially; and there is also a very important recreational fishery. That is why MRAG chose Sussex to conduct this important piece of research.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman) said earlier, I suspect that we will hear later today in this House the words, “long-term economic plan”. Well, let us just look at the economics of the issue that we are talking about. In Sussex alone, I calculate—from the figures in the MRAG report—that between 258 and 267 tonnes of fish were harvested commercially in 2012, and somewhere between 10 and 19 tonnes were harvested recreationally. Taking the median of those two, about 5.7% were landed from the recreational sector. However, what is really important is that the economic output per tonne in Sussex is 40 to 75 times higher for recreational than commercial. The employment that is generated, calculated per tonne, is 39 to 75 times higher for recreational bass fisheries than commercial.

The report states clearly that the final economic and employment impacts of recreational bass fisheries in Sussex are estimated at £31.3 million and 353 full-time equivalent jobs. The final economic employment impacts of commercial bass fisheries in Sussex were estimated as £9.25 million and 111.28 full-time equivalents. That is a staggering difference. As my hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley said, if calculated across the piece it is more than three times as valuable as a recreational fishery than as a commercial one.

It would obviously be better if the EU had measures in place to put this stock back on track, but I urge the Minister to look at what has happened in Ireland, where there is a recreation-only fishery, a strict catch limit and a high minimum landing size, which I gather is about to be increased to 50 cm, on the basis of scientific advice received by the Irish Government. This is a highly valuable tourist attraction. In Ireland, angling, tourism and coastal communities are integrating in a much better way than in this country. We have a lot to learn in that regard. People who go there are welcomed and find charter boats linked to hotels and pubs. The whole package is there; it is part of a deal that attracts people. I want those fisherman to go to Devon, Sussex and Essex and exploit this exciting game fish.

[Mr Jenkin]

I am going to do something that should never be done in the House of Commons, which is to ask a question without knowing the answer. I do not intend to put my hon. Friend on the spot, but he was Fisheries Minister until quite recently, so why did he not do this? What was the obstacle? Where is the resistance? What were he and his successor having to fight to be able to implement this measure, not just in the EU, but domestically?

[Richard Benyon]

I did set about trying to increase the minimum landing size. I regret that we did not move faster when going through the process of consultation and further consultation, and trying to ensure that this was agreed at European level, because the evidence is all there. When you are a Minister, people tell you that someone cannot be prevented from doing something without enough evidence and judicial review, and that there are threats of infraction, and all the other things. However, I freely admit that if I had my time over again I would steamroller this through and take the consequences, because the consequence now is a crashing stock. The stock will disappear, along with the economic value.

To the fishermen in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin), I say this: I have met them many times and I have great respect for them, but they will not be fishing for bass, not because of any decision taken by any Minister of any party, but because there will be none. They have a great future ahead of them exploiting other stocks, such as thornback rays and other things that are prevalent in those waters, but they really will have an economic benefit if they can get the fishermen on their boats to catch recreational bass in future.

[Mr Bradshaw]

It might help the hon. Gentleman if I say a little bit about my experience. In this regard, it was one of those occasions as a Minister where I had to stand up to powerful and well-funded vested interests and to officials. Great as my officials were, I am afraid it was a Minister’s decision against the advice and the will of my officials, and sometimes that is the right thing to do.

[Richard Benyon]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for making that position clear. It is important to listen to advice, but as I say we could still be fiddling when Rome burns. This stock will shortly be gone.

Other hon. Members want to speak. I shall conclude by saying that 80% of bass swim within 12 nautical miles of the coast, so action is needed now. We need action on minimum landing sizes; we need spatial and temporal closures; and we need better protection of nursery areas. Yes, we need a bag limit, but I do not believe that that is a massive issue—whether it is one, two or three—but other technical measures in the commercial fishery are needed. We also need better data so that we can face down the interests that say that this is the wrong decision.

The only way forward for bass is for them to be caught by hand line or rod. Any commercial activity at all should be based on its being a premium, hand-caught resource, in a similar way to mackerel in the south-west and other species: a virtue is made of the fact that those are local and high quality. My frank message to poncey restaurateurs who demand bass the size of the palm of my hand for their fussy customers is, “Get those from aquaculture, don’t get them from out of our seas, because that is destroying a stock.” Actually, their customers will probably mind more about not being able to eat bass in future. I want to see our waters criss-crossed with charter boats taking fat cats out to fish this really exciting stock, putting that money into coastal communities, and see a sustainable source working for this country, not crashing.

10:05

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I thank the hon. Member for Meon Valley (George Hollingbery) for securing such an important debate, which could help shape the future of bass angling in the United Kingdom. As I have mentioned on numerous occasions in this Chamber, I represent an area of the UK that has a rich fishing industry; in fact, for many, fishing is the life blood of the village. In Portavogie in particular, it is a tradition that has been passed down many generations. Unsurprisingly, this is a subject of great interest to me.

We are focusing on commercial fishing and looking at recreational fishing. Many hon. Members have spoken about work done in the Republic of Ireland. I want to mention that and some work done in Northern Ireland. Recreational sea angling attracts some 1.45 million anglers per annum and is worth in excess of £500 million per annum to the economy of England and Wales. Bass are a highly sought-after fish and bass angling attracts some of Britain’s most committed anglers, due to the fighting qualities and high reputation of this striking-looking fish.

The development and unregulated use of inshore monofilament gill nets, which commenced in the mid-1970s, followed by the development of winter bass pair-trawl fishing in the 1980s, means that bass are relentlessly pursued commercially as soon as they leave the estuary nursery areas. Bass are a slow-growing, long-living species, and can live for up to 25 years. I reiterate what hon. Members have said: many are caught as pre-adults at six to seven years old. We need to control that. I am sure that the Minister will hit on that issue and mention what we have done in Northern Ireland and what has been done in the Republic as well.

In 2013, the UK media reported that bass numbers were at their lowest in 20 years and that the breeding stock of bass had reduced by almost a third since 2009. To complicate matters further, bass is a non-quota species and there is a minimum landing size, which makes controlling and limiting commercial catches even more difficult. However, in Ireland commercial bass fishing has been restricted and protected bass areas have been created, and the fishing there has improved dramatically. Many in the UK see the Irish model as a way to restore British bass stocks. There are examples close at hand that we can use to help in this regard.

Despite questions about the long-term stability of bass numbers, this species appears to be extending its range northwards, with bass now being caught with some regularity in areas such as the Yorkshire and north-east coasts, where they were previously fairly rare.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

Before my hon. Friend leaves the issue of recreational fishing and the commercial benefits that can be derived from it, does he agree that the progress made in the Irish Republic can be replicated, not just in Northern Ireland but across the UK, if we take the right decision and if a third Minister does not also find the difficulties almost insurmountable in trying to address the problems that we all face?

[Jim Shannon]

I thank my hon. Friend and colleague for his intervention. Two previous Ministers have mentioned their experiences when they were in the position of power that the present Minister is now in, so perhaps their examples can be used to change the direction of the civil service roundabout, to push the matter through.

Many UK anglers fish for bass on a purely catch-and-release basis to help preserve stocks of the species and ensure that bass stocks return to a higher level, in turn preserving them for future generations. In 2010, new legislation was proposed in Northern Ireland to adopt the same protection measures for bass stocks as exist in the Republic of Ireland. The proposed legislation is going through the Northern Ireland Assembly, but a loophole has arisen. The legislation affects the crucial “Prohibition of the sale of bass” rule by introducing a clause that allows for bass caught accidentally by trawlers to be landed and marketed as allowable by-catch.

Case histories from the Republic of Ireland and the United States of America reveal how the sustainable management of fish species, such as the European sea bass and the striped bass, primarily for recreational benefit, can generate superior economic gains for local and national economies. We cannot ignore that money and how that helps villages and recreation. Undoubtedly the UK has lagged far behind other countries in realising the economic potential of proactive management of the marine species targeted by recreational anglers.

There are a number of fishing competitions and vessels around the coast of the United Kingdom, and I will mention two. The hon. Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (Simon Hart) will probably mention the Terry Herman bass fishing competition, which takes place each summer in Pembrokeshire. It is also a great charity fundraiser. There are examples like that around the United Kingdom, and good comes from them.

The hon. Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon) mentioned the USA. The Big Bass Splash—the Americans sometimes describe things in a different way from the rest of us—has taken place in Kentucky since 1984, with prizes of up to $85,000 to be won. We have seen bass competitions televised in sports programmes. We are well aware of “Extreme Fishing with Robson Green”; those interested in fishing will enjoy that programme, which features all the fish we wish we could catch. I could never even catch one. The Jersey Open Shore Bass Festival takes place every October, with a competition for anglers of all levels of experience to encourage the sport. I hope that a strategy, a policy and legislation to help preserve recreational bass fishing will come from the debate, but will the Minister indicate what discussions he has had with Jersey, Guernsey and the Channel Islands on the rules that they will put in place? They see the benefit of recreational angling, and I hope we can do the same.

I have a picture of my son when he caught a 10 lb bass on holiday in the USA. I could not get a bite, but he got one almost right away. Those experiences make memories that last for ever and encourage an interest in fishing that will last for many years—probably a whole life.

Recreational and sporting angling can deliver money to local economies. I was a guest speaker at Irish Fest last year in Milwaukee, where a number of councils from the Republic of Ireland were represented in the tourism facility. Every one of those councils was advertising recreational fishing as one of the things people can do when they visit Ireland. Do not ever underestimate the amount of money that can be generated and how that can help the economy. I spoke to one hotelier at the festival and afterwards. He said that people come from the States specifically for the fishing. The Republic of Ireland has recognised the benefits and moved forward. It is time that we on the United Kingdom mainland did likewise.

I always underline the increasing number of returns from anglers, as do those who see angling tourism as a way forward. Tourism-based sea angling for bass generates millions per annum for local and national economies. As the examples of America and Ireland have shown—they are two good examples; one is close by and one is further afield—the UK needs to adopt a policy of conservation so that levels do not drop any further. Given the long life of sea bass, it is vital that we do not fish them at the prime ages of six or seven. Instead, their time in nurseries or protected areas needs to be longer. We also need to consider changing how bass are commercially pursued, which I hope the Minister will address by altering how and when they can be fished. That is the only way to safeguard them and ensure that they remain part of angling culture for future generations.

I again congratulate the hon. Member for Meon Valley on securing the debate. I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute. I ask the Minister in response to consider not only what Northern Ireland—fishing is a devolved matter—is doing, but what the Republic of Ireland is doing with legislation that is already creating benefits.

10:14

[Simon Hart (Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire) (Con)]

I start by referring to a letter from my constituent, Matt Powell, which was written in July 2014. He said:

“I run a small bass guiding business on the Pembrokeshire coast. This has given me the opportunity to observe the difficulties facing the future stocks of the bass…our most iconic marine sport fish. It is clear that the species is under the sort of pressure that is unsustainable in the medium to long term future. A combination of angling pressure…is taking its toll on our local bass stocks. I am obviously concerned about the future of my own business if things continue as they are, but of far more importance is the legacy we create for future generations.”

Mr Powell is not alone. There are plenty of people like him along the Pembrokeshire coast and elsewhere in Wales.

This is really a story of political will. We have extensive planning conditions to protect bats and amphibians, fences that keep deer off roads and tunnels for hedgehogs and toads to pass under roads. The Minister will know that there was a national outcry when he went through with a policy that would remove less than 1% of the UK badger population—a thriving and increasing population —so it is sadly ironic that, on our watch and under our noses, we are seeing the steady decline and eradication of an iconic species. Nobody, it seems, can find a solution to the problem. Even the populations of salmon and sea trout, which are of significance in my part of the world, seem to be receiving more column inches these days than the future of bass.

We have heard about the economic value, and I will not repeat all the statistics. In my part of the world, bass fishing by anglers is crucial. Its economic value and the number of jobs it provides outstrip commercial endeavours significantly. It has three times the numbers of employees and three times the money generated by those other methods of fishing, yet we put all that at risk.

I have a simple question for the Minister: can he be as bold about bass as he is about badgers? That is what we require. As we heard from the former Fisheries Minister, the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw), it is about facing down interest groups and officials and doing what is right. It is within the Minister’s gift to do the right thing. It is not as though that is an impossible ask. It can be done, and it can be done now. If it is not done now, the Minister will sadly have it on his record that bass collapsed on his watch. I cannot believe that he or any other Minister, facing the evidence they face now, wants that to be the case.

An increase in the minimum landing size is crucial. Following the advice of the expert bodies—goodness me, there are enough of them—is crucial. The Minister also might take into account the thoughts of the chairman of the Blue Marine Foundation, who refers to the essential banning of netting, especially in nursery areas, and investing in the expansion of rod and line fishing around the UK coast.

This is not about stopping people from doing things; it is about investing in education and the huge benefits that would arise in our coastal regions—particularly in Wales—if we got the message across. It is about investment in something that will bring good fortune not only to the bass population around the UK shores, but to the residents of coastal areas whose livelihoods depend on the practice. It is also about the maximalisation of marketing, which has not been referred to in the debate but has been touched on once or twice in the media commentary around it.

The situation is pretty simple. Someone once said to me that Governments can do pretty much whatever they want, so long as they really want to. I think this is one of those occasions. Do the Government really want to help bass? If they do, they can; if they do not, bass stocks will collapse on our watch and take at least 20 years to recover, while the livelihoods of people such as my constituent, Matt Powell, will probably never recover at all.

10:19

[Jon Cruddas (Dagenham and Rainham) (Lab)]

This topic is important. Only this past weekend experts called for a ban on trawlermen catching sea bass, given the evidence that angling offers three times the benefit to the economy.

I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for Meon Valley (George Hollingbery) on securing such an important debate, and I want to repeat some facts that he pointed out in his opening address. DEFRA’s own “Sea Angling 2012” report shows that there are 884,000 sea anglers in England, who pump £1.23 billion per annum directly into the economy, with 10,400 full-time jobs dependent on the activity; and that the indirect spend is equivalent to £2.1 billion, with 23,600 jobs at stake. Bass are the most popular species for recreational angling and, according to figures given at the recent Dublin bass workshop, bass angling is worth more than £200 million in England alone.

I admit that I am not a bass fisherman—indeed, many of my colleagues in the all-party group might suggest that I am not a fisherman of any shape or size at all—but my youngest brother is a fanatical one, and many of my constituents are also bass fishermen. Indeed, angling is possibly the recreational sport with one of the highest participation rates in my east London constituency, as in the country at large. This obviously important debate is also about the nature of politics—about keeping our promises, which has been mentioned a number of times this morning.

For the past 13 years, recreational sea anglers have been led to believe that their most popular sporting fish would be managed sustainably and primarily as a recreational species, because Governments, including the previous Labour Government, kept telling them that that was what we were going to do. I want to focus on some of the recent history behind today’s debate, which was emphasised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) in his comments.

In 2007, we came close to a breakthrough based on a cross-party consensus, but a Fisheries Minister capitulated to pressure from the commercial sector and overturned the decision of his predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter, who had already signed off the order to increase the bass minimum landing size. Since then, arguably, we have witnessed seven wasted years in terms of sustainable management of the species, and that has been picked up time and again in the contributions this morning. Since 2007, as far as I can see, not a single measure introduced by Governments of either main party has halted the decline in bass stocks. We are still waiting for the publication of the 2012 bass minimum landing size review, instigated by the hon. Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon). There is some doubt as to whether any meaningful work has been done at all.

The core of the argument put by all our colleagues this morning is that politicians have promised that Britain’s most popular fish in sporting and eating potential should be managed sustainably. That has not happened and bass stocks are in deep trouble. The latest scientific advice issued by ICES in June 2014 recommended an 80% cut in catches of bass throughout the European Union by 2015—more than double the amount suggested in 2013, which we had not acted on. The Solent bass surveys also make dismal reading, but that is not new—the news has not fallen from the sky.

It is worth going back to some of the recent elements in the debate. As emphasised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter, in 2002 the Prime Minister’s strategy unit commissioned a report on the benefits of recreational sea angling. “Net Benefits” was eventually published in 2004 and it stated:

“Fisheries management policy should recognise that sea angling may, in some circumstances, provide a better return on the use of some resources than commercial exploitation.”

That is exactly the point made by the Blue Marine Foundation report that was in the papers this weekend, as I mentioned at the beginning of my speech.

The 2002 report’s recommendations were:

“Fisheries departments should review the evidence supporting arguments for re-designating commercially caught species for wholly recreational sea angling, beginning with bass by the end of 2004.”

The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee then looked at the issue when considering the “Net Benefits” report. According to the Committee’s all-party review:

“We strongly support the Strategy Unit recommendations to develop the recreational sea angling sector. We believe that the sector, which has considerable economic value, has been overlooked and under-represented for too long.”

It added:

“We support the re-designation of certain species for recreational use and recognise the benefits that this can bring from both a conservation and economic point of view.”

The same points about the economic case for recreational angling have been made consistently over the past 13 years.

I do not want to be party political in any way in this debate, but I want to emphasise the 2005 “Labour’s Charter for Angling”, which contained the following words in a foreword by my right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter:

“It was anglers concerns for the conservation status of sea bass that has persuaded me to agree to implement much of the excellent bass management plan put forward by the Bass Anglers Sport Fishing Society”,

including increases in the minimum landing size to strengthen the brood stock.

My right hon. Friend was true to his word, and in 2005 he launched the DEFRA consultation on increasing the minimum landing size for bass so as to produce a sustainable fishery with more and bigger bass for the commercial and recreational sectors. He took the long-term view in 2006 when he announced the conclusions of the consultation and his intention to increase the minimum landing size to 40 cm from 36 cm, and later to go on to 45 cm, beyond the optimum spawning size. According to his DEFRA press release:

“I have listened very carefully to the representations made and have not taken this decision lightly. I have accepted the arguments for a bigger minimum landing size to help increase the quantity and size of bass. This will also give better protection for the stocks. There may be short term costs from this measure before we see future gains but it is vital that fisheries management takes a long term view.”

My right hon. Friend went on:

“The recreational fishing sector makes a major contribution to our economy and it is important that their voice, as well as those of commercial fishermen, is taken into account in fisheries management.

In the future, I intend to increase the landing size further to 45 cm, but subject to the results of a review, in 2010”.

To justify that decision, DEFRA claimed at the time that the increase to 40 cm would bring the minimum landing size closer to the average spawning size for bass. As a result, more juvenile fish would be protected and there would be increased recruitment to the spawning stock. In turn, that would increase the number and size of bass available for capture to both the commercial and recreational sectors. My right hon. Friend concluded:

“I have taken on board the concerns expressed during the consultation by the commercial fishing sector about the impact of an immediate increase to 45 cm and the need for a reasonable implementation period to minimise the cost of net replacement.”

The next Fisheries Minister, however, made the decision to go back on the commitment made by his predecessor to increase the minimum landing size in the interests of conservation. On 25 October 2007 he made a statement on retaining the minimum landing size at 36 cm, rather than increasing it to 40 cm and then 45 cm by 2010. The decision was met with predictable anger and dismay by hundreds of thousands of sea anglers and many conservationists in the country. The Minister admitted at the time that his decision was based on looking after the short-term interests of the inshore fleet, rather than on the long-term interests of the species and the environment. We should obviously be concerned about any decision and its effect on jobs, but let us not forget the devastating impact that unsustainable fishing has on all sectors, whether commercial or recreational.

