Recreational Sea Bass Fishing

Huw Irranca-Davies Excerpts

Thursday 11th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Scott Mann]

I was not aware of that, and I thank the hon. Lady for making those points. I want to talk about some of the EU changes. I welcome the ban on French pair trawlers between January and April. They account for about a third of the bass taken in British waters, and many of the bass that they catch are spawning fish. Taking large spawning fish out of the ecosystem means there are no smaller fish to grow and become bigger fish. In the EU changes, we should be talking about reclaiming our territorial waters. The EU holds the common fisheries policy up as a shining example of joined-up thinking, but I am yet to find a commercial fisherman or a recreational sea angler who believes that the CFP is a good thing.

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

I am delighted to be drawn into intervening by the hon. Gentleman. May I draw his attention to a 3-inch piece in a right-hand column in The Times about six months ago—a tiny little thing—which reported that the long-running battle to replenish cod in the North sea was being won? Cod stocks are growing bigger, as we can read in the press again today. North sea cod has been replenished because instead of cod wars we have agreements based on science to replenish the stocks. Those agreements are working.

[Scott Mann]

I will try to check out that column in The Times. It is not my regular newspaper—I normally read The Telegraph and The Sun—but I will go back and check it. Such agreements may be fine in other waters, but we should have an understanding that our territorial waters inside the 6-mile limit should be protected for our fisheries and our people.

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[Mr Cox]

I do agree. The policy is crazy, and Ministers know it. They wrestle with their consciences, they feel guilty and they try to push the envelope for the inshore fleet, but they know that the situation is untenable. They know that decent men and women with livelihoods to protect cannot go to sea for more than a few days a year and cannot cover their costs. I sympathise with my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Scott Mann). Of course the position is crazy. It is an insane policy.

Of course the rod-and-line sea anglers must feel a sense of injustice. It is a direct and perverse consequence of a failed policy. That is the difficulty. How do I go back to Bideford and Appledore and say to my fishermen, “There’s nothing for you to catch”? Catching small-eyed ray, the last thing on which they depended, was banned in December. Why do we think my hon. Friend the Minister came back with derogations for gillnetting? It was because he knew that the small-eyed ray was banned, which meant 40% of the northern Devon fishing industry cut at a slice. Was there any consultation on that ban? No. Was there any warning? No.

The real injustice is the whole failed policy. It is time we got out of it. The people of this country will have the chance to withdraw us from it in just a few months. Then we can have a properly managed fishery in which the rod-and-line men and the sea anglers can be treated properly, and the inshore fleet, on which traditional coastal communities depend, can breathe again when we introduce common sense back into the counsels of our fishing policy.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

rose—

[Mr Cox]

No, I am not listening to a former Minister who presided over this policy and went cap in hand to Brussels begging for scraps. It is time we took back our fisheries policy. That will bring justice to the people my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall spoke for and to the decent men and women who have nothing to fish for in the north Devon fishery.

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! What are the Government doing risking Europe’s sea bass for their foolish, unfair, ineffective and fishy decision on sea bass fishing? Members might ask what I am doing here out of my darkened room—it is nothing to do with defence; I do not eat fish; and I am not an angler. Thanks to 40 years of living with an ecologist, however, I know an environmental disaster when I see one.

I have constituents who are sea anglers who came to my surgery and asked me to take an interest in sea bass fishing. Unfortunately for me, I happen to know the former Member for Reading, and when someone knows the former Member for Reading, it is very dangerous to ask him, “What is the issue about sea bass fishing?” because he will tell them.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

You shouldn’t have done that!

[Mrs Moon]

I appreciate the comment from my hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies)—I should never have done it, but my constituents wanted to know, so I wanted to know, and thus I am here today. I am also a Member who has a coastal resort, in which sea bass fishing was a very popular activity, so I started looking at the facts.

Everywhere I looked, it was very clear that there was an urgent need to rebuild bass stocks—and nobody seems to dispute that. It is the core bottom line. It is an environmental and economic imperative, and everybody will agree on that. We know this because in 2014, the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas recommended an 80% cut in bass mortality across the EU area for 2015, following a rise in bass landings from 772 tonnes to 1,004 tonnes. We were taking more out of the sea than was sustainable. The bass stock in the North Atlantic fishery is 527 tonnes—well below the trigger point of concern for the exploration of the seas, which was set at 8,000 tonnes. Future regenerations of sea bass stocks are now in danger.

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[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

I will try to be quick so that others can speak, Madam Deputy Speaker. I hope Members will understand if I do not take interventions. I have been tempted into making some points. There have been some very good speeches by Members who know a lot more about the fishing industry than I do, but my opening point is that the Europe issue is a red herring.

Even if we had control of our own waters, we would have to have the right conservation measures to balance conservation with the survival of fisheries. We would have to do that come what may. I alluded earlier to North sea cod. Even if we had not been part of the common fisheries policy, and even if I had not been the Minister who started the trend for bringing back devolution of decision making on the North sea alongside Scottish colleagues and others, we would still have had to have made that decision for the good of our fisheries in the long term. We need the focus to be on the conservation of stocks, which is, ultimately, good for recreational fishermen and commercial fisheries.

