Common Fisheries Policy

Amber Rudd Excerpts

Thursday 15th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Miss McIntosh]

My right hon. Friend has put his finger, possibly inadvertently, on the nub of the issue. This is a shared resource and we need to conserve it. The Committee has gone through things and we have identified many ways in which we believe we can do that.

[Amber Rudd (Hastings and Rye) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the best outcome for our country’s relationship with the common fisheries policy would be what was described to us as a “toolbox”? We would operate our own toolbox, given our certain allocation, and that would perhaps give us the best option in terms of the European balance and the UK fishing balance.

[Miss McIntosh]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for putting it so eloquently and so well. This approach would, indeed, be part of the toolbox, and it would give the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, negotiating for the UK, a much greater say and devolve decision making right down to the regional level, with a tremendous positive impact on fishermen and on coastal communities.

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[Sheryll Murray]

One problem is that when fixed quota allocations were introduced there was no quota restriction for under-10 metre vessels. The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food secured an agreement with the European Commission to estimate the catches of the under-10 metre fleet, and, sadly, they were grossly underestimated. A few years later, the registration of buyers and sellers was introduced. Sales notes had to be submitted to the European Commission for every fish landed, so the flaw in the estimates of the under-10 metre vessel catch was there for everybody to see.

[Amber Rudd]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it seems extraordinary that when the register of buyers and sellers was assessed and it became evident to everybody that there had been a huge mismatch in the numbers, something was not done to address it? Instead, our fishing industries were left with the damaging consequences.

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[Amber Rudd (Hastings and Rye) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Austin Mitchell) and to hear his support for our report.

The common fisheries policy is friendless—I think we will hear more about that from hon. Members this afternoon. However, it is not just we who say that: it is the fishermen, the environmentalists, to whom it has not been the solution they expected, and—let us face it—now the population at large, to whose attention the issue of discards has been brought. Discards are the very manifestation of the failure of the CFP. However, we have to be careful, as my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh) said in opening the debate, to ensure that we do not wish for the end of discards without explaining how to get there. We all want to see the end of discards, but the current system, with the mixed quota and a mixed fishery, does not allow for it. We therefore have to proceed in a measured, step-by-step way that will allow for what we all ultimately want: the end of discards.

I cannot overstate the mess and confusion that the industry faces. If Mephistopheles himself had tried to design a system intended to confuse and inhibit people, and to get the worst possible outcome for all the stakeholders, he just might have come up with the current system.

[Jim Shannon]

Just to step back to the issue of discards for one second, the hon. Lady will be aware of the progressive steps that local fishing organisations have taken to try to address it—through net sizes and so on. Does she feel that those steps—put forward by fishing organisations and coming straight from the industry itself—should be taken on board as a way of addressing the issue of discards directly?

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[Amber Rudd]

I agree entirely. Local organisations and local communities are coming up with their own solutions, which is absolutely to be recommended. It also points the way even more to what we have been hearing this afternoon, which is that we should have regional solutions, so that although we will allow a common fisheries policy to exercise overall control, we want regional solutions, selected within Governments.

[Mr MacNeil]

I am sure that the hon. Lady is aware that there is a zero-discard fishery quite close to UK waters, off the Faroe Islands. The boats go and fish, the area is closed, and they move on. The common fisheries policy is a manifestation of the obtuseness of European policy. Europe cannot move quickly to a working solution that is already being used off the north-west of the UK. A discard is only a bureaucratic label for a fish that cannot be landed, owing to other problems created by that very mechanism. The way out is already in existence. However, I have been in this place for seven years and I have attended many of these debates, and we face the same problem all the time. We cannot move the obtuse juggernaut that is the common fisheries policy—end of story. We are stuck.

[Amber Rudd]

I am not really familiar with the context of fishing off the Faroe Islands, but I am sure that the Minister is and that he will throw some light on the issue.

I return, however, to the main issue I have with discards, which is that that they are, I believe, down to the quota system being allocated for particular fish stocks, rather than for what we actually have, which is mixed fisheries. In part, that is an indication that we have a major problem with the fishing industry. I am entirely sympathetic—I know that many other Members here are too, as are those on our Committee—when it comes to the difficult pass that the Minister has been given. He has to find a difficult balance between the different interests in the fishing industry.

[Sheryll Murray]

Does my hon. Friend agree that part of the problem with a mixed fishery is that different sized nets are needed for different species of fish? Some fish, such as cephalopods—squid or octopus—grow a lot more quickly than other species. That is why we have such a big problem, and there is no simple solution.