Bass is a highly sought after and valuable resource. It was recognised as worthy of protection by the Prime Minister’s strategy unit, by the whole Government and by cross-party Committees of the House. Unfortunately, the direction of travel was later unwound, and seven years have followed with little having happened. I hope that today we will start a new phase of the discussion, and I praise the hon. Member for Meon Valley for putting the issue on the agenda today. I hope that we can begin to rebuild a cross-party consensus about sustainable management of the bass stock.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr David Crausby (in the Chair)]

Order. I intend to call the Front Benchers from 10.40 am, which leaves 12 minutes to be shared between two Members. We will then get everyone in. I call Charles Walker.

10:28

[Mr Charles Walker (Broxbourne) (Con)]

Thank you for calling me, Mr Crausby, to speak in the debate.

I will not rehash the figures given over the past hour, but I must say to the hon. Member for Dagenham and Rainham (Jon Cruddas), to paraphrase Napoleon, “better a lucky fisherman than a good fisherman”. I suspect that the hon. Gentleman is rather better than he gives himself credit for, although I know that he is a lucky fisherman, as I have landed both his double-figure barbel for him—or at least netted them; I think he takes responsibility for having landed them.

I was going to give a great exposition on the need to preserve bass stocks, but again that has been done eloquently by my colleagues. Instead, I want to say that I absolutely love fishing. Fishing bridges all walks of life, from the richest and most powerful people to those who simply enjoy a day on the beach. I spend a huge amount of time fishing with my sons and, before I had my sons, I spent an enormous amount of time fishing with my grandfather, so the activity bridges generations as well. One of the most exciting times that I have had in the past five or six years was when my middle son caught his first bass, on Islay. I was running up and down the seashore making a huge amount of noise, getting in a panic, and dropping the net and picking it up again, while he calmly landed a wonderful fish. As a family, we all then celebrated his success.

There has to be a fish species somewhere in the sea that does not belong to commercial fishermen. They have it all their own way. As the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) said, they are a powerful lobby. Sea bass are a resource that needs to be shared, and the balance in that sharing needs to be in favour of the recreational angler. As for commercial interests, the debate is not about the loss of jobs; it is about the creation of jobs—well-paid guiding jobs, and jobs in restaurants, hotels, pubs, the tackle trade and angling shops. It is a positive thing that we are doing here today.

The wonderful thing about sea angling is the way everyone gathers early in the morning, or when the tide is right, with great excitement. Tackle bags are thrown on to the shore, and people rootle through for their favourite lure. A great celebration takes place, with people enjoying their natural heritage and the natural history of this country.

It is all very well to come up with facts and figures, which are very important, but the most important fact is that we are currently taking fish that have not spawned. They have not reproduced. Any idiot, from whatever background, knows that that is unsustainable. One of the most depressing interventions in this discussion was by the European Union, which has drawn a moral equivalence between netting and pair trawlers, and recreational anglers, saying that if we are to make new rules and legislation about the taking of bass, recreational anglers should be limited to one fish. That is to confuse and conflate issues. Recreational anglers are not the problem—they are the solution to the problem.

10:31

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I do not intend to detain Westminster Hall for more than a few minutes.

Do we not all share a feeling of rising anger and frustration, which almost brings tears to our eyes, as we listen to the debate? We have heard about the manifesto commitment on which the Labour party was elected, and my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon), the former Fisheries Minister, has said he wishes he had acted when he was in office—a candid response to my remark.

Like many of those present for the debate I am a fisherman, and like thousands of others I have caught sea bass off the Essex coast. I treasure the species from an emotional point of view, but also from the point of view of the coastal communities. It brings life to seaside towns such as Harwich and Brightlingsea that have become so dejected in some respects because they are out on a limb and are no longer the economic centres that they became when they built ships, when there were big fishing fleets and when they were the links to the continent.

[Richard Benyon]

As Fisheries Minister, aside from my personal interest in fishing and angling and what my fishing friends would have told me, I do not think I would have known about the problem until it reached its present stage if it had not been for the Angling Trust coming to see me with a group of people who really know what is going on. We could then put in train a process—which I wish had happened earlier—involving the Government working well with organisations that are informed and rational in how they work with Ministers.

[Mr Jenkin]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker) said, the debate is not anti-commercial interests, anti-jobs or anti-employment. It is pro-economic, social and environmental development. It is about what all the political parties in the House believe in, yet we have had 10 years of debate and have achieved nothing.

As Chairman of the Select Committee on Public Administration, I have the word “accountability” in mind: that is the crunch. All the democratic pressure on successive Ministers was to get something done; my hon. Friend the Minister must ask himself why it has not been done. I invite him to consider what my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury—and indeed the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw)—said about wishing they had been tougher with their officials. It is not right to blame officials, who give their best advice, but there is also the question of legal advice.

Legal advice is not an instruction on how to behave; it is something to be taken into account in making a decision. If the risk of being taken to court—to judicial review—is balanced against the risk of losing the fish stock, which is the bigger risk? The Minister must be accountable for the decision. He is not being accountable to this House if he just submits to the legal advice. Legal advice is to be listened to, but in many cases it is to be overridden. It is to be disregarded—well, not disregarded; it is to be taken into account. The judgment that the Minister then makes is not about blindly accepting the legal advice. Otherwise we do not have accountability; we might as well be ruled by lawyers.

We have seen European law, human rights law and fear of judicial review take over the whole of government in some Departments—DEFRA may be one of the worst instances—but we expect our Ministers to govern. I ask my hon. Friend the Minister please to exercise his best judgment. He will then be vindicated for what he does. If he submits to the legal advice, he will be condemned.

When we think about why our system of government feels so unaccountable with respect to so many Ministers, the question we should ask is how they respond to the advice that they are given and whether the House should empower them to act in the national interest rather than submit to the rather blind legal advice they are often given. That advice is given for the best of reasons; that is the job of the lawyers. However, in my experience, lawyers always advise doing the more cautious thing from their point of view—not necessarily from the point of view of the public interest.

10:37

[Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Meon Valley (George Hollingbery) on securing the debate. We always say that debates are important, but this one really is; and it is very timely, given the meeting of the Council of the European Union in two week’s time.

The hon. Gentleman outlined perfectly the problems with sea bass stock. My right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw), and the hon. Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon)—both ex-Fisheries Ministers —made the important point that if we do not take tough decisions now we will be back in two years facing an even worse crisis in stock levels. That is an important backdrop to today’s debate.

I want to underline one of the debate’s key themes, and in doing so I must declare not quite an interest, but where I come from—literally. I am the daughter of a former commercial fisherman—a Grimsby fisherman. Grimsby was the biggest fishing port in the world at one point. He fished in the Arctic, which was probably the most difficult fishing ground to work in during the 1950s. I grew up in a village outside the town and fully realise the pride and feeling that coastal people have in their fishermen, which continues to this day. In my father’s youth it was common for the school day to start with the fisherman’s prayer because yet another tragedy had occurred at sea. It is important to remember that fishing was and still is the most dangerous occupation in the world.

Fishing is still an important source of economic activity, contributing many millions to the UK economy. In 2013, the commercial industry directly employed about 12,000 people, with a fleet of around 6,400 vessels, landing around 600,000 tonnes of fish at a value of over £700 million. Let us not forget, however—and I do not think that we can, after today’s debate—how important angling is, socially and economically. I am not going to rehearse the figures again—they have been reiterated more than once today—but to summarise, both directly and indirectly, angling contributes £1.2 billion and 23,600 jobs to the UK economy.

Fishing and angling matter, and sea bass is an important and iconic fish for those engaged in both commercial and recreational fishing. The latest figures suggest that across Europe some 5,600 tonnes of sea bass are landed annually, with the commercial side accounting for just over 4,000 tonnes, around 75% of the total, and recreational fishing accounting for the rest—around 25%. A breakdown of landings by EU state shows that French vessels are by far the biggest exploiters of the stock, accounting for around 66%; by contrast, UK vessels land around 20% of the total, with the Dutch and the Belgians landing the majority of the rest.

The fish itself—this next point is important when we are discussing sustainability—is a slow-growing one, and does not mature until four to seven years of age. Juveniles spend up to three years occupying nursery areas in estuaries and tend not to leave until they are around 36 cm in length.

The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea has advised that sea bass mortality is at a level well above that considered sustainable for the stock. As we all know, ICES has recommended that catches should be cut immediately by 80%, to restore stock levels. Furthermore, recruitment of young fish into the population has been in decline since the mid-2000s, and has been very poor since 2008. The decline in recruitment coupled with the increase in mortality has caused a rapid deterioration in stock levels. Another important point to bear in mind is that the species is completely unprotected by quotas.

It is against that backdrop that some EU countries have taken action to avoid a disastrous collapse of the stock in their waters. We have heard today what the Irish have done, with a complete ban on commercial bass fishing by Irish-registered vessels within Ireland’s 12-mile territorial limit. The Dutch Government are considering the introduction of a series of national measures, including the banning of pair trawling in certain areas from September to December, capping monthly landings, increasing the minimum landing size from 36 cm to 42 cm, setting a bag limit for recreational anglers and putting a cap on the small-scale commercial rod and line fleet.

The EU position is fluid, and is up for discussion and decision in two weeks’ time. It proposes that anglers be restricted to bagging one fish per person, per day, while commercial vessels would face some restrictions on catch—it is all very fluid—based on the assessment of the need for an immediate 80% reduction in catch and the reductions on stock exploitation required to keep the species sustainable.

As has been mentioned frequently, in the UK we recognised the need to protect sea bass stock—that history and the need to learn lessons from it have been well rehearsed today—with the plan in 2007 to raise the minimum landing size to 40 cm, and then again to 45 cm. In 2012, the then Fisheries Ministers, the hon. Member for Newbury, launched a review of the evidence supporting those measures, but to this day we have not seen its outcome. Will the Minister comment on where it has got to?

In the past few years, the UK Government—both the previous Government and the current one—have seemed unwilling to take action in UK waters to restore stock levels, arguing that they do not want to exceed or fall short of either the requirements set by the EU or, now, those of their own better regulation framework. However, I note from a recent letter sent by the Minister to the right hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) that although he believes that important progress can be made at the EU Council in two weeks’ time, he is of a mind to press for a more radical set of proposals from the Commission negotiations, with a focus on a balanced package of measures to reduce catches in the commercial sector, coupled with sensible measures for the recreational sector.

I wish to make it clear to the Minister that we support an approach that calls for stronger interim measures. The UK position in those negotiations needs to be firm and resolute. We need a better set of proposals from the EU than the one currently on the table. Although it is possible for member states to develop measures unilaterally, the impact of such measures is weakened by the grandfather rights on access to home waters that are enjoyed by some member states. That is why we need agreement at EU level. The ideal outcome would be a set of measures that all member states have to abide by, including short-term measures to halt the alarming decline in stocks while further research is undertaken and a long-term management plan is developed.

What do we do if we do not get agreement at the EU Council in two weeks’ time? The Opposition acknowledge the potential anomaly if we take unilateral action, but the UK Government would have to do something in the event of failure to find agreement at the EU Council. A number of measures have been proposed both today and in the recent past, including an increased minimum landing size. On that issue, I return to the review promised by one of the Minister’s predecessors and reiterate that we would be glad to hear both its findings and his view.

We all recognise that simply increasing the minimum landing size is not a complete answer. The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea has stated that it has serious concerns about the recruitment of fish into the sea bass population, which has been in decline for a long time. The debate about whether to extend the protection of sea bass nursery areas goes on and on. Will the Minister explain his plans to tackle that problem? We need resolution on that issue sooner rather than later—much sooner, in fact.

Has the Minister considered incentives to encourage commercial rod and line fishing, especially within the 6-mile limit, as an alternative to more damaging commercial fishing practices? Hon. Members have mentioned other measures such as catch limits and spatial closures. We need a response from him on those as well.

Finally, the Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009 set out the Government’s intention to create an ecologically coherent network of marine protected areas. One of the main aims of that network is conservation of the sea environment. Will the Minister explain his view on how that policy interacts with issues such as the one we are discussing, especially when one considers that around a third of commercial catches are based on demersal trawling, a type of fishing said to be extremely damaging to the sea environment?

The 2009 Act gives the Marine Management Organisation the powers to introduce byelaws in our protected areas in the 6-mile to 12-mile coastal limit. Those byelaws apply to the vessels of all EU member states, not just to the home fleet. That could be a valuable way to extend some of the protections we want to see. I am interested to hear what the Minister has to say about the potential use of marine conservation zones and the powers available to the MMO to deal with some of the problems we are facing.

I look forward to the Minister’s response on this critical issue. More than anything else, we want and need a European deal. We also want to see positive and constructive engagement with the EU, not just shouting from the sidelines. We hope he will commit to that and to outlining, in addition, any measures that the UK can apply successfully and fairly in the event of a decision failing to materialise at EU level.

10:48

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (George Eustice)]

I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley (George Hollingbery) on securing this timely and important debate. We have heard many good speeches and there is clearly a basis for quite a degree of cross-party consensus. We have certainly had our quota of former Fisheries Ministers contributing to the debate.

Sea bass is one of the most valuable species we have, both to recreational sea anglers, as many hon. Members have pointed out, and to some of our fleet of commercial fishing boats under 10 metres. We are at a pivotal moment for bass management. It is clear from the latest scientific advice from ICES that European bass stocks are in a very vulnerable state. In June 2014, ICES advised that, for us to be at maximum sustainable yield in 2015, total landings of bass in the Irish sea, Celtic sea, English channel and southern North sea for commercial and recreational fisheries should be no more than 1,155 tonnes, but last year the EU fleet commercial landings total was 4,132 tonnes, and estimated landings from the recreational sector were a further 1,500 tonnes—a total of more than 5,600 tonnes. To get to the ICES recommendation would require an 80% cut from 2013 landings.

Commercial bass fisheries in those areas include an offshore fishery on spawning fish in the channel and its approaches from January to April. That is conducted mainly by large mid-water pair trawlers, which take about a third of the total commercial landings. There is also an inshore fishery, which operates mainly between spring and autumn, using trawls, fixed and drift nets, and hooks and lines, and which involves a number of under-10-metre vessels.

Sadly, as many hon. Members have pointed out, the decline of bass is not new news, as ICES has made previous recommendations for reduction in mortality from fishing exploitation. The UK has been challenging the European Commission since 2012 to take urgent action to address that decline, and we have been at the forefront of promoting technical conservation measures for bass. It is worth reflecting on some of those proposals.

Initially, the European Commission suggested a total allowable catch for bass, but we firmly believe that that is not appropriate because a new TAC is established on track records of catches, so there is a real danger that that would simply lock in a continuation of the current exploitation pattern, which now needs to change radically. A further disadvantage of setting a TAC for bass is that it would take no account of the efforts a number of member states have already unilaterally taken to limit commercial catches, which would be unfair to those countries.

Bass is a migratory species. The ICES information clearly shows that a significant proportion—about 30%—of mortality occurs in spawning areas to which all member states have access. That is why, despite the frustrations of trying to get agreement at European level, the Government have consistently pressed, first and foremost, for technical conservation measures at EU level as the most effective way of ensuring that the bass stock recovers. Let me set out the position we have argued for in the last couple of years, because I think that will deal with many of the questions put by my hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley.

We have consistently argued, for instance, that there should at the very least be restrictions on targeting bass from January to April and that those should apply in the key offshore spawning aggregation areas. We have also recommended the phasing out of pair trawling to target bass. In addition, we have argued for catch limits for all EU vessels fishing for bass, to cap total effort and to avoid displacement away from pair trawling to other types of commercial fishing. Finally, we have suggested further work on the identification and protection of bass nursery areas in all member states, which will build on the progress we have made in the UK.

As many hon. Members have pointed out, the current EU proposal is far from perfect, but I think we should welcome the fact that the European Commission has at least proposed interim measures for 2015 in advance of the development of a long-term management plan for bass. However, let me be absolutely clear: I do not believe that the current proposed measures are sufficiently ambitious, nor do they achieve the right balance between the measures required for the commercial and recreational sectors, as my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker) pointed out.

When the proposals are discussed in a couple of weeks’ time at the December Fisheries Council, I will seek to agree a more effective package of measures to finally start the recovery of the bass stock. That will be challenging, as December Council negotiations always are, but it will be a UK priority for this Council to extend and strengthen the proposals to limit commercial fishing. We will also seek a two-fish bag limit for recreational anglers, rather than the one-fish limit that has been proposed. I have talked to anglers’ representatives, and they recognise they have a role to play. They completely recognise that there should be a bag limit, but it would be wrong to have a harsh one-fish bag limit for anglers while having relaxed restrictions on the commercial sector.

A number of hon. Members pointed out that there are things we could do nationally, and I want to reflect on some of those points. On minimum landing size, once we have seen the shape of any deal that comes out of the December Council, I will consider what supplementary measures we could introduce nationally. I understand the frustration of the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw), whose successor not only did not bother seeing his proposal through, but actually got the knife out and cut it. Revoking an order that has already been signed is quite a big step. Listening to him and others, I was reminded of the episode of “Yes Minister” in which Jim Hacker goes to talk to his previous opposite number to try to get the lowdown on an issue. There could be a role for minimum landing size. In the first instance, I want the negotiating team to focus on getting the deal right at European level. We should also recognise that just increasing the minimum landing size without changing net gears, for instance, might be counter-productive, and we could end up with more discards, which is something we want to avoid. Finally, a minimum landing size does not deal with the problem of mortality caused by pair trawling taking place in spawning areas. That typically affects larger fish, but it can be particularly damaging.

A number of hon. Members mentioned the report the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science carried out in 2012, which was commissioned by my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon). Internally, it was dubbed the Benyon report. I can assure hon. Members that there is no conspiracy—it is not being hidden, and it has already been shared with the Angling Trust and other stakeholders. In the light of the comments made by a number of hon. Members, I will make sure we lodge the report in the House of Commons Library after the debate so that all hon. Members can see it.

[George Hollingbery]

May I just confirm that the Minister is talking not about the sea angling report, but about the report into the study of minimum landing size?

[George Eustice]

It was the CEFAS report of 2012, which was commissioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury, which we will put in the Library. That report concluded that a minimum landing size increase applied at European level could have quite a big impact, but pointed out that, because a lot of fishing mortality is caused by foreign vessels in UK waters, a unilateral, UK-only minimum landing size would not necessarily have the desired effect.

[Mr Bradshaw]

I urge the Minister, in the last couple of minutes, to discuss the designation of bass as a recreational species.

[George Eustice]

I was going to try to cover some of the other points.

First, on the value of recreational angling, I should declare an interest, because my brother fishes bass in Cornwall and regularly lobbies me on bass stocks. Recreational angling has a significant economic value. At the end of last week, I met Charles Clover, the chairman of the Blue Marine Foundation, to discuss its latest report, and we recognise the value of that. What I am sceptical of, though, is having an outright ban on commercial fishing sectors, as has been trialled in Ireland. Anecdotally, there are quite a lot of reports of by-catch in Ireland and of bass having to be discarded because they are a by-catch of other fisheries. Ireland has found that, in the absence of a wider European agreement, just having a total ban on commercial fishing has not been effective.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) talked about me facing down legal advice. I can say that, on this issue, unlike on many other issues in DEFRA, where there is frequently legal advice about European law, I have not come across any particular legal advice that is an obstacle. This issue is much more about the best way to deliver the outcome we want, and although there are difficulties and frustrations in negotiating such outcomes at a European level, we can start by having effective measures at that level, which we can then supplement with our own national measures, and I intend to do both those things.

