Universal Credit: Farmers

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and Sheryll Murray

Wednesday 24th April 2024 Westminster Hall

[Mr Carmichael]

On a point of order, Mrs Murray. It was remiss of me while intervening in the debate not to remind the House of my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I hope you will allow me to do so now for the record.

[Mrs Sheryll Murray (in the Chair)]

Absolutely.

Question put and agreed to.

Fisheries Bill [Lords]

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and Sheryll Murray

Report stage & 3rd reading & 3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 13th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Carmichael]

I rise to speak to new clauses 11 and 12, standing in my name. It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for South East Cornwall (Mrs Murray). I listened very carefully to her remarks, as I always do on matters related to the fishing industry, and I absolutely understand her background and family history, which has brought her to a very close interest in fishing safety over the years. I am grateful to her—enormously grateful to her—for accepting that I am well intentioned. I would hope, as I am a vice-chair of the all-party group on fisheries, of which she is the chair, that she would have expected nothing less.

I am afraid I was not entirely persuaded by the hon. Lady’s reasoning, however, and on this occasion I will stick with the views of the representatives of the fishing industry, who say that amendments such as new clauses 11 and 12 are necessary. I say to the Minister, who has obviously been told that they are probing amendments, that they are no such thing. Unless I am able to hear any reason or persuasive arguments as to why I should not push them to a vote, then with your agreement, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will certainly seek to test the views of the House on new clause 12 at least.

The hon. Lady’s proposition was an interesting one. She said that we should rely on the provisions of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and also on the licensing provisions. I am actually a great fan of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act. It is legislative poetry. A whole body of case law and regulations have been born and grown up out of it, of which I am not always a great admirer, but the Act itself is very simple.

[Mrs Murray]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Carmichael]

I will just explain this to the hon. Lady, and then I will give way to her.

The Act creates an obligation to provide a safe system of work for those who come into contact with it. It is a measure that has to be applied in a way that is reasonable and proportionate. I cannot imagine that any safe system of work would deal with the sort of piracy we have seen off the west coast of Shetland in relation to Pesorsa Dos, which I will speak about in a second or two. With all due respect to the hon. Lady, it seems to me that, in seeking to rely on the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act and licensing conditions, she is in effect saying—or advancing an argument that would be akin to saying—that we do not require the Road Traffic Acts and the offences of dangerous or careless driving simply because we license cars, but if the hon. Lady wishes to intervene, I will give way.

[Mrs Murray]

I think the right hon. Gentleman misunderstood what I said. I actually mentioned the Merchant Shipping and Fishing Vessels (Health and Safety at Work) Regulations 1997, under which a massive number of M notices—merchant shipping notices—are published, meaning that vessels have to be kept and operated in a safe way. If we license other vessels from other nations, we could insist, as part of their licencing, that they behave in a responsible way and that the vessels meet the same requirements as UK vessels.

[Mr Carmichael]

The hon. Lady advances an excellent argument in support of my new clause 11, but as it happens, I am going to press new clause 12. The difficulty she has is that I do not hear any argument from her about enforcement, so when we are in the exclusive economic zone, if these regulations or licensing requirements are breached, how do we enforce them? At present, there is no power for the Maritime and Coastguard Agency to do that, but that would be a sensible and reasonable thing to do, and it would, I suggest, be entirely appropriate given the stated aim of taking back control.

[Mrs Murray]

I think it is the Marine Management Organisation that enforces licensing but in his area, the Scottish fisheries protection agency goes out on board the vessels.

[Mr Carmichael]

There will be no provision in licensing that will deal with the dangerous and reckless conduct that we have seen west of Shetland, and that we will see in other territorial waters, I think, in the next few months as the political heat is turned up in relation to fishing and the changes that are going to come in on 1 January.