[Amber Rudd]

My hon. Friend is well known for being incredibly knowledgeable about these issues, and she refers to one tool of the trade—changing the mesh size—that could be used to limit the quota and the type of fish stocks landed. She is also absolutely right in her final point. This is indeed a complicated issue, and there is no simple solution. Indeed, looking back on it, it seems that every time a Government or a Minister has tried to make a change for the better, the law of unintended consequences applies—we move a little bit this way and something happens on the other side. At the moment, the Minister is caught between trying to manage the divergent interests of the larger fishermen, in the POs, and those of the smaller fishing communities, in the under-10-metre fleet.

[Andrew George]

The hon. Lady says that there is no simple solution. As the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) suggested, either the quota system, which is a blunt instrument, could carry on in its present form, or we could get rid of it and base fishing policy on effort control. The problem with getting rid of it is that quota is marketable and has great value, and I do not think that any Government would want to compensate all those people who have valuable fishing—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. Can we have shorter interventions? A lot of Members still want to speak, and I would say to anyone who tries to make a speech by means of an intervention that it is not going to happen.

[Amber Rudd]

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting and quite radical suggestion, which brings me to my next point. Perhaps the Minister should consider an independent review of some sort. There are so many different interests involved, and so many ways of trying to move the goalposts and achieve one outcome or another, that I am not sure it is possible for one Minister to act as referee. Perhaps he should consider appointing an arbitrator to conduct an independent review, in order to achieve an outcome on which all the stakeholders could agree.

One proposal on common fisheries policy reform that our report has looked at involves transferrable fishing concessions. My concern, and that of other Members, is reflected in the report. It is that such concessions would not be good for the under-10 metre community. The evidence from other countries is that they have worked against smaller communities, and that the under-10s tend to suffer under them. Those communities tend to lose out in the initial allocation of quota, there is no route for new entrants, and the environmental and social performance is not taken into consideration. Under the present proposals, there is 5% of potential quota allocation for environmental and social performance. I would propose—this is not in the report—that, if we had such a system, there should be a far greater amount allocated to social and environmental performance, which is incredibly important. That would also help to stimulate the under-10 metre communities, which tend to do a lot of social and environmental work locally

The nub of the matter is the question why can we not have a fisheries policy that supports fishing communities? Our current policy has failed—the evidence of that is in our report. Communities find themselves diminished, and the discards continue. We need a new impetus, a new effort and new ideas. Under the new Government, we definitely got the new effort. We began well, by introducing a measure that the smaller, under-10-metre communities had been seeking for a while—namely, a one-off re-allocation of the quota. Obviously, as someone who comes from such a community, I would say that that was not enough, and that it was too conservative, but the Minister will have found, when he embarked on the re-allocation, that he had entered a swamp of divisiveness and infighting between the different interests. The previous Government tried to work with the under-10-metre communities, but they ended up suffering from fishing reform fatigue and gave up on their effort to help. Another great advantage of having a Conservative coalition Government is that we have a new impetus and a new effort. I say to the Minister: keep up the energy and the enthusiasm, so that we can get the reforms that this country so badly needs.

I want to reiterate my concerns about the transferrable fishing concessions. We must not allow them to cement what should be a public resource as a private commodity. When the Committee went down to Hastings and held discussions with both sectors, they acknowledged the need for decommissioning. As hon. Members have said, however, there have been problems with that in the past, even though it was supported by Government money. The hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Mr Doran) mentioned that the process had had limited success.

In Hastings, we also welcome the support for alternative initiatives. We have been lucky enough to receive £1 million of the £8.7 million put aside under a European initiative involving Fisheries Local Action Groups—FLAGs—to help to support fishermen into new initiatives. I urge fellow Members to come and look at the exciting, adventurous work being done on the Stade in Hastings, where our fishing fleet is, to find alternative methods of employing fishermen and to upgrade their kit and provide new tractors. That is a positive way of trying to help our fishermen into the future.

Above all, when we consider how we can help our fishermen, we need to try carefully to find the balance between satisfying the environmentalists, which we all are, the fishermen who need to continue their lives and the needs of the population who will not accept a system that has so many discards. I am fortunate to come from Hastings, where fishing is so important. It is crucial that my residents in Hastings and Rye know that this issue is taken very seriously. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply and the remaining comments from other Members.