In the 10 seconds I have left, let me say that we should recognise the role that IFCAs can play. Many already implement their own measures to protect bass. Finally, I will be going to Europe and to the Fisheries Council to get the best deal we can.

UK and Gibraltar Prosecuting Authorities

Wednesday 3rd December 2014 Westminster Hall

10:59

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Mr Crausby, and to have this important and very topical debate on the relationship between the UK and the British overseas territory of Gibraltar on prosecution and law enforcement matters. I refer at the outset to my relevant interests in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

As many Members will know, Gibraltar is a fully self-governing and self-funding British overseas territory. It adheres entirely to the British system and rule of law, and it is the contention of this debate and worth restating that it meets the highest United Kingdom and international standards in all respects. It is a small country, but it is proud to be British. Part of that British heritage is its strong legal system, entirely based upon our own common law.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

I thank my very hon. Friend for giving way. I want to reinforce his point by saying that not only is the legal system very good indeed, but the police and defence forces are outstanding. I speak from personal experience, having worked with them.

[Robert Neill]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point, particularly given his experience in that sphere. It certainly coincides entirely with my own.

As well as having a strong economy with growth that most places would envy, Gibraltar has a robust and independent legal system, a thriving legal community, a strong and independent judiciary, as well as an excellent police force, organised and trained to the highest British standards, and associated law enforcement agencies. It has, in particular, a robust prosecution service presided over by the highly experienced and very well regarded Attorney General, Ricky Rhoda, and supported by a team of Crown Counsel who meet the same high standards as would be found in any prosecution department in the United Kingdom. I have had the pleasure on more than one occasion of meeting the senior Crown Counsel, the Attorney General and senior members of the judiciary.

It is against that background that on my last visit to Gibraltar, I was struck by the genuine sense of outrage felt by Gibraltarian citizens at every level that I met, from members of Government through to legal practitioners, down to shopkeepers and the taxi driver who took me up to the Rock hotel one evening—once he found out I was an MP—at comments made in this House, I regret to say, on 30 October by the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz). I am glad to see him in his place. I notified him of my intention to refer to his comments in this debate. They were ill-founded, they have done damage to Gibraltar wrongly and needlessly, and this is a chance to set the record straight.

[Dame Angela Watkinson (Hornchurch and Upminster) (Con)]

I should mention that I am a member of the parliamentary group on Gibraltar. As my hon. Friend will know, Gibraltar is already suffering from gratuitous harassment by the Spanish Government at its border. When this news became public, it gave the Spanish Government another excuse to attack Gibraltar, as it has done in its media. That is having a very serious effect on Gibraltar’s reputation. It is entirely unfair and as we all know, Gibraltar is fiercely loyal to the United Kingdom.

[Robert Neill]

Sadly, my hon. Friend is right. I have seen some of the coverage in the Spanish press. It is gratuitous. Unfortunately, the comments, whatever the intention in making them, have been used to fuel the antagonism that some in the Spanish governing party and other parts of the media feel towards Gibraltar. It is worth saying that, precisely because Gibraltar is a small country with a difficult neighbour, an insult to Gibraltar is felt very personally, even by everyday Gibraltarians. It is not just a matter of Government circles; Gibraltarians feel this individually because every one of them sees the consequence of what happens when misleading information is used against them by their neighbours. For that reason, this debate is important, and it is worth setting out why.

The remarks made by the right hon. Member for Leicester East were in the context of a comment about drugs policy and money laundering. I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for having shown me a letter that he subsequently sent to the Chief Minister, who raised his concerns with the right hon. Gentleman, and I place that on the record. However, the reality is this: the inevitable innuendo in the comments made was that there was a particular issue with Gibraltar and drugs money and money laundering. That is wholly unjustified and untrue, and it is unsupported by any evidence of any kind. In every jurisdiction, we all have to be alert to the issues arising from organised crime, drugs and money laundering. The UK is, and so is Gibraltar, to exactly the same standards as the United Kingdom.

It is worth setting out in some detail, as briefly as I may, the work that Gibraltar has done in this field.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way and for informing me that he was going to raise these comments. This debate seems to be all about the five words that I spoke in the Chamber. As he knows, I wrote to the Chief Minister and I accepted his assurances that Gibraltar’s financial services were absolutely robust. I pointed out that in my speech I made it very clear that there was no criticism of the people or Government of Gibraltar. If he is now reassuring me again in the House that there is no question of any impropriety of any kind, of course we accept that assurance.

[Robert Neill]

I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for making those comments. More important, I hope the people of Gibraltar will be grateful, because unfortunately, once words are said, even perhaps in an uncharacteristically loose manner, much harm is done in this particular context. I not only want to put that on record in the House, but I know that my hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General will be able to state the position of the British Government in relation to those matters.

I think the position is this: unfortunately, the comments that the right hon. Gentleman referred to were made on the Floor of the Chamber of this House. They were recorded in Hansard and I am grateful to him for coming along today and withdrawing those comments, again, on the Floor of this House, sitting in Westminster Hall, and on the record in Hansard. That is hugely important to the people of Gibraltar and I am grateful to him for having done that.

Let me set out why that retraction is so important. Gibraltar, throughout recent times, has been fully compliant with all its international obligations. All relevant EU regulations that apply to Gibraltar and all EU directives are transposed into law by Gibraltar’s Parliament. That includes all EU measures on financial supervision and regulation, direct taxation and the fight against money laundering.

Gibraltar has been actively engaged with the OECD on exchange of information arrangements. The OECD and Council of Europe convention on mutual administrative assistance in tax matters has been extended to Gibraltar, and in consequence of a raft of measures, Gibraltar has now, pursuant to various agreements and the convention, exchange of information agreements to the OECD standard with some 77 countries and territories around the world. It has received a glowing review from the OECD on its record of exchange of information. Its overall compliance ratings are in exactly the same league as this country’s and Germany’s. I hope that gives a proper sense of perspective as to the seriousness with which Gibraltar takes these issues.

[Mr Nigel Dodds (Belfast North) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. With the comments of the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), it will put on the record the truth of the situation concerning Gibraltar. Does my hon. Friend accept that there is no real evidence from the UK or other EU member states, apart from Spain, which raises its voice from time to time on various issues, of complaints about the way in which the regulatory regime operates in Gibraltar on money laundering or otherwise?

[Robert Neill]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Independent monitoring reports state specifically that there have been no instances of failure by Gibraltar to co-operate with any requests by any member organisation. He is totally on the money as far as that is concerned. Gibraltar behaves to exactly the same standards as the United Kingdom. We should be proud of it and congratulate it on that.

It is worth pointing out that Gibraltar has signed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act intergovernmental agreement with the UK and the United States on a commitment to common reporting standards and automatic exchange of information. That now extends to 50 countries, with a further 30 in the process of joining it. Gibraltar has applied the EU savings directive since 2005. Its regulatory law enforcement and intelligence authorities, as my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) pointed out, work hand in glove with the United Kingdom and other international counterparts in the detection and prevention of crime. Despite the tensions across the border, the Royal Gibraltar police work effectively and well with their counterparts in the Guardia Civil, notwithstanding political interference from time to time from Madrid, and they should be commended for that.

Gibraltar has draconian all-crimes anti-money laundering legislation, systems and administrative practices in place, all of which comply with EU legislation and operate in exactly the same way as in the UK. Its systems have been tested with independent reviews by the Financial Action Task Force, the International Monetary Fund and others, and have been found to comply, not just in theory, but in practice. The Financial Action Task Force recently revised its 40 anti-money laundering principles and Gibraltar is taking those on board and updating its arrangements in the fight against crime in the same way as the United Kingdom. In other words, it meets exactly the same standards in every regard.

[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Gentleman is giving the Chamber a robust account of the prosecution system. Can he confirm that there have been no prosecutions for money laundering in Gibraltar?

[Robert Neill]

That is my understanding, but my hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General will be able to deal specifically with that. The fact that we have been successful in such matters is precisely because of the very good arrangements and regulatory systems in place in Gibraltar. It is totally right that we should be alert to the risk of crime, but when good preventative mechanisms are in place and prevent crimes from coming to fruition that is a plus point and we should congratulate Gibraltar on that.

[Dame Angela Watkinson]

Was it not the late right hon. Robin Cook, when Foreign Secretary, who was quoted as saying that Gibraltar was

“the benchmark jurisdiction in terms of legislative and regulatory standards in the fight against money-laundering”?

[Robert Neill]

That is exactly what the then Foreign Secretary said, and I believe the right hon. Member for Leicester East may have been a member of the same Government. Robin Cook was right, and his comment summarises the matter.

[Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)]

I regularly meet Gibraltar Ministers through the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and other bodies, and they are always telling me about the robust steps that they have taken in partnership with the UK and Spain to ensure that Gibraltar has the highest standards. Is that the hon. Gentleman’s experience in his conversations with Ministers from Gibraltar?

[Robert Neill]

That is my experience of conversations with Ministers in Gibraltar. It is my experience of conversations with our embassy in Madrid. It is also my experience of conversations with police officers and the senior judiciary in Gibraltar and the senior Crown Counsel and his Department in Gibraltar. It is certainly my experience of conversations with the excellent Attorney General, Ricky Rhoda. All the evidence is clear in such matters. That is a further indication of the permanent and long-running co-operation with the Chief Minister of Gibraltar, the hon. Fabian Picardo QC, who is in London at the moment for a meeting of the Joint Ministerial Council of Overseas Territories. Gibraltar works closely with the UK at every level and to the highest standards, and it moves swiftly.

To allow my hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General to respond, I will make my final point. No sooner had this House opted back into some European justice issues, from which we had had an opt-out—the justice and home affairs area—on 1 December, the Government of Gibraltar published a series of regulations to give effect to the same principles and arrangements as those that the UK has now opted into. It could not have moved more swiftly to ensure that it met exactly the same standards as the UK on police, criminal and judicial co-operation, including important matters such as exchange of intelligence and information, mutual recognition of criminal freezing orders, asset recovery confiscation orders and financial penalties. I hope that my hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General, who I am delighted to see here today and who is highly experienced in such matters, will be able to confirm that.

I am grateful to the right hon. Member for Leicester East for accepting on the record in this House that any allegations and slurs against Gibraltar were utterly baseless. The people of Gibraltar are entitled to an apology and a correction, and I hope that we have been able to achieve that in this debate and that the Solicitor-General will be able to set out the Government’s position on the excellent co-operation between our two jurisdictions.

11:16

[The Solicitor-General (Mr Robert Buckland)]

It is a pleasure, Mr Crausby, to serve under your chairmanship. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) for securing this debate at a timely moment, when the Joint Ministerial Council is meeting here in London and the Chief Minister of Gibraltar and those of other British overseas territories are with us. It is timely indeed, because it gives all Members of this House and all parties in this House an opportunity to reaffirm our strong support and commitment to Gibraltar and its work, not just in co-operation with the United Kingdom but with other territories and countries, in helping to fight international crime.

[Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)]

Will the Solicitor-General take it upon himself at the end of the debate to let the Chief Minister know of the unwavering support throughout this House and that it stands shoulder to shoulder with the people of Gibraltar?

[The Solicitor-General]

I am happy to accept the hon. Gentleman’s exhortation. I hope to see the Chief Minister at the Foreign Office later today and I will convey the message of this House loud and clear that we support the work of our friends in Gibraltar and the prosecutorial authorities and indeed the Attorney General, Ricky Rhoda.

I can contribute to this debate by outlining the work of the Crown Prosecution Service and Serious Fraud Office, both of which the Attorney-General and I superintend in our role as Law Officers. Indeed, I am pleased to be able to tell my hon. Friend that the working relationship between the UK and Gibraltarian prosecuting authorities is strong and constructive.

As my hon. Friend recognises, the Government have set out to reinvigorate our relationship with the overseas territories, to increase the UK’s engagement with their Governments at all levels and to support them when required. I have just returned from a conference of Attorneys General of 10 of the UK’s overseas territories, including Gibraltar, with representatives from the United States and Canadian Departments of Justice. We met in Miami and discussed a range of topics relating to the rule of law and administration of justice in the overseas territories and sought to enhance our mutual co-operation on a range of matters. After three and a half days of discussion, my firm view is that the Attorneys General of each of our territories play a key role in helping to drive forward legal reform and to meet our wider ambitions.

Ensuring good governance and respect for the rule of law is a fundamental and vital platform for delivering security and prosperity for all our citizens. During the conference we discussed important topics including mutual legal assistance, extradition procedures, tackling bribery, fraud and corruption, improving legislative drafting processes, child safeguarding—a growing and important issue in many territories—and constitutional matters. A series of actions on those subjects was agreed, and I look forward to continuing our close liaison with the Attorney General of Gibraltar and the other overseas territories as we work to deliver them.

I turn to the work of the prosecuting authorities, starting with the Crown Prosecution Service. It is important to note that co-operation between the UK and Gibraltar is not confined to mutual legal assistance through the formal letter of request process. It also takes place, as my hon. Friend suggested, on a police-to-police basis. The appropriate avenue will depend on the nature of the request and the purpose for which the information or evidence is sought. Both the Crown Prosecution Service and the Serious Fraud Office work regularly with other judicial authorities using the established MLA channels. That is how countries request and provide assistance in obtaining evidence that is located in one country for use in criminal investigations and prosecutions in another. It is also used to obtain assistance in the tracing, restraint and confiscation of the proceeds of crime, which is particularly germane to the issues that have been raised today.

Letters of request from Gibraltar to the UK typically come via the United Kingdom central authority, which is based in the Home Office. The CPS will be involved in requests to restrain or confiscate assets here in the UK. The CPS and the SFO have worked with the Gibraltarian authorities in the past few years, and that has been of real benefit to both jurisdictions.

[Bob Stewart]

Is my hon. and learned Friend saying that to all intents and purposes, that which is legal in this country is legal in Gibraltar, and that which is illegal in Gibraltar is illegal in this country, too?

[The Solicitor-General]

That is a fair way of putting it. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst has said, we will be entering into the justice and home affairs measures on 1 December, and Gibraltar has taken swift action to do likewise—to follow in lockstep with the UK. Those extra safeguards and means of mutual co-operation strengthen the ties that bind us.

I am sure that my hon. Friend will understand that it would not be appropriate for me to give specific examples because of the international expectation that MLA requests remain confidential. However, I can talk about some notable recent successes of the CPS, such as the securing of two convictions against individuals for fraudulently obtaining moneys from a vulnerable elderly relative. Assistance from Gibraltar helped to secure that conviction, and there was lawyer-to-lawyer contact to progress the case. I would like to mention some other examples of ongoing casework, ranging from organised crime—specifically drug trafficking—to fraud and identity theft. CPS lawyers have reported receiving exceptional assistance from Gibraltar, including a response to a request that was issued at very short notice following a change in position from the defence. In another case, a letter of request was sent to obtain banking evidence, and there were no problems with obtaining the material from Gibraltar.

[Keith Vaz]

That is very useful information, particularly in respect of the inquiries being undertaken by the Home Affairs Committee. Is the Solicitor-General telling the Chamber that there are no examples of people being prosecuted for money laundering in Gibraltar, either relating to drugs money—that is the main interest of the Select Committee—or otherwise?

[The Solicitor-General]

We are not aware of any prosecutions, but I will look into the matter further to give the right hon. Gentleman cast-iron information. I will write to him, if I may, on that point. I am grateful to him for helping to reinforce the consensus that exists in the House about the good criminal prosecution and investigation work that goes on in Gibraltar.

[Robert Neill]

Following on from that point, perhaps my hon. and learned Friend will confirm my own experience at the Bar, that very often jurisdiction as to where a prosecution takes place is but a small part of the bigger picture. Frequently, assistance given by authorities in one jurisdiction may lead to prosecutions elsewhere. The important test, with which Gibraltar completely complies, is the prevention of crime and the capture of criminals.

[The Solicitor-General]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The delicate network of interlocking mutual legal assistance is vital if we are to have a truly international approach to the fight against crime, which nowadays often exists in many jurisdictions and crosses many boundaries.

[Thomas Docherty]

Two specific allegations could be levelled against Gibraltar. The first is that it is a soft touch on the physical bringing of drugs into its ports; and the second is that it is a soft touch on the financial services-based introduction of laundered money. Will the Solicitor-General confirm, for the record, that Gibraltar’s ports are as safe as, if not safer than, UK ports and that its financial arrangements are as robust as those of the United Kingdom?

[The Solicitor-General]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving me the opportunity, on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government, to provide those assurances and to send the message clearly to Madrid that it is wrong to seek opportunities to tarnish Gibraltar’s reputation, particularly in relation to money laundering and drug smuggling. Gibraltar works unceasingly and tirelessly to address those allegations. This debate is a great opportunity for us to set the record straight.

In the time that I have remaining, I would like to talk briefly about the SFO. Like the CPS, the SFO normally works through MLA channels, but it also uses informal liaison. The international assistance team in the SFO considers the execution of matters that have arisen from Gibraltar, and the SFO also regularly makes MLA requests. I am pleased to report that liaison between the SFO and the Gibraltarian authorities is very good. The SFO has worked with the Gibraltarian authorities on several occasions in the last few years. It is a matter of record that the First Minister of Gibraltar gave evidence for the prosecution in an SFO case relating to GP Noble in 2011 and 2012. The SFO has also provided expert assistance and support to the Gibraltarian authorities in respect of operational procedure and best practice. For example, the SFO graphics team met the Royal Gibraltar police to discuss a number of issues, including the presentation of evidence at court.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst set out, Gibraltar has signed up to several international obligations, which put it high in international standings. We are assured that the anti-money laundering legislation in Gibraltar is in full compliance with its EU obligations and that it has been independently reviewed by the Financial Action Task Force, the International Monetary Fund and others. Gibraltar is well advanced on meeting its Financial Action Task Force recommendations and preparing for the fourth money laundering directive. Notably, Gibraltar has entered into the equivalent of 125 tax information exchange agreements, and it is committed to automatic tax exchange with the UK, the USA and some 90 other countries via the common reporting standard, which my hon. Friend referred to. In addition, the Gibraltar Financial Intelligence Unit, which is responsible for, among other things, the receiving and actioning of suspicious transaction reports, is a member of the international Egmont group and shares information systematically with members of the group around the world. Those examples further demonstrate how Gibraltar’s regulatory, law enforcement and intelligence authorities work hand in glove with their UK and international counterparts in the detection and prevention of crime.

I hope that the debate has made it crystal clear, both to my hon. Friend and other hon. Members, and to the wider world, that there is a strong, constructive and ongoing working relationship between the prosecution authorities in this country and in Gibraltar. It should be obvious from the summary I have provided that that co-operation spans both formal and informal channels, and that it includes joint working on casework and promoting best practice. As I mentioned at the outset, the Attorney-General and I are clear in our support for our counterparts and their teams in all the overseas territories, which very much includes Gibraltar. They play a central role in driving legal reform and upholding the rule of law, and we are pleased to be able to offer them our full support in that regard.

11:29

Sitting suspended.

Youth Service Provision

Wednesday 3rd December 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mr Philip Davies in the Chair]

14:30

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship yet again, Mr Davies. I say in opening that I am rather disappointed; when I look round the Chamber, I see that we have Opposition Members who are interested in youth services, but we have only the Minister to reply on behalf of the Government. It is very disappointing, but even so, I am grateful to be granted the opportunity to raise some of these issues today.