I want to make a couple of points before dealing in detail with the reason why new clauses 11 and/or 12 are necessary. The first is on Government amendment 36, which I raised with the Minister in her opening comments. I understand the reasons why a lot of late Government amendments to the Bill have come and I have sympathy with them, knowing the to and fro that there has been between the Minister’s Department and the various devolved Administrations, but the Bill is not new. We had the Bill go through all its stages in this House—certainly the Public Bill Committee—once already. It started then in the other place and it has been through Committee here, so introducing at this late stage—when, frankly, there is little opportunity for meaningful scrutiny of it—a provision that strikes at a fairly important constitutional point in relation to the Channel Islands as dependent territories requires further explanation from the Minister.

Essentially, the difficulty is that saying that this is just a backstop power is one thing, but the Government giving themselves a backstop power that can be used unilaterally—possibly without any consultation, although I accept that that is unlikely—takes us down a very difficult and dangerous constitutional path. I think that this requires greater scrutiny than this House is able to give it today, because once I have given way to the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill), I will not say much more about it.

UK Fishing Industry

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and Sheryll Murray

Wednesday 12th December 2018 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Sheryll Murray (South East Cornwall) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the UK fishing industry.

I felt it was important to hold this debate in the run-up to the last Fisheries Council that the Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice), will attend and have a voice in. We have heard lots of debates in this place about what will happen to fisheries policy once we leave the European Union in March 2019. As is normal, we should have a debate about what the Fisheries Council will decide this year.

Before I move on to the Fisheries Council, I would like to set the record straight. We have heard many people in recent times quote the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, implying that it welcomes the deal that is on the table. I want to quote the federation’s chief executive, Bertie Armstrong:

“We have made it very clear since the referendum in 2016 that anything other than full, unfettered sovereignty over our own waters would be crossing a red line for the fishing industry.

Despite the stated wishes of French president Emmanuel Macron, which we know are shared by the other large fishing nations, Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany, we should give a clear and resounding ‘Non!’ to the idea of guaranteeing continued access.

Access and quotas must be negotiated…not carved up in advance.”

I do not think those words describe some of the things we have heard attributed to Bertie Armstrong in the main Chamber in recent times, and I wanted to set the record straight.

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on obtaining this debate. Bertie Armstrong also said, when giving evidence to the Fisheries Bill Committee last week, that the fisheries were put into the transitional arrangements because there were four or five countries that would have blocked a transitional deal otherwise. He was probably right about that, but the question for him, and—indeed, for the Minister and Prime Minister—is, if that was the attitude to the transition, what will be different come the final deal?

[Mrs Murray]

I completely agree. I think Bertie’s words have been taken out of context and misquoted. He went on to say:

“The link between access and trade breaches all international norms and practice and is simply unacceptable.”

When the European Union negotiated our terms of entry, it was very keen to get access to the United Kingdom’s then 12-mile limit—it was not until 1976 that we had a 200-mile limit—but that must end. The weak words I have heard about us negotiating with our European partners are completely wrong, because under international law we have control. We should decide how much surplus our fisherman, other member states and other nations—it is not just member states of the European Union—are allowed to take. British fishermen must be treated fairly.

Superfast Broadband: Rural Communities

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and Sheryll Murray

Tuesday 21st February 2017 Westminster Hall

[Mr Carmichael]

I could make many comments about that sort of thing, but I fear that you would rule me out of order, Mr Brady. It does, however, illustrate the frustration that many people in rural communities feel, and it is becoming more acute. The evidence is growing that the disparity between the densely populated urban areas and rural areas is becoming ever wider.

[Mrs Sheryll Murray (South East Cornwall) (Con)]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

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

rose—

[Mrs Murray]

rose—

[Mr Carmichael]

I suspect that I am going to get willing agreement first from the hon. Gentleman and then the hon. Lady.

[Mr Carmichael]

The hon. Gentleman and I both know the Faroe Islands quite well and we both know that they have been able to achieve the things that our island communities have struggled to achieve because they start from the presumption of a service that is provided for the people on the islands first. It is not something that is driven from, as it is for his community and mine, people in Edinburgh or even Inverness, which is frankly not an awful lot better. It is community and island-centric provision. That is what matters.