As hon. Members know, there is a crisis in youth services, which have suffered cuts of around £260 million since 2010. There was nothing today in the Chancellor’s autumn statement to cheer up our young people at all. Link that to the ditching of the education maintenance allowance and the access to learning fund, the virtual collapse of careers advice delegated to schools without the necessary resources, and the pittance that local authorities have to pay out from the student opportunity fund, and we can see that young people are getting a very poor deal from this Government.

We are all aware of the spending cuts that local authorities are being forced to make as a result of reduced funding from central Government. That is being felt acutely in areas such as the north-east of England, where 11 out of 12 councils will experience higher than average reductions in spending power for 2014-15, along with a 5% funding reduction compared with 2013-14. To be clear, in pounds per dwelling, that is 10 times higher than cuts in the south-east, and almost four times higher in percentage terms. Across the country, this is devastating service provision and the ability of councils to meet the needs of residents, whether in the form of road maintenance, care and support services for the elderly or the provision of sporting and recreational facilities for the young. Nowhere has been left untouched.

One area particularly hard hit by the attacks on spending is youth services. Despite those services being among the most important that local authorities provide, and ignoring the long-term nature of the impact, levels of provision for young people across the UK have suffered horrendously under the coalition. To be clear from the outset, the Government’s policies have seen young people, just like women, shoulder a disproportionate share of austerity and its worst effects.

Youth services have been hit by funding cuts of £60 million since 2012. Some 73% of local authorities have reported being forced to reduce youth service spending during that time because of central Government cuts, resulting in the loss of hundreds of youth centres and thousands of youth workers across the country. I know that view is recognised by the former children’s Minister, the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), who said:

“Because they don’t have to statutorily provide youth services they”—

the councils—

“have too often been at the top of the queue when cuts come along”.

However, that is just part of a trend that started when the coalition came to power.

Over that longer term, 93% of respondents to a Unison survey said that their local authority had cut youth service spending since 2010, with youth service spending down by £62 million in 2010-11 and £137 million in 2011-12. Overall, that adds up to cuts of £259 million since 2010, with some local authorities having to slash spending by over half to meet their costs.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this afternoon’s debate, and I apologise for the fact that I will not be able to stay for the entire debate. He paints a rather rosier picture, perhaps because he is talking about two or three years ago, than is the case today. My local authority of Trafford is now proposing that we would have no spending on the youth service at all from next year.

[Alex Cunningham]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. That is frightful, and as I develop my speech this afternoon, I will refer to some of the consequences of losing youth services altogether.

The Government have established a maze of inefficient and underperforming nationally controlled programmes that duplicate services locally. There are around 40 national schemes and services delivered by 10 different Departments and agencies, leaving councils little, if any, influence to co-ordinate, target and scrutinise the shifting market of publicly funded provision and hindering their ability to plan where best to invest their own support.

Over the summer, I visited one of the schemes, the National Citizen Service, and met some lovely young people. I was impressed by the efforts and intentions, but the fact remains that these schemes have failed to fill the gap that cuts to youth services have created. To make matters worse, the NCS costs £1,200 per head for a six-week volunteering programme, whereas a similar scheme in Germany is able to fund a whole year’s work-based volunteering for the same cost.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

Like my hon. Friend, I have met the people running the NCS, and I think the work that they do is very good. However, would he agree that one of the big problems with the NCS is that it does not happen week in, week out, all year round? What we really need are youth service workers working with young people every day of the year, because that is where the real difference is and where the real impact is made.

[Alex Cunningham]

My hon. Friend is correct. I will not take anything away from the NCS; I think it is a tremendous and very effective programme. The young people whom I spoke to were really enjoying it and they told me that they were learning tremendous things, but as my hon. Friend said, it does not address year-round provision. It is six weeks, then there is a cliff edge and the provision ends.

The loss of specialist staff and locally tailored services should worry us all in that context. Young people want and need to be able to socialise in a safe and secure environment, but they also need specific professional support in many areas of their life, yet the Government measures forced on local authorities will leave many young people with nowhere to go but street corners. What my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) mentioned is probably an example of that. It does not just risk encouraging antisocial behaviour; more importantly, it will leave young people in very vulnerable situations and potentially victims of who knows what as they spend their time on the streets.

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is outlining some consequences for socialisation and for the benefits of engaging young people in constructive behaviour. Does he agree—this is on the basis of my discussion with youth workers in Sheffield—that there is an even more significant loss related to youth provision during school holidays, because youth workers have said to me, “Frankly, if people do not engage in these schemes and these schemes are threatened, they will not eat that day”? Is the provision of food within these activities not a serious dimension of this problem that we ought to consider?

[Alex Cunningham]

Most certainly, because a lot of these programmes are aimed specifically at young people from deprived backgrounds who may not have access to the theme parks and holiday experiences that are enjoyed by other young people. It is all the more important that the service provision is there—and that they can eat there. When I went to the NCS in Stockton, they were doing some cooking. I did not care for the famous Parmo pork, with cheese spread over the top, and the pizzas that they made, but they were actually doing something. People said, “It is not very healthy food,” but at least they were eating, and we need to make sure that young people can eat along the way as well.

In many poorer communities, youth clubs and similar facilities are the only service available to young people and provide opportunities to learn new skills and channel their energies productively, but youth centres are so much more than simply a hangout place for young people. Yes, that is one element of the function they serve, and a very welcome one, but well-managed youth centres serve a dual purpose that will now be missed.

That open-access provision is a gateway to early intervention, reaching out to vulnerable youngsters who might otherwise be missed by other services or whose needs might escalate before they are picked up by targeted services. These open-access services are often more appropriate than targeted interventions when it comes to improving outcomes for young people. However, the large numbers of young people at risk of falling through the cracks in provision will not become evident for perhaps five or 10 years, by which time it will be too late.

Stockton-on-Tees borough council, which is responsible for youth services within my constituency, has seen the number of youth centres halved to just 12. That said, through much hard work, I understand that they have succeeded in attracting greater numbers of young people and on a more frequent basis. I take my hat off to them; that is very positive. However, in outlying areas, where provision for young people is generally poorest, the loss of somewhere to go that is close to home is a real problem for communities.

Across the country, the remaining youth provision is provided by youth workers who are thinly spread, overworked and, consequently, less able to fulfil their roles effectively. There is an obvious detriment to the services that they provide and to the young people with whom they work. Although local authorities are limiting the extent of cuts in youth service spending as best they can, that has largely been achieved by reducing the numbers of professional youth workers with the important JNC—Joint Negotiating Committee for Youth and Community Workers—qualification and the skills that come with that.

Again, the context is crucial. In the same two-year period that has seen the number of youth centres dwindle, 2,000 valuable skilled youth workers have been lost from the system. The Unison report highlighted the fact that, as a result, 41,000 youth service places for young people have disappeared, meaning that 35,000 hours of outreach have vanished from youth service provision. That loss is particularly concerning because by building relationships of trust and support with young people, specialist youth workers can actively engage with their communities and help young people to make their own informed decisions about their lives and develop confidence and resilience. In short, youth workers play a central role in supporting young people, yet their years of hard work are being dispensed with and the successes that they have worked hard to achieve are being jeopardised by scything Government cutbacks.

As if that was not bad enough, it has emerged that, as has often been the case under this Government, the impact of the cuts has been felt particularly hard in some of our most deprived communities. In such areas, youth services play an even more significant role: helping young people into work, avoiding and preventing substance abuse and tackling problems of antisocial behaviour and gang violence, as well as boosting community cohesion. However, the effects of austerity have been concentrated in those very communities. The education maintenance allowance has been removed, while support from the access to learning fund and the student opportunity fund has been cut. Housing benefit for the under-25s has been cut, tuition fees have trebled, making higher education more expensive than ever before, and careers services have been slashed. Those cuts are severely short-sighted and will add up to even greater problems as we move forward.

Let us take, for example, the careers service. At a sitting of the Select Committee on Education last week, Lorna Fitzjohn, Ofsted’s national director for further education and skills, reminded MPs that their assessment of the quality of careers advice in schools was that it was less than good in four out of five. It is no wonder: the Government dumped the careers service on schools—I acknowledge that they have the National Careers Service—but did not provide them with the funding that went with the responsibility. They were relying on the national service to offer additional guidance, but few young people have even heard of it.

There are some examples of very good practice, but in most cases, it is left to ill-equipped teachers to cobble something together and, if they have the right contacts, encourage a few employers to come in and chat to the young people. Association of Colleges research indicates that less than half of all colleges have reported that schools in their area are delivering the requirement to provide independent careers advice and guidance. Largely gone are the professional people who had the breadth of knowledge of different opportunities that provided the young with options best suited to their needs.

The Unison survey found that the majority of schools had reduced their careers advice and had no place for careers experts. Research by the university of Derby found that out of 144 local authorities, only 15 would maintain a substantial careers service. Ofsted’s promised review of careers guidance—that particular area of youth services—in 2015-16 cannot come soon enough.

In the current economic climate, which has seen unprecedented levels of youth unemployment and witnessed 1 million young people being out of work, education or training, there can be no doubt about the need for qualified youth workers, who are able to guide our young people into making the right choices for their lives and provide the support necessary for them to enter the work force. We cannot ignore the fact that young people are far more likely to be unemployed than those in older age groups, who are more likely to have experience on their side.

I am fortunate that Stockton borough council is very much a forward-thinking local authority. Its Youth Direction service is therefore geared to provide to young people across the borough a range of resources, including careers advice, business support and an array of targeted youth support projects, but it is the innovation that comes with that proactive provision that is particularly impressive. Working alongside the council’s antisocial behaviour team to carry out joint patrols in Billingham, the Youth Direction service is assisting with the targeting of identified hot spot areas and is actively contributing to reduced instances of antisocial behaviour according to police statistics.

[Bill Esterson]

My hon. Friend uses reducing antisocial behaviour as one of the very good examples of how youth work really does help as an intervention. Youth workers in my area—or former youth workers, to be more accurate, given that they are not employed any more—make the point to me that they are very often the one person in a young person’s life who is trusted and who gives them some kind of contact with authorities through which to address issues, whether it is antisocial behaviour, routes into employment or dealing with life in general. That one person makes all the difference to a young person’s life. They make a fantastic difference between success and failure later on as well.

[Alex Cunningham]

I am sure that that is very much the case, but it is not just about being the one person who may be trusted. I understand that youth workers are trusted more than teachers. Many young people look to a teacher for that sort of daily support and that level of guidance. I also see youth workers as almost being between the young person and the establishment, because they can be a champion for the young person in their community and with the other agencies. The point my hon. Friend raises is very important.

In Stockton, we are also going to have a patrol co-ordinator. The post, which will be advertised on Friday, will build on the work already being undertaken in Stockton and Billingham and will be the first ever joint antisocial behaviour and youth worker post in the country, so at least we are recruiting some youth workers, albeit only the odd one here and there.

Although a report from the National Audit Office concluded that, overall, councils have managed reductions well, 50% are none the less now at financial risk, while cuts to local government funding and services are jeopardising the Government’s professed ambitions for young people. Such an outcome not only is objectionable, but threatens to run counter to the duty on local authorities to secure access to a local offer. Introduced by the last Labour Government, that duty required all local authorities

“so far as reasonably practicable”

to provide all qualifying young people with access to

“sufficient educational leisure-time activities which are for the improvement of their well-being”.

In March 2012, the coalition confirmed that it would retain the duty and published streamlined guidance to accompany it, but that new guidance does not make clear the Government’s expectations for what a “good” or “sufficient” offer should look like. Instead, the guidance notes that local authorities are responsible for securing, so far as reasonably practicable,

“equality of access for all young people to the positive, preventative and early help they need to improve their well-being.”

Local authorities, however, face an enormous challenge in providing youth services while adapting to the sizeable budget constraints applied from Westminster. The large reduction in overall grant from central Government to local authorities and the cuts to early intervention grants mean that the sector faces a number of challenges. Despite research prepared for the Cabinet Office indicating that cuts to youth services in London were a factor in the riots experienced in the capital and other large cities in August 2011, the Government have refused to protect youth service budgets. Indeed, that report clearly states:

“Where young people described their normal lives as boring and talked about ‘nothing happening around here’, the riots were seen as an exciting event, a day like no other.”

On top of that, numerous young people are quoted as identifying boredom as a key driver of their involvement. With the riots taking place during the school holidays and with many youngsters having literally nothing better to do by way of structured activities, many resorted to joining in. If that point needed driving home, the report also notes that being otherwise occupied, whether through education, work, an apprenticeship or some other activity, was identified as a significant “tug” factor against “nudges” such as boredom.

Despite that alarming connection, statistics from the Local Government Association show that at least eight out of 10 heads of young people’s services said that they had faced more budget cuts since 2012. At the same time, two thirds of voluntary and community organisations providing youth services reported that they, too, had seen their income reduced in the previous 12 months. Although Churches and other voluntary groups have attempted to step into the breach that has been left by Government cuts, many simply do not have the resources to do so sustainably. Perhaps we need to go back to the expression “so far as reasonably practicable”. At least local authorities would be able to say that it is not reasonably practicable to deliver those services because the resources to enable them to do so no longer exist.

Before I ask the Minister some questions, I want to return to my home area. The Stockton youth assembly, known locally as the SYA, has been established to ensure that young people are consulted and their voices heard, and to help the council to work directly with young people to shape local services. The assembly provides a voice for young people aged 11 to 19, or up to 25 if they have a learning difficulty or a disability, and is made up of representatives from a wide range of existing youth voice forums. It holds a formal meeting every other month with an action-packed agenda. In between the formal meetings, the group have opportunities to engage in team building, positive activities and development sessions, which are provided by Youth Direction’s targeted youth support.

I remember well, when I was the chair of the Stockton Children’s Trust board, those same young people putting politicians, council, health, police and other professionals through their paces. They asked difficult questions, tried to force us to justify some of the changes that we were making at the time and encouraged us to do different things. That is the best of practice by a council that has been nominated countless times for council of the year and has, of course, won that award as well. From what I hear from around the country, not every local authority has been able to adapt to that extent to serve their young people—the example from Trafford comes to mind—and it is young people who pay the price for that.

I ask the Minister to carry out his own assessment of the impact of his Government’s cuts to youth services, and to pledge to become a champion for our young people and fight the Treasury for the resources that are required to start healing our youth services. Will he work with the Local Government Association to understand better the pressures it faces in delivering, in many cases, the most basic services for our young people? Will he help to fulfil his role of champion—the one that I have just given him—by better understanding young people’s need for the right advice and services from professional people? Will he further fulfil that role by working across Government to influence, among others, the Education Secretary to sort out the careers service? Equally importantly, will he help to ensure that the whole of Government works for our young people?

This is a well-worn cliché, but I will use it anyway. The young people of today are our future. They are the taxpayers of tomorrow and the people who will look after us. We need to give them more, and we need to give them a better start to help them to prepare for that responsibility.

14:53

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this debate about a matter that is of huge concern to my constituency following the Trafford council budget proposals made a few weeks ago, which would result in the closure of all of our youth centres around the borough, leaving only the central Talkshop available for young people in Trafford. In a borough that has, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) highlighted, some outlying geographical areas and quite high transport costs, it is unlikely that many young people in my constituency would be able to access the central Talkshop.

The concern extends well beyond my constituents, although many of them have written to me about it over the past few weeks. There is considerable pressure on MPs from all over the country to sign a recently tabled early-day motion, and at a recent meeting of the all-party group on poverty, young people challenged MPs from all political parties about the importance of the youth service. They received favourable responses from MPs from all political parties about how we value the youth service, and they told us that, frankly, we do not put our money where our mouth is. It deeply discredits us as politicians when we proclaim our belief in a service but we are unwilling to ensure that it is sustainably maintained and funded. Young people become disillusioned when they see that our promises of investment in them are only words.

In Trafford, we are not only concerned about the loss of youth centres, important though that is—some of them are extremely effective and popular in reaching out to the young people in their neighbourhood; as my hon. Friend said, we are also concerned about the loss of trained youth workers. There will also be a reduction in volunteering opportunities in those youth centres, and I am surprised that a Government who are so keen on volunteering should remove such opportunities, which are much valued in my constituency.

In Trafford, as in other communities, the voluntary sector has traditionally supplied a good proportion of youth provision. I believe that our local authority hopes that that sector will now do much more. Like my hon. Friend, I greatly value the youth work that is done by a range of non-governmental, non-statutory organisations in my borough. The problem is that if we leave such work entirely to voluntary and self-organising youth provision, the offer across the borough will not be strategic. Some areas may be quite well served, but other areas where need is higher may be rather poorly served. There may be some activities that offer lots of opportunities for young people, but other activities that young people want to take part in may not be available in our borough.

My hon. Friend made an important point about sustainability. Voluntary organisations are keen to do what they can to fill the gap in Trafford, but it is a big challenge for them to raise sustainable funding to enable them to make commitments beyond one or two years. For example, Redeeming Our Communities, which has recently begun operating in Partington in my constituency, is keen to look at what more it can do as the youth service in Trafford is degraded, but it has already made the point to me that it can do only as much as it can raise funding for. We must be mindful of the fact that a voluntary sector solution is not sustainable unless there is sustainable funding to allow such organisations to operate.

[Alex Cunningham]

One of the questions that perhaps I should have asked the Minister is whether he will do something to ring-fence and protect youth budgets. Even if Trafford had only a small amount, at least it could work with the voluntary sector to improve its chances of delivering provision in some of the more difficult areas.

[Kate Green]

Certainty would be valuable to those who want to provide youth services. I also make the point to the Minister that the availability of statutory funding has drawn in additional voluntary funding on top of the statutory funding that has hitherto underpinned our service. Lostock youth centre, for example, has been able to raise hundreds of thousands of pounds of voluntary money to top up the statutory support that it receives. Although some of that voluntary money may continue to reach our youth centres, we will lose the basic infrastructure that enables a trained team of youth workers to go out and seek such additional voluntary funding support. Even if voluntary funding were widely available, provision cannot exist in a vacuum, without an underpinning of statutory financial support.

I am concerned that there is a real mismatch between the degrading of our youth services and the other strategic ambitions of local authorities and the Government for our young people: priorities such as reducing crime and antisocial behaviour, making young people feel safe, ensuring their emotional well-being and ensuring that they achieve, attain and have aspirations. In the context of considerable attention being given to the risk of sexual exploitation and abuse, there must be the highest provision in relation to safeguarding, and the youth service hitherto has been an important element of providing such protection to potentially vulnerable young people. As I am sure the Minister will understand, we are deeply concerned about that in the Greater Manchester area. The youth service in Trafford has been actively engaged in that area, and it is well informed about the young people who are at risk. I am concerned that such knowledge and intelligence may be lost.

Everyone recognises the financial pressures that our local authorities are under, but it is very short-sighted simply to slash youth provision. It is poor value for money because it will generate additional costs and pressures in other parts of the system in the years to come. I appreciate that the Minister will say that local authorities must exercise discretion locally and make their own decisions, but he has the opportunity today to offer certainty and stability so that we at least have the capacity for forward planning. I hope he will give us those assurances this afternoon.

15:00

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) on securing this debate.

I must declare an interest: I am a youth worker. At least, when I had a proper job before I came to this place I spent almost all my professional life as a youth and community worker, working with young people in communities. A few of us in this place and a few more in the other place were youth and community workers, and we are all in absolute despair at what is happening to our services. I also chair the all-party group on youth affairs, so I try to keep my feet on the ground, although the situation is moving incredibly fast at the moment. Unfortunately, it is not changing for the better; services are being destroyed up and down the country—I will talk a little more about that later.

Let me start with something the Chancellor said in his autumn statement a few minutes ago:

“We have shown in this Parliament that we can deliver spending reductions without damaging front-line public services”.

I wish he were part of this debate so he could see how those budget cuts have totally destroyed front-line services —the youth service in particular.

Let me take hon. Members back to the start of the system. There was an early youth service at the end of the 19th century, when a number of voluntary organisations were set up to work with young people—in particular, those who faced difficulties in the streets and those who worked in the mills, in service and in other places. There were cuts to those services as the years went on, particularly in the 1950s. In 1958, Lady Albemarle produced a report that became the foundation of the modern youth service. The Education Act 1944 provided a statutory basis for the youth service. If hon. Members wonder why I am talking about 1958 and 1944, it is because we always link Acts backwards, and the Education and Inspections Act 2006 contains references to the 1944 Act—I was always confused about that. The 1944 Act set out that local authorities should procure a sufficient youth service.

Sadly, under the previous Tory Government in the 90s, our youth services started disappearing at a rate of knots. I always used to think that perhaps one day I would not be a youth worker, but I never thought that there would be an end of the youth service. In the 1990s, although I still wanted to be a youth worker, there were nearly no jobs left.

The previous Labour Government strengthened the legislation. Unfortunately, some of the first words in the 2006 Act are:

“must, so far as reasonably practicable”.

That is something I hope an incoming Labour Government will sort out. I plead with the Minister to talk to local authorities about what is “reasonably practicable”. If it is reasonably practicable for a local authority to provide library services, education and other services, surely it should still be providing youth services.

The 2006 Act called on local authorities to secure for qualifying young persons in the local authority area—13 to 19-year-olds and people with learning difficulties up to the age of 25—

“sufficient educational leisure-time activities which are for the improvement of their well-being, and sufficient facilities for such activities; and...sufficient recreational leisure-time activities which are for the improvement of their well-being, and sufficient facilities for such activities”.

It states that

“ ‘sufficient educational leisure-time activities’ which are for the improvement of the well-being of qualifying young persons in the authority’s area must include sufficient educational leisure-time activities which are for the improvement of their personal and social development.”

That was later defined to mean youth work.

The Act set out two forms of activity. Educational leisure-time activity aids young people’s social and personal development, and includes activities delivered by youth workers. Recreational leisure-time activities can include provision by youth workers, but it also includes sport, informal physical activities and cultural activities such as music, performing arts and visual arts.

The Government did not totally abandon that commitment. In a policy document on youth services, they reiterated:

“It is…local authorities’ duty to secure, so far as reasonably practicable, equality of access for all young people to the positive, preventative and early help they need to improve their well-being. This includes youth work and other services and activities that:…Connect young people with their communities, enabling them to belong and contribute to society, including through volunteering, and supporting them to have a voice in decisions which affect their lives;…offer young people opportunities in safe environments to take part in a wide range of sports, arts, music and other activities, through which they can develop a strong sense of belonging, socialise safely with their peers, enjoy social mixing, experience spending time with older people, and develop relationships with adults they trust;…support the personal and social development of young people through which they build the capabilities they need for learning, work, and the transition to adulthood…improve young people’s physical and mental health and emotional well-being;…help those young people at risk of dropping out…raise young people’s aspirations, build their resilience, and inform their decisions—and thereby reducing teenage pregnancy, risky behaviours such as substance misuse, and involvement in crime and anti-social behaviour.”

Sadly, the Government, through their devastating cuts, have failed absolutely to enable young people to access those services.

The previous Government’s document “Resourcing excellent youth services” states:

“the purpose of the work must be predominantly that of achieving outcomes related to young people’s personal and social development (as distinct from, say, their academic or vocational learning);…the methods of the work include the extensive use of experiential learning and of small groups (as distinct from, say, a prescribed curriculum and whole-class teaching or individual casework);…the values of the work include the voluntary engagement of young people with skilled adults. This relationship transforms what is possible for young people.”

[Alex Cunningham]

My hon. Friend is talking about how the youth service and youth workers have a very different role to play in supporting young people today. In schools today, there is tremendous pressure on young people. They have got to have their heads down, the curriculum is very tight and they must concentrate on academic subjects. That is all the more reason why they need somebody outside that environment to help them develop in other ways.

[Julie Hilling]

I agree. Anybody who has worked with young people knows that if their heads are not in the right place, they cannot learn. I used to manage a project for looked-after young people, who were put in small groups with qualitative professional workers to work through their issues. Sticking them in a classroom and trying to stuff their heads full of facts was not working. The facts were being kept out by the mess in their lives—they did not know what was going on in their lives and they did not have good relationships with adults. Providing that space did more than allow those young people to be themselves; it enabled them to learn, participate, take part, get ready for work and take up their role in the world. It fulfilled an important part of those young people’s development.

I shall quote from Choose Youth, an organisation that shows that the Government have done something right. They have brought together all the practitioners in the voluntary and statutory sectors in youth work—that was unknown in the past—in an organisation that seeks to defend and promote youth work. Choose Youth says:

“What is youth work and why is it important?...Youth work as a professional educational practice uniquely inspires, educates, empowers, takes the side of young people and amplifies their voice. Unlike other interventions with young people it combines these elements in a relationship that young people freely choose to make with their youth workers. From this relationship a curriculum of learning and activities is developed that build on the positive and enhance social and personal education.”

Youth work is sometimes a place, such as a centre. Sometimes it takes place on the streets, sometimes in projects—in arts or sports projects in a variety of settings. What is unique, however, is that it is, first, an informal relationship that young people can choose to be part of—they do not have to be part of it. Secondly, the relationship is based on their terms; the youth worker tries to find out what young people actually want and need, rather than what the youth worker, as an adult, thinks they want and need. There is, therefore, a voluntary relationship and the ability for young people to develop and to choose their own curriculum.

As a youth worker—I apologise to all the young people I worked with over the years for this—I never had a conversation that was truly about what they thought about “Brookside” the night before or what they did the weekend before, because all those conversations were fundamental starting points for exploring other issues. We would use soaps to talk about date rape, and we would use things that were going on to talk about drugs, sex or relationships. Yes, we would teach young people about condoms and how to have positive sexual relationships, but there was a whole mix when it came to working with young people.

[Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)]

I am listening with interest to what my hon. Friend is saying. In terms of the horrendous examples of child sexual exploitation we have seen across the country, with more surely to come over the next few years, does she agree that there is a reason why, in every serious case review we read, it is charities that have raised the alarm? They take the time and have the space to develop relationships with young people, exactly as she is outlining. That is why cutting these organisations, which are doing such important work, is so short-sighted.

[Julie Hilling]

I was going to talk about that issue, but I will pick it up now. If we look at the reports about Rotherham and Rochdale, we see it was youth workers who took the side of young people and started to raise issues. They said, “Things are not right here. These young people need to be listened to.” Indeed, they are perhaps the only professionals who come out well from those reports.

Youth work is also about challenging attitudes. It is not necessarily about taking the side of young people and deciding they are absolutely right, but about challenging their attitudes, their racism and their sexism. It is about challenging them to think about the world so that they do not just walk into the world and accept their place, but challenge the world as well. If they see injustice, they can challenge it by working together, not by rioting on the streets. Part of the legislation is that the voice of youth is central and that young people have a right to a voice.

[Bill Esterson]

I want to link what my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) said with something that my hon. Friend said earlier, based on her experience. Many of the young people involved in the trafficking were in children’s homes; my hon. Friend talked about her work with looked-after children. All too sadly, many children in care will end up in prison a few years on, costing £200,000 a year each, which is an horrendous sum. Given my hon. Friend’s experience, can she say how effective youth work has been over the years in keeping some of those young people from ending up in prison?

[Julie Hilling]

That is always hard to quantify, but the issue is important. Over the past few years, people have looked for integrated services, which is the right thing to do, but they have then tried to combine them in one role. Social workers working with young people in care have a vital role, but that adult who befriends young people and works with them on their terms, and who does not have to make sure that they are home by 9 o’clock at night, they have done their homework or they have eaten their greens, is also vital.

My hon. Friend is right that the cost of young people who enter the penal system is enormous, and I will come to the figures in a moment. We are spending about £100 per year per young person on youth work, compared with the hundreds of thousands of pounds we spend to keep people in the penal system because we could not spend a pittance on them before. It is estimated that if we spent £350 per year per young person, that would fund the proper youth service we are talking about.

Another issue the Government have led us to is working just with the young people who are most in need—those who are not in education, employment or training. Of course we need to work with those people, but the more cuts we make to the service that gathers most young people, the more people will fall to the bottom of the net and need a more specialist service to get them out. The youth service is a good vehicle for enabling all young people to have that same positive relationship.

Let us talk about some of the cuts. In 2010, Sheffield had 41 youth clubs; in 2013, that was down to 23. Since 2013, of course, there have been further cuts, and those cuts are continuing. In the north-west, Manchester disestablished its youth service. It is still putting £1.3 million into the voluntary sector, but that is now up for grabs, and it is likely to disappear. Oldham is getting rid of everything apart from one myplace centre. In Trafford, all provision is on the table to go completely, although a housing association might pick some up. In St Helens, there is a 77% cut, and it now has only 28 hours of delivery at the most.

In Lancashire, half the budget has gone, and it is now looking at further cuts. In Tameside, the budget is almost gone. In Stockport, it is gone. Sefton faces huge cuts. In Liverpool, the budget is gone. Bolton faces massive cuts. Wigan now faces an 80% cut. Cheshire West now has four professional youth workers—I am sure they know individually every one of the young people they are supposed to be working with. The one little bit of success is in Knowsley, where youth workers and young people have set up a project together and are running the services.

The picture across the country is devastating. The smallest cut is 50%. A lot of areas have cuts of 75%. Now, particularly in the period going forward, a lot of areas are cutting budgets completely. These authorities have a statutory duty to provide a service, and I will come back to that in a minute.

We are losing the professional expertise and the co-ordination across the piece. Even when there is money to go into the voluntary sector, there is nobody there to co-ordinate that spend. Indeed, I was told yesterday of a local authority that is now looking to the regional youth service unit to provide it with some infrastructure, because the local authority’s infrastructure has completely disappeared.

It is now difficult to ascertain what is left of many services. Some are youth and play, while some are just youth support services. The whole designated youth service budget has gone completely. What saved the Wigan youth service in the late ’80s was the fact that the local authority had to spend a percentage of its education budget on the youth service. We had a great influx of money, and we doubled the number of youth workers. Legislation is important, and it should be implemented.

If we ask people in a neighbourhood what they want, they say they want youth centres for young people to go to. They do not want young people hanging around on street corners with nothing to do; they want them to have positive relationships. In that respect, early-day motion 488 now has more than 100 signatures, and 38 Degrees—I agree with this 38 Degrees petition—is encouraging people to sign a petition.

One of the Minister’s predecessors did a survey of local authorities’ youth service spending. As far as I am aware, it has never come to light. Can the Minister enlighten us about what happened to it, or whether it exists? Certainly, Unison did freedom of information requests on some local authorities and discovered that at least 2,000 jobs had gone. Given that there were only 7,000 in the first place, that is an enormous percentage. Some 350 youth centres closed and 41,000 youth services places were lost. As has been mentioned, a place in the criminal justice system costs £200,000 per annum.

I quote again from the Choose Youth manifesto:

“Youth work contributes significantly to early intervention and preventative services thereby reducing the incidence of young people in need of highly targeted intensive and expensive services later on.

For example, the Audit Commission report into the benefits of sport and leisure activities in preventing anti-social behaviour by young people estimates that a young person in the criminal justice system costs the taxpayer over £200,000 by the age of 16. But one who is given support to stay out costs less than £50,000. Other comparative costs include: £1,300 per person for an electronically monitored curfew order. £35,000 per year to keep one young person in a young offender institution. £9,000 for the average resettlement package per young person after custody.”

Youth work is a cheap, efficient alternative to all those other intervention measures. The National Youth Agency used to be paid to collate a survey of spending on local authorities. It can no longer do that work because it is no longer paid to do it.

The youth service profession are qualified workers, not just people who turn up on a Friday night and decide that they will play with young people. A youth work qualification is equivalent to a teaching qualification. The qualification and training are as rigorous as those for other caring professions such as social work and teaching. Youth work is now a degree profession and youth workers are highly trained and qualified. They support volunteers in their work. For every pound spent, £8 comes back in action by volunteers. The work is cost-effective in all sorts of ways, but it is about professional service. Most of us would not want an unqualified teacher to be standing in front of a class and teaching. Most of us would not want an unqualified doctor to treat us or an unqualified nurse to deal with us. Why then should we accept unqualified youth workers working with young people?

[Alex Cunningham]

I am delighted that my hon. Friend is paying tribute to youth workers and their professionalism, in what is now a degree-entry profession. They do tremendous work, and for so little pay; it is not a well rewarded profession financially, although it is in other ways. Could my hon. Friend recommend it as a career choice in the current environment?

[Julie Hilling]

My hon. Friend makes an interesting point. I went to Huddersfield to talk to a group of students a couple of weeks ago, and asked them much the same question. They are still as dedicated and committed, and they may well get jobs, but not as youth workers, because the skills of youth workers and the methodology of youth work are wanted by many other professions. Really, however, we should hope that they can employ their core skills in working with young people.

Finally—I recognise I have gone on for rather a long time—it is a false economy to remove youth services, and to work with young people only when they are already in trouble or at risk of getting into trouble. The Minister needs to make local authorities live up to their statutory duties, and not just ignore the legislation that says there is a statutory basis for the youth service. Of course that needs strengthening and I hope that the next Labour Government will strengthen it. We have seen how easily an incoming Government can water down regulation. However, there is regulation and legislation. The Government should live up to their promise to young people and enforce the legislation to make sure that we have a sufficient youth service in every area of the country.

15:19

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

I apologise for being late for the debate. I was in the Chamber for the autumn statement, desperately bobbing up and down trying to be called, which took rather a long time. I am sorry to have missed the opening speech, and congratulate the hon. Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) on securing the debate. It is a privilege and pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bolton West (Julie Hilling), who knows an awful lot about the subject. I was interested in her speech, which was largely non-political, with the exception of some comments about cuts. I will say something about those in the context of my local authority.

I used to serve as a local councillor and I used to be—and still consider myself to be—a schoolteacher, so general issues to do with young people are of considerable interest to me. I am interested also because one of the local authorities in my constituency has made a significant change to youth services in recent years, from which I think we can learn a lot, and perhaps paint a slightly different picture from the doom and gloom scenario in many local authority areas. I was a councillor through a Labour Government, and year after year, youth services seemed to be cut or reduced, or become less significant. Even at a time of increasing local government expenditure, which happened in some years, it was a service that still seemed to come under the hammer for efficiency savings or cuts. Of course, there is variation in that from authority to authority.

We hear a lot about cuts to the youth service, and that was happening in North Lincolnshire until we came to office in 2011 when we took the council away from the control of the Labour group and made the political decision to increase the youth budget.

[Lisa Nandy]

Given the problems that the hon. Gentleman outlined about non-statutory services becoming poorer and less of a priority in times of trouble, does he support a statutory youth service?

[Andrew Percy]

I am open to debate on that. I do not have a particularly strong view one way or the other. Provision for young people is something that local authorities should just want to make, because it is part of their core function. If we have local democracy those decisions should be for local councillors, and if they do not choose to provide those services local people have the option of throwing them out. Young people can play an important role in that if more of them vote. I always say to young people that the reason they do not have a free bus pas when pensioners do can be seen from the turnout figures.

I have been painting a rosy picture up to now.

[Alex Cunningham]

rose—

[Andrew Percy]

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman. It is his debate, after all.

[Alex Cunningham]

If the hon. Gentleman is not in favour of youth services becoming a statutory responsibility of local authorities, does he accept that perhaps we need to make sure there is specific funding—an increase first, and then specific ring-fenced funding for the delivery of youth services in local authority areas?

[Andrew Percy]

I am always wary, Mr Davies—and as a fellow Yorkshireman I should have mentioned that it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship—of this place telling local authorities what they should or should not spend their budget on. I remember the Connexions budget, which was ring-fenced to local councils. It was ring-fenced funding for a couple of years, at which point it simply passed into the revenue budget of local authorities. The extra funding we got for Connexions, which we had to spend on it in the first year or two when it came from central Government, did not continue because it became part of our main revenue budget.

[Alex Cunningham]

I chaired a Connexions company across the whole of the Tees valley. That was not money vested in the local authority; it was vested in the Connexions company, which was there to deliver, and it had no other option but to spend the money on direct services.

[Andrew Percy]

I do not know what the situation was, but I remember in the city of Hull, when we had it, although there was pump-priming from central Government we eventually ended up picking up some of the expenditure on Connexions. [Interruption.] I will have to. If the hon. Gentleman wants to contact me afterwards we can try to sort it out. I was on the council for 10 years. There are many things I remember well and some I choose to forget. This is one that I remember; we debated it in the council chamber. I will happily be corrected afterwards.

On the hon. Gentleman’s broader point about whether we should be mandating how local councils spend their money, there are countless examples. Connexions may be an example of where that happened after funding was made available by the previous Government. Bus passes are another example of where local authorities got some money and were told that they had to provide something. The money from central Government disappears off and local authorities ended up having to absorb it in their revenue budget. My answer to his question is that I would be nervous. It is something that local authorities should choose to provide, and if they do not provide it, they can be held accountable at the next election.

[Bill Esterson]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Andrew Percy]

I came in late, so it would be rude of me not to give way.

[Bill Esterson]

The hon. Gentleman used the phrase “Government money disappears off,” which has certainly happened on a grand scale under this Government. Does he agree—this is the point Opposition Members have all been making—that investment in youth services prevents the costs of social failure, one way or another, especially preventing young people ending up in prison? Does he support the general principle of invest to save, quite apart from the benefits to young people?

[Andrew Percy]

I will not rehearse with the hon. Gentleman the reason why there are spending reductions for local government, which would have been implemented by whoever was in power. Let us not pretend that there is some sort of alternative nirvana in which local government budgets would be increasing. Regardless of who won the 2010 election, local government budgets would be reducing, so let us nail that myth.

I am rapidly trying to remember the hon. Gentleman’s question, which was on whether there is value in investment. I think there is value, but it can be provided in a number of ways. Indeed, who is providing such bespoke support, particularly to at-risk young people, varies between localities. There is no doubt, because the evidence is very clear, that if we intervene early on young people who are at risk of following certain pathways, we can prevent those outcomes—that is what we all want. I broadly agree with him, although how we provide it should not be mandated in one particular way.

That brings me neatly to North Lincolnshire council. We went through a painful process, because following the “Positive for Youth” Government guidance in July 2012, the local authority decided to consult young people on how it should provide its youth services. In so doing, the local authority spoke to 2,000 young people, who told us that the service they had been offered, which in many ways had not changed since the old Humberside youth service of 40 years earlier, was not necessarily delivering what they wanted it to deliver. That became controversial. Some youth workers did not like it, because different providers were brought in. Indeed, in the initial proposals there was a gap between what would happen to the core, traditional youth worker roles and the new provision. Questions were asked about whether we would lose something. Eventually, the local authority came to the sensible position of retaining a number of fully qualified youth workers in an outreach role across localities, and a range of other provisions was provided across various localities with an increased budget of £194,000, which is not insignificant for a small authority.