[Mrs Sheryll Murray]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the problem exists not just at the end of the country where his constituency is, but in Cornwall? I cannot attribute this to my right hon. Friend the Minister. Superfast Cornwall, which is a partnership between the EU, the Liberal Democrat-led Cornwall Council and BT, is failing to roll out broadband in a satisfactory way for a lot of my constituents. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that there is a problem there as well?

[Mr Carmichael]

The hon. Lady has the advantage of me. I was mildly and pleasantly surprised to hear that we still have a controlling interest in Cornwall. I am sure that my colleagues there are doing their best in very difficult circumstances. I am sure equally, from the tone of her intervention, that the hon. Lady will be doing everything she can, in a non-partisan way, to work with them.

Let me make progress for a minute or two. Ofcom’s “Connected Nations” report in December 2016 gave us a good snapshot of the overall picture. Average download speeds across the UK as a whole are now running at 37 megabits per second. However, 5% of premises, which is about 1.4 million, are unable to receive speeds faster than 10 megabits per second. Superfast broadband—that means speeds greater than 30 megabits per second—is now available in 89% of premises, which is more than 25 million, across the whole of the United Kingdom. However, those high-level, headline statistics actually illustrate the acuteness of the divide—the growing divide—between urban and rural communities. In Scotland, 43.9% of people living in large urban areas, as opposed to 7.9% in remote urban areas, are able to receive speeds classed as superfast. Those unable to reach the 10-megabits-per-second threshold constitute 1.6% in large urban areas, as opposed to 54.3% in very rural areas. That is a good illustration of the gap between the digital haves and have-nots—the rural and the urban.

Fisheries Policy

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and Sheryll Murray

Thursday 3rd December 2015 Westminster Hall

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Nuttall. I congratulate the hon. Members for South East Cornwall (Mrs Murray) and for South Down (Ms Ritchie) on securing this debate, and I endorse the view expressed by the right hon. Member for Tynemouth (Mr Campbell) that this subject really belongs in the main Chamber. The fishing industry matters for all our coastal and island communities and deserves that degree of respect. I hope it will receive it in years to come.

I echo the comments made by the hon. Member for South East Cornwall when she spoke of the current EU renegotiations as a missed opportunity to reopen discussions on the common fisheries policy. There was an opportunity for the Prime Minister to atone for the sins of his political ancestors, if I may put it that way, and it would be an eminently achievable objective, because I do not think the common fisheries policy, as it stands, has many friends, even in Brussels. We can all see the damage that it has done to our respective countries and industries. We have the opportunity to reboot it.

[Mrs Murray]

I praise the right hon. Gentleman for securing the earlier Westminster Hall debate on the common fisheries policy. Does he agree that it would send a message to the fishing industry that the Government care about fishermen and women?

[Mr Carmichael]

Indeed it would. For that reason, I intend to keep making the case, and I do not doubt that the hon. Lady will, too. This case is best made in this House, as is generally the case—I speak as a Member who represents a fishing community—to ensure it is made in the broadest possible way. By and large, there is not a great deal of difference between the parties on fisheries policy. We all face the same challenges in our communities. For that reason, it will be easy to build a cross-party consensus.

I want to dwell on two areas today. I understand—perhaps the Minister will deal with this in his remarks—that the EU-Norway negotiations are proceeding fairly well. It looks as though they will produce quota uplifts for most species, with a significant—and worrying for my constituency—exception for mackerel and blue whiting. That exception will be even more significant in the discussions that are about to start in Copenhagen between the European Union and the Faroe Islands. I hope the Minister will take that point away and pursue it vigorously with the EU negotiators in those discussions. There is grave concern in the pelagic industry about the way in which the 2014 deal between the EU and the Faroe Islands is being allowed to operate.

As hon. Members are doubtless aware, the deal was designed to allow EU vessels some access to Faroese waters. In return, Faroese vessels can catch a proportion of their mackerel and blue whiting in EU waters. The deal was met with substantial scepticism in my constituency and by the pelagic fleet in Shetland, in particular. They have gone along with it and have done their best to make it work, but with every week and month that passes it becomes more apparent that the deal requires urgent review.

The recent Seafish study shows that this year the Faroese have overcaught their entitlement of mackerel by 1,400 tonnes, but there have been no boats catching mackerel or blue whiting in the Faroese waters. Surely, it is possible to do this without threatening the access of EU vessels to Faroese waters. Essentially, the Faroese were given an inch in 2014, since which time they have taken a mile. The deal looks more and more unbalanced with every day that passes. It requires urgent attention from Britain and the EU.

The other matter that I wish to bring to the attention of the Minister and of those in the devolved Administrations, because it is of significance to them, is the implementation of the demersal discard ban, which is due to come into force at the beginning of the year. We always knew that the demersal ban would be tricky.

Trident

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and Sheryll Murray

Tuesday 24th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to take part in a very important debate on a subject to which the House has not given sufficient time recently, although we have known for some years that we would have to address it. For the benefit of Government business managers, may I say that I think the House would be better served by a more substantial motion in Government time, which might allow wider consideration of the challenges that face us?

We are dealing today with an Opposition day debate. I listened with great care to the speech of the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O'Hara). It was remarkable that it focused on the position of the Labour party as much as it focused on the Government. That is a novel position for an Opposition day debate. In fairness, I am not entirely without sympathy for the approach, given the current difficulties in the Labour party. It is not that Labour lacks a clear position—in fact, I would suggest that Labour has too many clear positions and it is difficult to reconcile them all within the one party.

I have sympathy with the review that Labour is undertaking. I wish it well, but I have severe misgivings when I hear that Ken Livingstone has been put in charge of it. Putting Ken Livingstone in charge of a review of nuclear weaponry is a bit like putting King Herod in charge of the nursery.

I commend the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins) for his contribution to the debate and the manner in which he made it. The review could do an awful lot worse than to take as its starting point the Trident alternatives review that was carried out at the behest of my party in the previous Government, which looked at various alternatives and different ways in which the question could be approached.

[Mrs Sheryll Murray]

Can the right hon. Gentleman clarify the stance of his own party? A member who represents his party in my constituency claimed that we did not need a nuclear deterrent because we did not use it in the Falklands. Will the right hon. Gentleman clarify his party’s policy, please?

[Mr Carmichael]

I am not responsible for every contribution from every member of my party in every constituency, any more, I suspect, than the hon. Lady would want to be for her own party. I will come to my party’s position in a moment, because I think it is central to the debate and I want to put it on record. The hon. Lady has the advantage of being able to consider the terms of the amendment that was tabled but unfortunately was not selected for Division today.

It is worth remembering that we are having this debate only because the maingate decision, which was to have been taken in the previous Parliament, was delayed until this Parliament. When the Minister responds to the debate, I invite him to accept that although his party wanted to take that maingate decision in the last Parliament, events vindicate the decision that was made and this is the right point in the cycle to take it.

We live in an ever-changing and uncertain world. As the hon. Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke), I think, said earlier, we cannot ignore the fact that nuclear weapons exist. I wish they could be uninvented, but they cannot. That is the basis on which we should approach this debate. It is not just about whether the position should be reviewed or not: it is about what the United Kingdom, as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, can do to take a lead in the international community and among the nuclear powers to ensure that there is a serious movement towards multilateral nuclear disarmament.

This was a formative debate in my early political years, as it probably was for you, Madam Deputy Speaker, in the 1987 general election, but the world was a very different place in 1987. The cold war was still at its height and the Soviet Union still existed. We have seen enormous change since that time, but the change has not all been in one direction. We have only to look at the situation in Ukraine and Crimea to realise that such old enmities never die. It is not pertinent to say what is a tier 1 or a tier 2 risk at this point. The question is what the situation will be in the future.