Young people told us that they did not necessarily want everything to be sport-related, which often happens with youth services and youth provision in the broader sense. People often think, “We’ll just put goalposts up and give kids a football, because that’s what they really want.” But that is not what a lot of young people want, so street dance is now being provided by a brilliant organisation called Street Beat. We have Grasp the Nettle, and we even have cooking classes. Of course, street sport is provided throughout the summer months, and indoor sports are provided in the winter months.

We have been able to base those activities in 20 centres across North Lincolnshire, including all the existing youth centres, which the council decided to retain and, in some cases, improve—the youth centre in Broughton in my constituency will shortly be moving. We now have new providers offering a range of services, including the Duke of Edinburgh award programme, in a number of new centres. There are new operators in places such as Winterton, Brigg, Epworth and Crowle. Attendance in Broughton has increased by 63% since youth services were provided in this different way, which was controversial in many respects, but the figures speak for themselves.

The local authority also talked to disabled young people about what they wanted. The responses were very interesting, because they wanted bespoke services for disabled young people to be part of the mix, but they wanted mainstream provision to apply to them, too. I pay tribute to Scunthorpe United, which does a great job of providing disabled youth services. I also pay tribute to Daisy Lincs, which is a great local charity headed by Julie Reed from Crowle. Daisy Lincs does a brilliant job with disabled young people.

I will now describe where we are at in my area and across North Lincolnshire. Before the changes, we used to have three sessions a week in Winterton; we now have five. We used to have eight sessions in Brigg; we now have nine. On the Isle of Axholme, which I represent, we used to have three sessions; we now have nine. The number of sessions increased by 49.5% between 2012-13 and 2013-14, and the attendances speak for themselves. There were 31,215 attendances in 2013-14 compared with 22,800 in 2012-13, so providing services in a different way and delivering them with extra funding has made a real difference. The biggest thing we found was that 85% to 90% of young people simply did not engage with the old youth service provision, which was working very well for a certain group of young people, but it was not working more broadly. It could be argued that some of the new provision, because it is based around themes such as street theatre, may not be picking up some of the important issues that the hon. Member for Bolton West so eloquently outlined. That is why outreach services are being retained.

We know that the picture is painful for many local authorities, but in North Lincolnshire, by putting in that extra money and providing services in a different way, based on what young people told us they want—there were some protests from youth workers—we have been able to deliver a positive change.

[Alex Cunningham]

The hon. Gentleman is giving the same message that Opposition Members would give. If more resources are put into the service, and if the service is modernised, better services can be delivered for more young people. Surely that is the message: we need more resources for youth work.

[Andrew Percy]

Local authorities may simply provide what they already spend, but we took the decision to reverse the cuts of the previous council administration. We put new money in, but we provided the services in a different way. If I had one criticism of my time as a local councillor and of my time working in this process, it is that some of those closest to the service do not necessarily always understand how society and young people have changed and how the provision needs to alter too. In my profession as a teacher, the pastoral support offered to young people now is very different from the support that was provided to young people even—when did I go to school?—10 or 20 years ago. The provision is very different, so schools pick up some of it, and there are other services, too. Nothing can exist in stasis. Money may be part of the answer, but we can do things differently. We can get positive outcomes even with a declining budget, which my other local authority faces because it made different decisions. The general message is that provision for young people is vital.

[Alex Cunningham]

It is not statutory.

[Andrew Percy]

I have already explained the answers to that one. I apologise once again for being late and will end there.

15:29

[Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) on securing the debate and on his opening speech. He is right to situate what has happened to youth services in the context of what has happened to support for and the focus on young people over the past few years. Support has collapsed in some areas where it is most needed. He mentioned the education maintenance allowance and the careers service among other things. The speeches and interventions made by my hon. Friends show how strongly Labour feels about youth services and demonstrate our commitment to ensuring that all young people have access to a high-quality, open-access and appropriately funded youth service.

We believe that it is important to set that benchmark because of what we have seen happening in recent years, with huge pressures being placed on local authority budgets, but we are not prescriptive about how it should be delivered locally, or what it should look like. However, where we are clear and where we perhaps differ from this Government—unless the Minister is going to say something very exciting in his closing speech—is in our belief the Government have a clear role in ensuring that that offer to young people is made clear to local government and is delivered in every community around the country. I agreed with much of what the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) said. The difficulty is that what we have seen over the years is that some local authorities absolutely get this issue and understand it, but not all. The key question for national Government is what to do when that commitment is not being delivered in some local areas where people simply do not get it.

My own local authority, Wigan, has had real challenges with this. We have had the third worst budget cuts in the entire country, but the fact that there are three MPs in Westminster Hall today who represent parts of that borough—my hon. Friends the Members for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue) and for Bolton West (Julie Hilling), and myself—shows that there is a strong commitment from us as elected politicians to try to protect those services.

One of the exciting things that has happened in Wigan in the past few years is the youth zone that we have managed to set up. It is an example of some of the things that Members have talked about today. It is a way of doing things differently, because it is a partnership between the OnSide charity, the local authority, local entrepreneurs and businesses, the community, and, most important of course, young people themselves, who have been involved from the outset in campaigning for this service, designing it and now running it, as well as using it. It is not the beginning and end of the whole story in terms of the youth services that we need in our borough, but it is a real achievement at a time when the local authority budget in particular and the community are under such strain.

[Yvonne Fovargue (Makerfield) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend join me in welcoming the free bus service that runs from my area, which is an outlying area of the borough? The authorities recognised that young people from the outlying areas of the borough were not using that service, and they have done something immediately to try to solve that problem.

[Lisa Nandy]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to highlight that, and it is one of the reasons why I congratulated my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North for situating this debate in the wider context of what is happening to young people. Transport costs are the key thing that young people always raise with me and, I am sure, many other Members, and it is important that we think about that when we consider services for young people.

There are some other startling examples of local authorities doing something really exciting. The hon. Member for Brigg and Goole is right to acknowledge the impact that the cuts have had but also to say that this is not just about funding. For example, I think that many Members will be aware of a project in Lambeth that I have heard about and seen for myself. Lambeth took the huge amounts that it was spending on young people through various budgets and put it into a trust, which anyone in the community over the age of 12 could join. It was weighted towards young people, so that they retained control, and it gave the community the power to take real decisions about how services were commissioned and delivered and what they looked like. My understanding is that that project has been a remarkable success. It points to a key feature of successful youth services; the most successful ones are those that involve young people in commissioning, designing and delivering them, where possible.

However, we know from our experience of looking at youth services that what works in Lambeth does not necessarily work in Liverpool. That is why I have said that there needs to be a clear minimum offer from this Government. Labour is clearly committed to that, but not to prescription about on how it should be delivered. Labour Members have previously said that we are open to strengthening the statutory duty to provide youth services, and I have listened carefully to the contributions by hon. Members on that point, but I think we must recognise that, on its own, a statutory duty is not enough. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West said, we already have a statutory duty, limited though it is, and it is not being fulfilled around the country. Labour is very attracted by the possibility of introducing a duty to ensure that young people are involved from the outset in designing and commissioning youth services, and we wonder whether the Minister might share that aspiration; if he does, perhaps he will say something about it today.

There is also a clear need to ensure that young people can hold the people who make these decisions to account. That is one of the reasons why Labour is committed to introducing votes at 16. I hope that the Minister will listen to that argument and consider carefully how young people can hold their elected politicians to account for their decisions if they do not have the vote.

I should also mention briefly concerns about the work force. I want to be fair to the Minister, so I will say that some of the problems in the youth service work force predate the coalition. In 2008, a survey by the National Youth Agency found that a third of councils were not investing at all in the professional development of youth workers. That was really worrying then, but I dread to think what the figure is now, several years after the huge cuts that we have had. Can the Minister tell us? There is a real risk that we will run down the quality of our services and then turn around and say to young people that those services are not worth saving in any case.

There is no question that the last four years have been absolutely horrendous for this sector, and I do not want to lose sight of that. We have lost good, skilled staff, and many more are under significant strain, dealing with low pay, job insecurity and the prospect of redundancies. This really matters, because as my hon. Friends the Members for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson) and for Stockton North said, behind the loss of all those youth workers—2,000 of them during the last few years—is a story of broken relationships. I once worked with a young person who had grown up in and out of care. He was 18 when I first came across him and he told me that the only consistent adult in his life since he was 11 had been his youth worker. When we lose good, skilled staff, we break that link and that bond, and the damage is irreparable.

Regarding the National Citizen Service, I say to the Minister that although I support many of the things that my hon. Friends have said, and I myself have also had a parmo with some of the young people from Redcar who have taken part in NCS, it is no substitute for long-term, ongoing youth services provided all year round. It is a short-term intervention and it is very expensive. If we come to power in May next year, we are not planning to make the same mistake that this Government did with the v scheme, and simply tear something up because another party has established it, but we are very concerned about the cost of NCS. My hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North drew a parallel between the amount of money that the German Federal Government spend on year-round youth work and the money that this Government spend on short-term interventions.

The other thing to say is that young people spend 85% of their time out of school, yet each year local authorities spend 55 times more on formal education than they do on providing services for young people outside the school day. We need to get a bit of a grip on this, because when this Government agreed to protect ring-fencing for school funding they did not do the same for additional activities. They abolished ring-fenced grants for—

[Alex Cunningham]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Lisa Nandy]

If my hon. Friend does not mind, I will not give way, as I have only a couple of minutes left and I wanted to make some last points.

As I was saying, the Government abolished the ring-fenced grants for additional activities. They inherited spending of £350 million per year on those activities, which equated to about £77 per young person aged between 13 and 19. A previous Minister responsible for this area said that that equated to

“large slugs of public money”.

I hope that the current Minister will take the opportunity to reject that view and tell us that he thinks young people are worth at least £77 of our money per head.

Over the past four years, Ministers have passed on responsibility to the very same local authorities that they are hammering with budget cuts. Frankly there was only ever going to be one result, because at the same time the money that helped to sustain youth services was put into an early intervention grant, which was also used to fund Sure Starts and services dealing with teen pregnancy, substance misuse and mental health, before being cut again by up to 40%. I say to the Minister: what sort of message does that send to young people about our commitment to them? If my hon. Friend the former Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East were here, he would say that this approach is so short-sighted, particularly given all the issues about child protection and children in the criminal justice system that we have discussed.

I also wanted to say to the Minister that some local authorities have cut way beyond the average. Have he or any of his colleagues ever considered using the powers that they have under the Education Act 2006 to intervene where they see youth services being cut disproportionately and the statutory duty that exists in that Act not being met?

In 2011, the Minister’s predecessor as Minister for Civil Society said,

“we are working with our strategic partners to gather information about what is happening on the ground”.

Has that happened and has it been published? What discussions has he had with local authorities?

This is not simply a question of money; it is about priorities. My hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West said, quite rightly, that the emergence of a significant youth service can be traced back to post-world war two and “In the Service of Youth”. It was a time when the country was facing the most significant financial challenge in its history. This is not just a question of what we say to our young people; it is about what sort of country we want to be. Do we want to be forward-looking, confident, ambitious and invest in our young people, their talent and energy, or do we want to watch the sad disintegration of the services that they rely on over the next few years? I know what our answer is.

15:50

[The Minister for Civil Society (Mr Rob Wilson)]

With your toleration, Mr Davies, may I begin in a slightly unusual way by congratulating the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) on her recent news that she will be adding to the youth of the nation? I hope that she will be declaring a personal interest from now on. I also congratulate the hon. Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) on securing an important debate and I thank all hon. Members who have contributed. It has been a useful airing of views.

My first response to the debate is that I know these have been tough times. On today of all days, I recognise that the funding situation remains tight across the public sector, even though this Government have successfully cut the deficit in half. Local councils have had some difficult decisions to make across all the services that they provide and this has had a knock-on effect on wider youth services. Having said that, I was slightly concerned during some contributions, because we should always remember to talk about young people in a positive way. We should be emphasising strengths among our young people, not negatives.

I was pleased to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) say that 20 centres are being established in his area and that those are doing things in a different, but very positive, way. The hon. Member for Stockton North mentioned some positive things that Stockton council is doing. I congratulate it on raising attendance at some of its centres and on its engagement in the youth services area.

I was sorry to hear that the council in the constituency of the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), who has had to leave, is taking the option of abandoning youth centres, but at the end of the day that is a choice, not a necessity.

[Alex Cunningham]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Wilson]

I will make some progress and then I will come back to the hon. Gentleman.

I have been Minister for Civil Society for just over two months and have seen the important and difficult work done by youth workers and so many others with young people. These individuals are making a vital contribution to realising the Government’s ambition to ensure that all young people have the opportunities needed to fulfil their potential—an ambition I am sure we all agree with.

Only last month on a visit to Stockton, I met Five Lamps, an organisation in the constituency neighbouring the hon. Gentleman’s. This award-winning social enterprise is working with young people in the town. Five Lamps works with nearly 25,000 people every year through programmes including youth services and work with those who are not in education, employment or training. It was inspiring to see how it transforms lives and raises aspirations in Stockton. Five Lamps is a fine example of the type of support that is available at the local level, and hon. Members would do well to commend such work in their own constituencies. I am a huge supporter of these types of local services. I am also committed to bringing national and local government together, along with civil society and businesses, to give young people the best possible opportunities to succeed, and I will set out the Government’s current work to achieve this.

At local level, this Government have retained the existing statutory duty for local authorities, which requires that they secure, as far as is practicable, sufficient services and activities to improve the well-being of young people, as outlined in section 507B of the Education and Inspections Act 2006. Not only did we retain the duty, but we updated the guidance on it in June 2012.

Hon. Members will have seen early-day motion 488, tabled by a Labour Member—some have mentioned it —in favour of a statutory funded service with ring-fenced funding from central Government. I have considered the issues, but do not support the EDM. I believe that effective local youth services are already supported by the existing statutory duty. I also believe that local authorities should be empowered to decide how to secure services that meet the needs of young people in their communities with the resources available to them. It cannot be the role of central Government to dictate to them what services to deliver or to ring-fence funding for this purpose. I am not clear from comments by the shadow Minister whether Labour now proposes to ring-fence these budgets.

[Julie Hilling]

I do not understand why we bother to legislate in this place if we are not going to ensure that local authorities or other bodies carry out the measures in legislation that we introduce.

[Mr Wilson]

The hon. Lady has to recognise that the principles of localism cannot simply be overridden the first time anyone disagrees with a decision that is made. If we are serious about localism—I am—we have to trust and respect local choices, and if necessary provide support to encourage new ways of thinking about how services are delivered.

[Alex Cunningham]

rose—

[Mr Wilson]

I will make a bit more progress, if I may.

I support transformational change that results in services that are more responsive to the needs of people using them and more efficient and resilient. We know that innovation is possible and that there are new models for delivering youth services that get the most out of the best of the voluntary and private sectors. Gloucestershire county council is one example. Its targeted youth support service is now provided through a partnership between a private sector organisation, Prospects, and the county council. It works with nearly 6,000 vulnerable young people in the county, more than 90% of whom say it has made a difference to their lives. Nationally, the Government want to provide practical support so that others can follow its lead. Through the “Delivering Differently for Young People” programme, we are supporting 10 local authorities to do so and to explore new models of delivery. I heard what the hon. Member for Stockton North said about his own local authority and its initiatives and I will look at those more closely.

If the hon. Gentleman would like an example of what is possible in his region, he could look north to North Tyneside, one of the councils we are supporting through the “Delivering Differently for Young People” programme. Its vision is to deliver joined-up services for young people that bring the public and voluntary sectors together to make the most of skills, buildings and resources. At every step, this will involve young people and will focus on tackling the needs of young people in a way that is co-ordinated and comprehensive. We will provide short-term specialist support to plan how they implement this vision. Gloucestershire and North Tyneside councils are just two of many positive examples of how councils are looking for new and creative opportunities to bring people together, create partnerships and look at new funding streams.

To answer the hon. Gentleman’s question, my officials are working closely with the Local Government Association, which is a co-sponsor of the “Delivering Differently for Young People” programme.

[Alex Cunningham]

The Minister is giving examples of good practice. We all love such examples and we know it is happening in parts of the country, but in other parts of the country the service is disappearing—we have heard an example today—so what is he going to do about that?

[Mr Wilson]

At a national level, the Government are going further. We are supporting leading youth organisations to develop the centre for youth impact. For the first time in this country there will be a central point for information, guidance and bespoke support, to demonstrate the value of youth services to others, particularly those who make funding decisions—something a Labour Government never did. Again, to answer another of the hon. Gentleman’s questions, the Cabinet Office did a survey of youth services in November 2013, which has informed the actions that I am talking about today.

Moving away from local youth services, I know that the hon. Gentleman has a particular interest in engaging young people in the democratic process. I share his commitment and will speak about the Government’s work in this area. Last month I had the privilege of speaking to the UK Youth Parliament and saw young people at their best: informed, articulate and passionate. They debated with eloquence and conviction about issues that matter to them, such as mental health and a living wage for all. We must make sure this same powerful voice shapes the services they use, locally and nationally. Engaging and listening is a way of ensuring our policies and services meet their actual needs. The Government are also ensuring social action opportunities exist outside school and college for young people to develop the skills and confidence they require to transition into adulthood.

Unfortunately, I am not going to make it to the end of my speech, so I will leave it there, Mr. Davies.

[Philip Davies (in the Chair)]

We come to the next debate, which is on Government strategy for the UK steel industry.

UK Steel Industry

Wednesday 3rd December 2014 Westminster Hall

16:00

[Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies, and to have the chance to raise an issue that is of concern not only to me and my constituency, but to many Members from all parts of the House. It is great to see a number of them here with me, as well as the shadow Minister for these issues in the shadow Business, Innovation and Skills team, my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright).

The UK steel industry and the associated metals sectors comprise more than 24,000 enterprises, which directly employ more than 330,000 people and were worth more than £45.5 billion to the UK economy in 2012. Indirectly, two to three jobs in the broader economy are dependent on each job in the metals sector. Steel, as many of my colleagues will attest, is vital for many of the UK’s strategic supply chains, such as those in the automotive industries, construction and energy.

As many will know, Cardiff South and Penarth has a long and proud industrial history. It is just a stone’s throw from Tiger bay, where the coal hewed out of the valleys of south Wales was exported to the world and where the East Moors steelworks sprang, establishing Cardiff as a major player in the steel-making industry in the late 1800s. Although the original East Moors complex was closed in 1978, I am pleased to say that Cardiff remains a major centre for steel production, which is currently done by Celsa. It has one of the most carbon-efficient electric arc furnaces in Europe and the world and rolling mills that produce crucial products, such as reinforcing bar, for such UK infrastructure projects as Crossrail.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

I am pleased that my hon. Friend has managed to secure a debate on this important topic. Shotton steelworks is in my constituency. It produces high-end, top quality coated products. Does he agree that the price of energy is harming this important industry, which could do so much better if it could compete with companies in Europe that have much lower costs?

[Stephen Doughty]

I absolutely agree. It is very much the case that from Shotton to Cardiff, from Skinningrove to Llanelli, from Scunthorpe to Middlesbrough and from Newport to Redcar, steel producers are being outflanked by significant challenges, including energy prices, which continue to increase unabated. The rules of the game appear to have changed. I want to focus on a number of strategic issues.

[Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this timely debate. Does he share my disappointment that in the autumn statement the Chancellor did not take the opportunity to bring forward mitigation on the renewables obligation for high energy users, such as the steel industry? That would have been a clear message today that the Government are on the side of steelmakers.

[Stephen Doughty]

I share my hon. Friend’s disappointment. I asked the Chancellor a question on that issue, and I was disappointed that he chose to make a political point, rather than engage with the serious issues being raised by many hon. Members.

I want to focus on a number of strategic issues. Whether it is energy prices, taxation, foreign dumping, uncertain future ownership or the lack of clarity in the UK’s industrial and infrastructure strategies, it is crucial for the sake of our future industrial and manufacturing capacity, as well as for jobs across the UK, that the steel industry has urgent, robust and bold action from the Government, not caution and bureaucratic handwringing alongside many warm words that make little difference in practice.

[Jessica Morden (Newport East) (Lab)]

Because of the challenges facing the steel industry, steelworkers have had to adapt, accepting changes to their terms and conditions and rising to the challenge of hitting the targets that companies have set them in difficult times. Does my hon. Friend agree that announcing some support for the steel industry is all very well, but delivering on it is crucial for steelworkers, who have worked so hard in difficult times in constituencies such as mine?

[Stephen Doughty]

That is absolutely the case. My hon. Friend speaks about her constituency; employers at Celsa in my constituency have taken some hard decisions to ensure that the company continues to thrive and go forward. We need that kind of commitment from the Government, too.

The steel industry does not need posturing or the erection of barriers to trade or unjustified protection from fair competition; it is simply asking for action to level the playing field and ensure that we do not offshore carbon emissions or contract out our potential domestic growth generation to such places as China and Turkey.

[Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that there is terrific knowledge, skill, innovation and expertise within the Community union? Tata Steel would be well served if it exploited that collective wisdom and experience, because that could be the solution to keeping its operation intact and thriving.

[Stephen Doughty]

I wholeheartedly agree. My hon. Friend mentions the Community union, which has many members in my constituency and those of other Members present. It provided a helpful briefing for this debate and continues to speak out with a strong voice on these issues. Community estimates that the energy prices faced by UK steel producers can be 50% higher than those faced by our main European competitors, such as Germany. The Minister might not be aware of this, but green levies in the UK are two to three times higher than those faced by European competitors.

I firmly believe that we need a responsible and supported transition to a low-carbon economy, but it would be absurd if ill-fitting policies for this and other energy-intensive industries resulted in carbon leakage that leads to higher global carbon emissions. The Celsa plant in my constituency uses recycled steel in a carbon-efficient process, and it would be a tragedy if some of that production was lost to China, where the same carbon emissions standards and local environment standards would not be followed.

Earlier this year, the Chancellor said that manufacturing continues to play a key role in the UK’s economic recovery, but that the cost of energy acutely impacts on the international competitiveness of the sector, particularly for energy-intensive industries. I agree, as I am sure do many of my colleagues and the French and German Governments, but actions speak louder than words. Where the UK Government has failed to act robustly and urgently to level the playing field, others around the world have been taking action, including Germany and France. Unfortunately, that is leaving the UK at a disadvantage. As a close observer of what happens on the continent, the Minister might know that the French Senate recently debated finding a mechanism to fix the electricity cost for energy-intensive users at a maximum of €30 per megawatt-hour, compared with the €73.50 per megawatt-hour in the UK. That is a stark contrast.

The Minister might be aware that there has been extensive correspondence between the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and me and other Members on these issues. The announcements in the Budget earlier this year on an energy-intensive industries compensation package were welcome, but many of the measures will have no immediate impact, which presents a serious risk.

My hon. Friend the Member for Newport East (Jessica Morden) mentioned this issue. I was deeply disappointed by the Chancellor’s answer today. I simply asked whether he was content with the decision—I had been told that the Minister for Business and Enterprise, the right hon. Member for West Suffolk (Matthew Hancock), would be responding to the debate, and I am disappointed that he is not here—that he and that Minister made not to bring forward that package. That decision is deeply disappointing to many of the steel producers in this country.

I am sure that the Minister has received many bulging red boxes full of cautious and bureaucratic advice from officials on the issue, but it is ultimately a political decision for Ministers to interpret European guidelines and decide whether there is a possibility of retrospective exemption and renewable sources support compensation. The bottom line for our steel producers is that in practical terms many of them are paying more taxes than they paid three years ago. They are finding themselves at a growing competitive disadvantage. The Minister’s cautious approach stands in stark contrast to the proactive and decisive one taken by Ministers in other EU member states. I am sincerely asking whether he and his ministerial colleagues will take another look at this crucial issue.

[Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it was the unilateral imposition of the carbon floor price at a particular rate that has caused the problems? The steel industry is not asking for charity; it is simply asking for a level playing field. We want the situation put right as soon as possible.

[Stephen Doughty]

I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend’s points.

On another issue, the Minister here today will know that business rates are one of the few taxes that are non-cyclical and fixed at a level irrespective of economic or market conditions. As such, business rates are treated by industry as a fixed cost, which is given much greater prominence when making investment decisions. According to the industry, the fact that business rates are five to 10 times higher in the UK than in EU counterparts represents a significant comparative distortion that undermines the UK as a destination for investment.

Will the Minister say whether any consideration has been given to removing plant and machinery from the business rates valuations? What about alternative approaches for large-scale manufacturers, with a view to adopting a simplified model based on capital values rather than hypothetical rental values?

I come to foreign dumping, responsible sourcing and supply-chain access, huge issues for UK-based steel producers—and the environment is changing all the time. We have been shown some shocking statistics. I mentioned the reinforcing bar produced by Celsa in my constituency. Hopefully, the Minister has seen the data that show that imports from China now account for more than a third of overall UK market share, which is a dramatic increase in recent years; the figures for this year show an even greater increase. We also see problems with imports from Turkey.

There are also questions about traceability in the supply chain and the fact that the classification of such products often does not meet British standards. In the extreme, that has potentially serious implications for the future structural integrity of buildings or infrastructure projects in which non-compliant rebar or other steel products have been used.

The UK Certification Authority for Reinforcing Steels has been too slow and ineffective in its response to date. Quite frankly, the Government’s response has also been disappointingly slow, given that I understand that misclassification was raised at the steel contact group in October 2013 and again in June 2014.

[Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent point about the importance of manufacturing to his constituency. We know that Celsa was built under the tenure of the previous Labour Government, much like the blast furnace at the Redcar steelworks near my constituency that was built under the Callaghan Labour Government. We are potentially on the verge of putting 46% of Britain’s steel making in limbo. We need strong opposition from the Government in relation to Celsa as well as Scunthorpe’s four-blast-furnace operation. We need clear direction and a clear message from the Government about what steel production will look like in the future.

[Stephen Doughty]

I thank my hon. Friend for those well made points; I wholeheartedly agree with them. On traceability and the quality of products used, the Government could do something right away: ensure that all Government or Government-backed projects have a robust, responsible sourcing requirement.

As I have said before, although the Government’s sector- by-sector approach is welcome, it must be dramatically accelerated. That would, without doubt, serve to stem some of the questions about safety and sustainability rightly coming from concerned people inside and outside the industry. Reports that Chinese rebar has been failing British standards tests coupled with the news that one third of rebar used on UK sites is Chinese should have red lights flashing on ministerial dashboards, not only in BIS but in other Departments.

[Nia Griffith]

Does my hon. Friend share my disappointment that Ministers, in their reply to the steel group, rather brushed aside any option to intervene in what CARES is doing? Will he reiterate to this Minister the need for them to look at that thoroughly?

[Stephen Doughty]

I wholeheartedly agree; I was disappointed by the Ministers’ response. Like many others here, I saw a glimmer of hope when the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills responded to a question on that from my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool, who is sitting here. The right hon. Gentleman said that there would potentially be an inquiry into the testing process of rebar steel. However, since then we have been told—not only publicly, but in answer to parliamentary questions and informally—that the Secretary of State misspoke, and the executive director of CARES has said that it has not been contacted by the Government.

I hope that the Secretary of State did not misspeak, but if he did, perhaps the Minister can clarify the situation. More importantly, will such an inquiry be considered? Ultimately, people want to see one because they want to know that the steel products being used are safe, sustainable and responsibly sourced.

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case. Given that Network Rail is due to invest billions of pounds in track renewals and that major rail infrastructure such as Crossrail, High Speed 2 and possibly Crossrail 2 are coming up, is it not shocking that the future of Tata’s long products steelworks at Scunthorpe, which I have visited and produces much of the UK’s high quality rail, is so uncertain?

[Stephen Doughty]

My hon. Friend makes a crucial point about not just the industry, but the crucial infrastructure projects, especially in transport, that it supports. It is crucial that we get that right.

I mentioned Celsa’s contribution to the Crossrail project. The only responsible sourcing scheme in the UK that guarantees cradle-to-grave traceability for construction steel products is BS 6001, which was crucial to Crossrail. Will the Minister say whether the Government intend to ensure that all public projects apply the same standard in a timely fashion?

Ultimately, each of the issues and concerns that we have raised can be considered on its own, but there is an increasingly apparent need for a detailed, workable industrial strategy for metals, including steel. The Minister might jump to his feet in a moment and cite the development of a UK metals strategy as showing that the Government are on the case, but by all accounts, that is still in its early development stages and is not even guaranteed to receive official backing, despite being funded by BIS.

Indeed, we are more than four and a half years into a Government who chose not to include the metals industry among their sector-specific industrial strategy and who now, quite frankly, are playing catch-up. We have talked about procurement and other investment decisions, but the UK cannot afford to lose out on major public infrastructure projects, as Community made clear was the case with the £790 million contract to supply steel for the new Forth road bridge. Tata steel’s plant just down the road could have supplied more than one third of the required steel, but instead the contract went to producers in China, Poland and Spain.

[Tom Blenkinsop]

The Minister will probably also agree that that was primarily the responsibility of the Scottish Executive, who did not play their part in trying to support the local Scottish industry. It would be interesting to hear the Minister’s response on what the UK Government said to the Scottish Government at a time of trying to support UK steel rather than Chinese imports.

[Stephen Doughty]

My hon. Friend makes a strong point and I would be interested to know the answer to that question as well. Many steelworkers and those who work in related industries throughout the UK want to see the Government standing up and backing the steel and metals industries here—not seeing major projects that could be generating wealth, jobs and opportunities in this country all ending up with Chinese products. I have already raised concerns about the quality and traceability of some of those products.

In conclusion, I will ask the Minister a few questions on which I would appreciate answers. I mentioned dumping by China and Turkey. Will he outline what representations Ministers at BIS have made to other EU member states, the European Commission and the Council on support for an anti-dumping measure?

Will the Minister outline whether there have been discussions on a UK Government responsible-sourcing requirement? Would he be willing to facilitate a meeting between the Chancellor of the Exchequer and colleagues concerned about these issues to discuss the use of steel in UK infrastructure projects and how procurement can drive the future of the industry?

Will the Minister clarify what assessment the Department has made of reports that Chinese rebar has failed British standards tests, given that much of the steel used in the past year on UK sites has been Chinese? Has he had discussions with other Departments about any risks to the future structural integrity of building and other infrastructure projects?

As I said earlier, will the Minister, with his colleagues, be generous and look again at the decision not to bring forward compensation packages to January 2015? That is crucial. Will he detail what discussions there have been in BIS on that and why it was decided not, for example, to make an encouraging announcement on that today in the autumn statement?

We have mentioned China and Turkey. Will the Minister give an assessment of reports that India is now also looking at subsidising its steel industry to compete with cheaper Chinese imports? What assessment has been made of the US Department of Commerce’s decision to impose anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duties on imports of carbon and alloy steel wire rod from China in reaction to a massive increase in its shipment?

Any one of the issues that I have outlined, in addition to those that I have not had time to mention, is enough to put serious strain on any business, but the cumulative effect is a matter of grave concern to the British steel industry. The risks are real and the threats are intensifying, so urgent and robust action is required from the Government. If capacity is put at risk, that could have serious consequences not only for the jobs and communities that depend on those industries, but for UK infrastructure priorities. I hope that today the Minister will give some encouragement to UK steel producers and their employees.

16:19

[The Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy (Mr Edward Vaizey)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Davies, if a little disconcerting. I look forward to participating in the debate under your chairmanship.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) on securing the debate, which is the second one I have done on British steel. It is always reassuring to see the passion and knowledge of the Labour Members in the Chamber, who represent many different steel interests in their constituencies.

I hope that the House will not take it amiss if I also thank in person once again the hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Tom Blenkinsop), who was kind enough in a previous debate to mention my late father’s work, “The History of British Steel”, because it is the 40th anniversary of the publication of that seminal work.

[Mr Iain Wright (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

Will it be reprinted?

[Mr Vaizey]

It will be if this level of interest in the House is maintained. This year is also the 30th anniversary of my father’s death, and it is nice that he can be mentioned in Hansard, because he was a Member of the other place, thanks to Harold Wilson.

[Stephen Doughty]

The Minister mentioned that this was the second time that he had had to respond to a steel debate. I appreciate that his family has a strong tradition in such matters—I enjoyed hearing about it in a previous debate—but where is the Minister responsible for the issue today and why has he not been present now at two such debates?

[Mr Vaizey]

Hansard has on the record the reason why my right hon. Friend the Minister for Business and Enterprise could not attend the previous debate. I gather that today he is assisting the Chancellor with the autumn statement, because his brief covers a wide range of issues. Indeed, Mr Davies, you are an expert on the working relationship between the Chancellor and the Minister for Business and Enterprise.

[Nic Dakin]

Are we to understand that the Minister is now the Minister for steel, because he has shown far more steel on the issue than the Minister to whom he was just referring?

[Mr Vaizey]

I do not wish to sound churlish, but it is said that one should be beware of Greeks bearing gifts, and one should also be beware of Labour Members, however much one admires them, bearing compliments.

The hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth is working hard to secure a long-term future for the steel industry in his constituency. He has been an assiduous champion for Celsa and has facilitated meetings between it and Ministers. I picked up on about nine points made by hon. Members during the course of the debate, but he left me with five or six specific questions, mostly focusing on efforts to mitigate the impact of high energy prices and of competition, which from his perspective is unfair—I hope that I am not speaking out of turn in putting it that way—and on what the Government are doing about things. He also asked about the future strategy for the steel industry.

I have quite a long speech, but the hon. Gentleman spoke rapidly, if clearly, and the time left to me is not long, especially given the level of interest in the debate. I will try to pack in as much in the short period available as he managed.

It is well known that the steel industry is cyclical, and we also know that it has faced particular difficulties in the past few years, especially with the economic downturn having a major impact on construction, leading to overcapacity and severe competition throughout the world. It is worth saying, as I did in the previous debate, that the UK remains a significant player in the global steel market. We have replaced France as Europe’s second largest producer of steel and we have overtaken Italy. It is worth remembering that we continue to manufacture to a high level in this country.

My right hon. Friends the Minister for Business and Enterprise and the Secretary of State for Wales met the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth and representatives of Celsa to talk about the company’s concerns, in particular the policy issues, which it is important to note affect many other steel companies in the UK as well. The Minister for Business and Enterprise replied at the beginning of this week to the letter that was sent out by Celsa following that meeting.

The first major issue raised at the meeting and in the debate today was compensation for energy-intensive industries for the indirect costs of the European Union emissions trading scheme and the carbon price floor. The hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth knows that the Government are trying to compensate electricity-intensive industries for the indirect costs of the renewables obligation and the feed-in tariff. We are also seeking to exempt EIIs from the costs of the contract for difference.

The mitigation has not been brought forward, because we need to seek state aid clearance from the European Commission. It took 18 months to obtain Commission state aid clearance for the carbon price floor. The hon. Gentleman and Celsa would perhaps like to see the Government being what they might describe as more robust, but clear state aid clearance is important. As he knows, if aid is provided before state aid approval is given, technically that would be illegal and we run the risk, if approval is not given, that the company would have to pay back the state aid. That is the reason. I am sure that the Chancellor, if he could wave a magic wand, would wish to bring forward mitigation, but we have to go through the process.

The hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth also talked about procurement. We have greater transparency of opportunities through the publication of procurement pipelines, which now cover 19 sectors. We have a simpler public procurement system; we have abolished the pre-qualification questionnaires for low-value contracts; and we help suppliers to find contract opportunities via a single online portal. We are working with industry to map supplier capabilities. We want to quantify the opportunity that exists to maximise the economic benefit for the UK—of course we do. Where there are capability gaps, sectors will encourage domestic suppliers to expand to fill them, with support from the Manufacturing Advisory Service.

The hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland tried to tempt me to have a pop at the Scottish Executive over the Forth bridge. My understanding is that the approaches to the bridge are to use British Tata steel, but I cannot comment on the procurement process of the Scottish Executive—[Interruption.] Perhaps the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil), commenting from a sedentary position, would like to say why the Scottish Executive procured from China, Poland and other markets.

[Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

I only wanted to ensure that the Minister knew the difference between the Executive and the Government. “The Executive” is what Labour did not have the courage to call their Government in the past; “the Government” is what exists now.

[Mr Vaizey]

We are disappearing down a particular Scottish cul-de-sac. I will leave that as an argument between the Scottish National and Labour parties.

We are working to strengthen existing supply chains by encouraging primes to adopt a collaborative and long-term approach to their suppliers. The hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth discussed Chinese imports of rebar. The United Kingdom Accreditation Service looked at the complaint by UK Steel and concluded that CARES had responded in an appropriate way to the concerns expressed in line with the expectations and requirements of the accreditation standard. I can tell him, however, that there has been an increase in vigilance on the part of CARES, with increased sampling and more checks. We have also been advised that, as a result of ongoing discussions between CARES and UK Steel, and of the further testing of some non-compliant imports, CARES visited the Chinese steel mill concerned. CARES conducted further sampling and testing, but it did not find evidence of stock production being non-compliant. On that basis, we genuinely think that we are doing everything possible, although we may be able to do more if the industry provides us with additional evidence of what it thinks that we should investigate.

[Tom Blenkinsop]

The issue of whether it was a Scottish Government or an Executive who sold steelworkers in Motherwell and the rest of the UK down the Yangtse is irrelevant. The real issue is whether the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills has an ongoing inquiry. If so, is it looking at the steel products that are sitting on dockyards or in warehouses for more than 12 months at a time, rusting away and undermining any usage in a construction project, because of health and safety?

[Mr Vaizey]

I will take that specific point back to the Secretary of State. As I said, there have been discussions between UK Steel, UKAS and CARES. The Government take an interest in such issues. We will go back to those organisations if there is appropriate additional information.

Let me comment on anti-dumping quickly, because time is running out. We have been in contact with the European Commission on a number of occasions over the past year. We have had face-to-face meetings and we have asked the Commission to look at the case for launching an anti-dumping investigation into Chinese rebar imports. The problem is simply that Chinese rebar is only being exported, as I understand it, to the UK market and anti-dumping actions are taken at the European level, which presents serious legal difficulties for the Commission. We think, however, that the Commission is genuinely trying to find a way round the problems. We check regularly with it on progress and encourage it to take action, but at this stage a more aggressive approach might be unproductive.

Coastguard Centres (Staffing)

Wednesday 3rd December 2014 Westminster Hall

16:30

[Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies, in the last, but I hope by no means the least, debate of the day. I look forward to hearing the response from the Department for Transport on the issues I will raise.

It is now about three years since the coastguard went through the upheaval of reorganisation, changes and closures, onwards towards its new structure. Of course I mourn the loss to Scotland of the Clyde and Forth coastguard stations. Scotland has 66% of the UK’s coastline, but, alas, only 33% of the coastguard stations. I am glad that we managed to save Stornoway station, which is now a very important coastguard station. It has a search and rescue helicopter—at one point, it had an emergency towing vessel, a tugboat—and is located in an important sea area. I am glad that we also still have in Scotland the Shetland and Aberdeen stations.