Having said all that, I would still say that the Government’s determination to pursue a like-for-like replacement for Trident ignores the different world in which we now live and misses the opportunity that we have as a force for multilateral nuclear disarmament to take a different approach—to take a step down the nuclear ladder—and as a nuclear power to meet our obligations under the various nuclear non-proliferation treaties.

When the Secretary of State addressed the House, he spoke of what he has done to reduce the number of nuclear warheads currently available for deployment. I commend him for that. He lamented the fact that this has elicited little response from other nuclear or nuclear-aspirant countries. I suspect that that is because despite the reduction in the number of warheads, the Government continue to cleave to the notion of continuous at-sea deterrence. The time has now come for a very long and serious look at whether that remains an appropriate approach. My party has reached the conclusion that it is no longer necessary or appropriate. We would like to see an end to continuous at-sea nuclear deterrence, while of course maintaining our deterrence capability. That would allow us to take something of a lead in taking the step down—[Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock) wishes to intervene, I will take an intervention, but I will not take sedentary chuntering.

Common Fisheries Policy (Reform)

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and Sheryll Murray

Thursday 10th September 2015 Westminster Hall

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

I am slightly disappointed to see the Chamber thinning at the rate that it is, but I am resigned to it. This topic has not suffered from a lack of debate over the years, certainly not during my time in the House. As we can tell from the number of Members leaving the Chamber, this issue matters a lot to a small number of communities and to a smaller number of people in a wider range of communities. My constituency of Shetland, in particular, is one of those communities where it does matter a lot.

In 2014, we in Shetland alone landed in the region of 78,000 tonnes of fish or shellfish with a value of £76 million from local and visiting boats: 24% of all fish landed in Scotland in that year. In fact, the amount of fish landed in Shetland is greater than the amounts landed in ports in England, Wales and Northern Ireland combined. Some 30% of our local economic product comes from fishing or fish farming—the seafood industries taken as a whole. I tell hon. Members that so that they can understand. Talk about common fisheries policy reform can often be quite jargon-heavy and a little bit dry and academic, but for us, as a community, it is anything but that. The fishing industry defines us as a community and underpins just about everything else that happens within our community.

Indeed, across all sectors of the industry, more traditional models of boat ownership and operating exist in Shetland than in other parts of the country, from where they have perhaps disappeared. We retain fishing as a family industry, where generation after generation will want to go to sea and make their living as fishermen. That came home to me in 2002, as a fairly new Member of Parliament elected in 2001: we had the December Council result, which was probably one of the most difficult for the industry to manage that people can ever remember. The week before Christmas, when the House had gone into recess, I went home to Shetland and had to address a mass meeting of the local fishermen’s association in the mission in Lerwick. It was as bleak and grim a meeting as I have ever seen; a week before the end of the year, not knowing what was going to happen come 1 January, the rug had been pulled out from underneath these men’s feet and they had no idea how they were going to manage the deal that had been landed on them. No other industry would manage itself, or allow itself to be managed, in that way. It was in that 2002 deal that the seeds of reform were sown, and we have seen significant progress since then.

In 2000, before I was elected to Parliament, I attended a conference in north-east Scotland where Mike Park of the Scottish White Fish Producers Association was one of the speakers. He said that the further a skipper is from his home port, the less he cares about conservation of stocks. That has stuck with me ever since. I have always taken that as being the justification for regionalisation and bringing control of the industry back as close as possible to the communities most directly affected by it.

[Mrs Sheryll Murray (South East Cornwall) (Con)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that what was said at that time has been borne out, given the plundering of tiny fish that the Spanish pursued after Spain’s accession?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Carmichael]

There is not much that I disagree with there. The essence of the problem that the hon. Gentleman highlights is that fisheries management is something done to the industry and to the communities affected, rather than being something that they feel they have any ownership of, or are able to influence. Although there have been an enormous number of problems with the regional advisory councils, they have been a source of enormous progress and benefit and are certainly infinitely preferable to what we had before they were established, when everything was done in Brussels with simply no opportunity to challenge it.

How we have been able to build partnerships between fishermen, conservationists and scientists, through the regional advisory structures, is exceptional. That has been taken on by various people. I commend the Minister’s predecessor, the hon. Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon), for the work he did in the lead-up to landing a reformed common fisheries policy, because that developed the first iteration of the regional advisory councils to the point where they might even become regional management councils. That is the first point that I would like the Minister to take on. The advisory councils themselves are best placed to author the next iteration of their development. With the history of joint working and the body of expertise within the councils, that could now be done to improve and speed up the present rate of change.

[Mrs Murray]

The right hon. Gentleman wants regional management councils. How would he do this under the current treaties and regulations? We are never going to get rid of the equal access to a common resource while other countries want access to our waters.

[Mr Carmichael]

One reason why I love being in debates with the hon. Lady is that she always anticipates my next point. That is exactly why I think this is a timely debate. However, before I touch on that, I should like to make a brief reference to one other aspect that hinders the work of the regional advisory councils and everybody else involved in fisheries conservation. The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea and all the scientists involved in it are required to use data that, by the time they are implemented, are about two years out of date. One of the biggest difficulties with our total allowable catch and quota system is that it will work only if it accurately reflects the amount of fish in the sea at any moment in time. For that reason, if the data are two years out of date, there will eventually be a difference between what fishermen are told is in the sea and what they actually find in their nets. That then results in a downward spiral, where the fishermen have no respect for what the scientists tell them, and the TACs and the quotas do not reflect what the fishermen find.

The problem will become particularly acute as we implement the next stage of the discards ban; it has always been difficult, but it is now positively urgent that we deal with it. There must be some way in which an early, quick and dirty analysis can be done so that the data can be used in as close to real time as possible.

The reason why I sought the debate, and why I am so pleased we have a good turnout, is the very point raised by the hon. Member for South East Cornwall (Mrs Murray). I hope Members will forgive the pun, but we have been pushing water uphill a lot of the time in reforming fisheries management and the CFP. That is because of the constitutional architecture within which the CFP, in its various iterations, has had to sit: the various treaties, the acquis communautaire, the principle of common access, which the hon. Lady mentioned, and the Lisbon treaty, which enshrined the principle that the conservation of marine biological resources, as only the EU could call fishing, was to be a sole competence—something about which I felt so strongly that I resigned from my party’s Front Bench when the issue came to a vote.

We have had to live with all those matters, because it has been next to impossible to find our way around them. If we proceed piece by piece, we will reform neither the policy nor the constitutional architecture that sits around it. Now, however, we apparently have an opportunity to bring about reform. The Prime Minister has said that we are to have a referendum on a reformed European Union, and the issue before us is one of the areas of community policy and responsibility that is absolutely ripe for reform. The CFP has not worked for fishermen, fishing communities, conservationists or scientists, so this is surely the time to take a blank sheet of paper and say, “We can do this differently.”

When we talk about regionalisation and regional management, we should say, “Those can be written into any new or changed treaty.” When we talk about the principle of common access, we should be honest about the fact that it had its roots in the very earliest days of the community. It was perhaps understandable for a community of six nation states, but for a community of 28 member states—not just around the North sea, but stretching right across Europe, and including many that are actually landlocked—it makes no sense whatever.

I cannot see many people in Europe, beyond the confines of the Commission perhaps, wanting to argue against such reform. The CFP has badly served all the member states and all the various interests affected by it. It has affected particularly badly the communities that I and others in the Chamber represent. We now have an opportunity, and I suspect that the Government would find it rather easier to make progress and to deliver positive change in this area than they might in some of the others that the Prime Minister has listed as priorities.

My request to the Minister is a simple one. On behalf of the House and the various fishing communities represented here today, will he make the need for reform and for tackling historic anomalies that have caused so many problems in Europe a priority for negotiation with other member states? In that way, he could deliver a change that would make an enormous difference to the industry and to the communities we represent, which would serve us all better as a result.