Stornoway is located between Belfast to the south and Shetland to the north, and covers a large sea area, not least because the next station to the west—perhaps the one direction I have not yet mentioned—is in Canada. Stornoway station’s area of responsibility covers about 250,000 square miles of sea, and meets the Canadians’ area at 30° west, about a time zone and a half away; Stornoway lies about 7° west. I had thought that Shetland station’s area of responsibility would be larger, but the Faroe Islands lie to its west and Norway to the east and north.

Those are just a few facts that can be found out by your average MP when they visit the local coastguard station. I bring them to hon. Members’ attention because they emphasise the international aspect of maritime activity, which could doubtless be further underlined by the station to our south, Belfast, which no doubt deals with coastguard colleagues in other jurisdictions such as the Isle of Man and the Republic of Ireland.

As I said, it is now over three years since the announcement that, importantly for me, confirmed that the hard work had paid off and Stornoway coastguard station was saved. The date was 22 November 2011, and it was a Tuesday—one that brought great relief not just to me but to those working at the station and people round about. We kept our coastal maritime expertise in Stornoway, and with it the associated local knowledge and jobs, as well as the intimate interaction with our local fishing community.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

I do not want to take away from what the hon. Gentleman has said about the people of Stornoway, but on that same date the people of Crosby coastguard station had exactly the opposite reaction, because of the announcement of the closure of that station with the loss of jobs unless people were prepared to relocate to either Southampton or, in some cases, Holyhead. The subject he has chosen for his debate is the staffing of coastguard stations, and I am interested to hear what he has to say on that point. Many of the staff at Crosby have not been able to transfer, and grave concerns have been raised with me about the standard of recruitment and training of replacement staff. Have similar points been raised with him?

[Mr MacNeil]

I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s intervention. He will recall, I think, that the word I used about Stornoway was relief. To see that the stations in Forth, Clyde, Crosby and other areas were to close and the jobs of professionals with years of expertise under their belts were to be lost brought no pleasure at all—in fact, it brought great sadness. I am interested to hear what he said about staff, because I am coming on to that point. If there are surplus staff somewhere, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency might consider that fact when dealing with some of the problems I will be highlighting.

It has been three years since the reorganisation, so we would have thought that most of the changes would have been brought through by now and the organisation would be running as smoothly as it could and should be. Many people would expect the changes to have bedded down, yet reports have come to my ears—actually, to my eyes—of one coastguard officer saying to another, “Let’s hope the latest Minister does something, because the whole issue—the closure of stations, the loss of experienced staff, the undermanning—is a disaster waiting to happen.” Those are strong words—not my words, I stress, but words I feel need to be checked up on.

We must remember the value of our coastguard staff, as the hon. Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson) pointed out with regard to the staff in Crosby, who sadly lost their station. We know they are trained to a high standard and that their professionalism is exemplary. I know that not just from visiting coastguard stations as an MP but from an earlier life working on fishing boats, and travelling regularly on ferries as I do, I am aware of yet another aspect of the work of coastguard staff. Each time I have been in the wheelhouse of a fishing boat or on the bridge of a passenger ferry and the words “Stornoway coastguard” have come over the radio, that radio has been turned up and there has been silence from those assembled within earshot, because, nearly always, serious and important words are coming across the airwaves.

How are those in the stations—the people broadcasting into the wheelhouses of fishing boats and the bridges of passenger ferries—faring at the moment? No one would know it from the professionalism that I hear coming over the radio, but in reality, although they may not show the strain, it seems that the stresses are most certainly there. When I visited Stornoway coastguard recently, the watch was at 75% of its strength. That brings us back to the point about Crosby. There is a problem with staffing, and people are working overtime to cover a shortage of staff—it is a regular occurrence. Some retired coastguard officers are coming in to help out, if only for a limited time due to the restrictions on what they can earn, and their expertise is still looked to. The demands on present staff are high.

I have good news for the Minister. I am sure he will be pleased to know that fortunately there are many people waiting to join the coastguard service. Sadly, I have not got much more good news than that—that is where the good news ends. Perhaps, by extension, we could say that the fact that 60 or so people came to Stornoway coastguard station in May and June to apply to join the service is good news, but six months later there is still a shortage of staff, and none of those people has been appointed. I am told that that pattern is being repeated across the service; in fact, some at Stornoway would argue that their situation is better than that at many other stations.

The problem has lasted for six months and is set to go on until February. That means the MCA’s recruitment process for the coastguard will have taken eight months in total. And there is more: although three staff are in the pipeline for Stornoway—they are due to start in February—the reality is that eight more are needed and the glacial pace of recruitment could go on for ever.

Can anything be done? There are indeed things that can be done, which were identified quite quickly by the staff I have met—these ideas are not mine, but are emerging within the coastguard. The bottleneck seems to be the fact that new recruits cannot start until they go to training, which takes place in Fareham or perhaps Highcliffe. There are certain dates set aside in March and new recruits can start at their stations six weeks before, hence the eight-month delay. However, there will be a knock-on effect. When will the next opportunity be? Surely the Minister and the MCA either have to look to increase training so it starts at more regular intervals, in order to shorten the recruitment period, or else think of another solution so that stations are not left with such stresses on the shoulders of their watch staff—stresses that have obvious knock-on effects on morale.

The most obvious solution would be to let new recruits into the operations room once they have been through the application process and have been accepted, so that they can do most of their training in there. Coastguard officers—seasoned people with a wealth of knowledge under their belts—tell me that that is where most of the training occurs anyway. The training centre helps to top and tail those skills; it is a useful check on quality, and is useful, too, as a refresher course.

The current situation cannot be allowed to fester—that is how it feels to many at the moment. Some in the service feel that it could be a cack-handed way to save money, but I am not sure it is that sophisticated. I would not say it is incompetence. Perhaps it is mismanagement, or I might be a bit kinder and say that it is not mismanagement but people cleaving to a system and a model idealised for some time, which they think should be delivering for the coastguard. However, it is not—it is simply not cutting the mustard.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

The coastguard station at Bangor in Northern Ireland was saved when the last changes took place. I was aware earlier this year of issues similar to those outlined by the hon. Gentleman at Stornoway. Action was taken in Belfast and at Bangor coastguard station in regard to issues of sickness and overtime, and I understand that those matters have been addressed. When changes have taken place successfully, that might be a precedent for what to do in Stornoway.

[Mr MacNeil]

I thank the hon. Gentleman. I understand from what he says that, unfortunately, Stornoway is not the only place affected like this, but I am pleased to hear that Bangor had a successful localised approach.

The situation facing some of us is an eight-month delay, which has had an unfortunate result for at least one new recruit, who gave up her job when she accepted the coastguard job, only for it to become apparent later that she would have to wait many months, until February, without salaried employment while she waited to start the job with the coastguard.

[Bill Esterson]

The hon. Gentleman is raising some worrying examples, and I can add to them because information given to me suggests that existing coastguard staff have felt criticised by senior agency management—so much so that some of them have left, which perhaps explains some of the evidence he gave earlier. That concerns me not just in terms of what is going on with the closure at Liverpool, but what is happening at Fareham and elsewhere and the knock-on effect on the service’s ability to deliver. It does not bode well if quality and experienced staff are being criticised.

[Mr MacNeil]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I have some evidence that I was not going to use because I thought there was not enough support behind it. Essentially, it is an e-mail containing implied criticism of existing staff, saying that there were better, more highly trained, more experienced or higher quality staff—I cannot remember the exact words—and existing staff felt undermined by that. I will be charitable and say that that was unfortunate, but there seems to be more than one example, or it may be the same example in many places, but it is unfortunate that the situation arose.

I return to the new recruit at Stornoway. I cannot help but think that that person has been mucked about by the MCA system—I will be kind and say that it is the system. We cannot treat grown adults, whom we trust to run one of our most important emergency services, like that and expect them to go months without paid employment because of the MCA’s procedures not being clear during the recruitment.

I have outlined some of the problems of undermanning in the ops room and taking in retired people, but there are other knock-on effects. Coastguard volunteers around our coast are also affected. Some people are destined to leave the operations room to train volunteer coastguards and to give them the training they deserve and the professionalism that anyone who is ever in need of their services deserves, but they cannot leave the operations room because of the demands there, so one of the knock-on effects is that that training is not happening. Those who would oversee development of the volunteer teams cannot be in place due to the glacial recruitment issues. Courses that should be happening in rope rescue, water rescue, first aid, land search, and equipment control and maintenance, to name but a few of the 20 courses in the guide, are not happening and cannot happen. We are back at the root of the problem, which is getting people into the service in a timely, speedy, correct and clear manner. This is not good for morale.

I may have sounded critical of the MCA and operations within the coastguard, but I do not mean to. There has been a general pattern of events in the coastguard service over the last few years and I have been critical, but although I am still being critical today, I hope that the criticism is constructive. We would all like nothing better than to have a properly functioning coastguard service. It is important to get to grips with that goal, and it could be happening, but it is not.

I want to spend a few moments putting on the record the importance of another aspect of guarding the coasts: emergency tug vessels. I want the Minister to understand the seriousness with which we on the west coast of Scotland regard them. We have nuclear movements going through the Minch—the stretch of water between the Hebrides and the mainland. The Minch is used by boats carrying nuclear material from Scrabster near Dounreay to the reprocessing facility at Sellafield, and we certainly do not want to contemplate one of those boats with that cargo requiring assistance, but the possibility exists. We also have fuel tankers, and those of us who do a bit of maritime trainspotting with the automatic identification system online often see tankers transiting north and south of the Hebrides between Tranmere and Mongstad in Norway. They carry fuel into some of the roughest European waters. We also have cruise ships in ever-increasing numbers, and the coastguards tell me that these sometimes carry the same amount of fuel as a tanker, which surprised me. They also carry something else very important: passengers. There are many people’s lives at stake, and we do not want one of those ships losing power along the rocky coastline of Scotland’s west coast.

If there are problems on the west coast, we will not be ready to tackle them like other nations, which take their responsibilities seriously and have plans in place to deal with problems. We have been told that we could get a tug from the oilfields west of Shetland and north of the Hebrides, but to my knowledge no simulation of a tanker or cruise ship in trouble has been carried out at the drop of a hat so that we have some experience of what would happen in real time trying to source one of those boats. I ask that such an exercise should take place. I fear that it will not happen and that our first experience will be an emergency.

I have a couple of final points. I mentioned the Faroes, Norway, the Republic of Ireland, the Isle of Man and Canada—the internationalisation of the coastguard. I am disappointed that the Smith commission on Scottish devolution has left only a consultative role for the Scottish Government. The issues I have brought to the fore would be dealt with faster and better in Edinburgh. As we saw today in the autumn statement, some of the things that have happened in Edinburgh, such as on stamp duty, have been a good example and have been copied. We have nothing to fear from devolution and control by Government outside Westminster. Sometimes, it may be for the benefit of us all.

As I said at the start, Scotland has 60% of the UK’s coastline but only 33% of the coastguard stations. Those coastguard stations are undermanned. I hope that if anything comes out of this debate, it will be that the Minister looks at the system so that we do not have the same situation in a year, and after four years a new system will have bedded down and we will have the necessary manpower in the coastguard station at Stornoway so that people do not suffer stress, can do their job professionally, and are released from the operations room to train volunteer coastguards.

16:47

[The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Mr John Hayes)]

It is an immense joy, Mr Davies, to serve under your illustrious and benevolent chairmanship. I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman secured this debate on an important issue. It is important because coastguards are important. Their work is immensely valuable and I want to take this opportunity to thank and congratulate them on all they do to keep our shores and our people safe, not only the professionals, but the volunteers. They deserve a particular mention because in my constituency and in constituencies of other hon. Members here, volunteer coastguards do a superb job.

The provision of search and rescue is an obligation enshrined in international law and convention, including the UN convention on the law of the sea and the international convention on maritime search and rescue. The UK coastguard service’s area of operation extends as far west as the mid-Atlantic and in all other directions to internationally agreed meridians.

Picking up the hon. Gentleman’s last point, national coastguard services must operate across international boundaries to provide a search and rescue capability that is most appropriate in each incident at sea. The commitment from all professional coastguards is to protect and to save using whatever assets and resources are available, even those that may belong to other national authorities. Fear, risk, safety and rescue know no national boundaries and it is important to remember that that has always been the way and the habit of our coastguards.

From December 2010, this Government entered extensive consultations to find a way of addressing combined challenges: resilience, preventing skills-fade, improving the job offer for coastguard officers, and giving greater leadership and training support to community volunteers that make up the coastguard rescue service. Hon. Members, and particularly the Select Committee on Transport, were very much involved in those discussions and the consultation, and helped to shape the blueprint that we announced in November 2011. That was further refined in September 2013, because it took longer than we all hoped to agree new pay arrangements to reflect properly the different roles and responsibilities of coastguards working in co-ordination centres.

The unions were properly and heavily involved in that process, as they should be. I work closely, and always have as a Minister, with the trade unions that relate to the sector for which I am responsible.

[Bill Esterson]

The Minister is absolutely right to praise the volunteers, who do a fantastic job in my constituency, as in his. I am sure he is aware of a point that was made in arguing the case against the closures—I am looking at the 2011 report from Crosby. What assurances can he give about the relationships between officers in the MCA and those volunteers where coastguard stations have closed, as they have in my constituency?

[Mr Hayes]

I take that relationship very seriously indeed. I have already celebrated, in this all too short contribution, the work of those volunteers, and I see them as being critically important to the link between the coastguard service and the community. They are model examples of how voluntary involvement can not only enliven communities, but provide vital services. I take the relationship very seriously, and under this Minister, it will always be taken in that way.

Nevertheless, as the hon. Gentleman will know, the national network, made up of a new National Maritime Operations Centre in Hampshire and a series of geographically spread coastguard operation centres that, in effect, retain each of the existing paired sites, has been the product of the consultation that we described. The retained sites would move progressively into the national network over time until December 2015, whereas other centres would either close completely or would remain open but would no longer be responsible for search and rescue co-ordination.

The blueprint included new and exciting coastguard roles and responsibilities with improved pay and terms and conditions. As I said, the unions were involved in developing that package for coastguard roles, which, for example, would see shift patterns redesigned to reflect better seasonal demands, and with more weekends off over a year. In the union ballot, 79% of those who voted supported acceptance of the new terms and conditions.

The Maritime and Coastguard Agency has moved on a long way from the concept phase of this programme. We are now making real progress in establishing a joined-up national network for rescue co-ordination. The new National Maritime Operations Centre near Fareham became operational from 1 September this year, when it assumed responsibility for coastguard functions along the south coast that were previously handled by the Solent and Portland maritime rescue co-ordination centres.

Coastguards at Falmouth now operate in the first of the new breed of refurbished and refreshed coastguard operations centres, and in effect, joined the national network in October. Just as envisaged by the blueprint that we published in November 2011, any coastguard function, including search and rescue, in the areas covered by the network can be handled by anyone in that network, allowing the national commander at the National Maritime Operations Centre at Fareham to make decisions about the distribution of work loads, given the people, resources and experience available. It is that improved co-ordination, better use of resources and more efficient use of skills that lies at the heart of the blueprint and its implementation.

I believe that we can maintain and improve what we do as a result of the changes. If I did not believe that, I would not support them. It is as simple as that, because there is no way that this Minister or this Government would compromise safety or inhibit effectiveness. It is simply not our intention; it never would be and it never could be. It is important for hon. Members to accept that. As the national network evolves, the number of officers on duty at a particular site becomes less significant. Measurements of input, in the end, are bound to be less significant than measurements of effect. What matters is how the coastguard operation deals with need at the point of need.

Every month, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency is either moving an existing co-ordination centre into the evolving network or ending the search and rescue function in one of the centres that was earmarked for closure.

[Mr MacNeil]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Hayes]

I will not, because I am very short of time. I know the MCA is far from complacent and will continue to give the closures and transitions to come the same management, attention and care, so that people, their allegiances and emotions are handled with sympathy.

I appreciate that there are always issues with this kind of radical programme, but I want to assure the House that after each transitional closure, there is a period of review, to learn lessons and improve the process before moving on to the next transition. I can further reassure the House that I will continue my regular face-to-face meetings with Sir Alan Massey and HM Coastguard officers to scrutinise and challenge the agency’s progress against that blueprint, including monitoring any particular pressure points, so that we can all have confidence that Her Majesty’s Coastguard continues to deliver the first-class service that we have all come to expect. It is absolutely right to examine and review this process to ensure the effectiveness at the point of need that I have described, in line with some of the arguments that the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar has made in this debate.

The new coastguard roles and responsibilities are more demanding, and I am delighted that we are taking large numbers of our existing coastguard officers into the new set-up, supplemented by many new recruits. The hon. Gentleman mentioned recruitment, and he acknowledged generously that lots of people want to join.

16:55

Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.

17:00

On resuming—

[Philip Davies (in the Chair)]

We have five minutes to go.

[Mr Hayes]

These five minutes will be exciting, because we have had a break and are waiting with anticipation for the culmination of this wonderful address.

I want to talk about recruitment, because for the operations centres the MCA has recruited against 78% of the roles, while for the roles to support the volunteer Coastguard Rescue Service the recruitment figure is 90%. Of the posts that have been filled, only 21% have been filled by new recruits; 79% of the vacancies have been filled by experienced coastguards taking up new opportunities. That is very important. The need to maintain continuity, to take advantage of experience and to ensure that the skills that people have developed over time play a key part in the new operation seems to me to be salient.

I do understand that there is particular concern about the adequacy of staffing at some centres that are transitioning into the growing national network. Many of the concerns expressed by hon. Members stem from the fact that the MCA has undoubtedly found it a challenge to staff existing maritime rescue co-ordination centres to the levels set out in historical watch-keeping risk assessments. Those levels were set several years ago and erred on the side of caution.

I can tell the House that I have had an assurance from Sir Alan Massey and the chief coastguard that there are sufficient officers with the right skills available across each existing pairing arrangement, backed up by additional cover, to sustain the comprehensive search and rescue service that we would expect. I have made the effort to challenge the service on that basis; I have asked those questions and asked to be regularly updated on recruitment and staffing. Hon. Members will understand that getting everyone in place for the new roles, both at co-ordination centres and on the coast to support our coastguard volunteers, is a complex jigsaw that must be carefully handled in terms of logistics and sequencing.

[Mr MacNeil]

I would like an undertaking from the Minister that he will seek to speed up what has been a glacial process. Eight months is too long. Can he look at shortening the period so that we do not see the undermanning in operations rooms that we have seen?

[Mr Hayes]

Senior managers closely monitor staffing on a daily basis and take action to ensure that safety is not jeopardised. That is certainly true for a lot of the west coast of Scotland and at Aberdeen. The essence of the plans that we have put in place is that they must have at their heart continuing operational effectiveness. I regard it as a key responsibility to ensure that that is the case.

I end by paying tribute to the professionalism and dedication of all those wearing the uniform of Her Majesty’s Coastguard. They should rightly continue to be proud of the job that they are doing and look forward to being part of a new and exciting future. Transitional arrangements are always challenging, and new ideas are sometimes regarded with suspicion, but we must move forward and we must get this right, because we owe it to the future to do so.

Question put and agreed to.

17:08

Sitting adjourned.