The Minister has a very difficult task. When he goes to Brussels, he argues for the UK—it is not as though we do not have a voice, and he is there alongside colleagues from Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland—and he has to do a difficult thing: he has to represent fishing communities while taking account of the science. Yes, I understand that that is difficult, but my question to the Minister is why is the decision on bass such a departure from the science? That is the fundamental question. I understand the difficulties he has when he goes to Europe, but there is such a difference between what ICES and the science clearly says—science is never perfect, but it is pretty good to go on—and what the Government have come up with. That is what we need to hear today. This issue is not between recreational anglers and commercial fisheries—or it should not be, although sometimes it seems to descend into that—but about the balance between using the science effectively in negotiations and keeping the fisheries alive.

The fundamental question in my very short contribution is this: why is there a chasm between the science and the final outcome of the December fisheries negotiations on bass? The joy of the North sea cod result was that we had to strike a balance for more than a decade and we did it. Yes, fishermen were not happy, but they are a lot happier now that the cod is recovering and that they have bigger fish to land in their vessels. We need to do the same with bass and all other species as well.

The question that I leave the Minister is this: why is there such a gap? I have experienced the difficulties of fisheries negotiations, but he must understand that there is a chasm between what the science was telling him and the outcome. Is it because there was a huge pressure from the fisheries communities and the Minister gave way? I have certainly been faced with the situation in which we almost had to close fisheries off the west of Scotland and off north-east Ireland. We managed to pull away from that, but it was difficult. There is such a chasm now that I must ask whether the Minister has just dispelled the science and let rip.

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

As someone who is not the fisheries Minister and whose constituency is stuck on the top of a mountain, I feel I am being drawn from my native rivers and well out from the pelagic realms into very deep water. My main responsibility has been to listen very carefully to this highly intelligent and serious debate. I will communicate all the arguments that have been made to the fisheries Minister and I will make sure that DEFRA takes them into account, responds to them in detail and takes action.

In the seven minutes I have left, it will not be possible for me to do full justice to all the speeches and interventions. May I say, however, that it is a great pleasure to take part in this debate? One of the most striking things about it, as one can see in the Chamber, is the great strength, good humour and, indeed, good looks of anglers. I have been very struck by the sense of generally energetic, tanned men, such as the hon. Member for Dagenham and Rainham (Jon Cruddas) and my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Scott Mann), who is looking cheerful and bouncy. I have a general sense that this sport brings out a stress-free, cheerful life, and that it is to be praised. The hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) also contributed to the debate in an intervention.

As someone who is new to the debate about sea bass, it is striking that it is bringing to the surface the very serious tension between EU fisheries policy and UK policy, and between the interests of anglers and the interests of commercial fishermen. Navigating our way through that is quite tough. Very strong statements were made by my hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall (Mrs Murray), who particularly stressed her family connection with commercial fishing, my hon. Friend the Member for Fareham (Suella Fernandes), who took us all the way back to medieval abbots, and my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr Cox), whose speech was perhaps more suitable for mobilising a brigade for war than for a technical discussion of maximum sustainable yields.

The hon. Member for Angus (Mike Weir) made us think about the role of aquaculture in relation to sea bass. One reason why sea bass is a very striking fish is that it is, or so it seems to an outsider, the next salmon—the next great challenge we face in the debate in the United Kingdom. It is clearly an unusual fish, as people found when they developed aquaculture in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It struggles to get out of the microscopic eggs, it produces juveniles that have difficulty in tracking down their prey, and it has to create its air sack by rising to the surface and filling it with an oxygen bubble. In fact, the species suffered what was essentially an extinction event in the Mediterranean. We are now talking about the north-east Atlantic, but the Mediterranean sea bass was in effect eliminated during the 1960s and 1970s. Most of its presence there now appears to be related to farmed sea bass that have escaped.

That is why the challenge that the hon. Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies) made to us to focus hard on the science is so important. The hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) focused on biomass, particularly breeding or spawning biomass, and my hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Antoinette Sandbach) focused on landings. The shadow Secretary of State pointed to the issues around tonnage and black fish, particularly the landing of 1,100 tonnes in 2014.

This is a serious subject and the science is at the core of the debate. It does not matter whether we are talking to commercial fishermen or the angling community: the question is: what is the state of sea bass? Of course, sea bass has been on an extraordinary rollercoaster since the early 1980s. We went from minimal tonnage to a single spike year in the 1980s in which we hit nearly 13 million tonnes of biomass. Very warm conditions seem to have created an enormous number of sea bass. Along with changes in our eating patterns, that created the phenomenon, which did not really exist before the 1980s, of commercial fleets going into the Atlantic after sea bass to feed these new tastes. A series of cold winters from 2009 onwards appear to have led to a serious problem in new juvenile production, when combined with the large levels of catching, as the shadow Secretary of State pointed out.

The best analysis that we can currently reach on the subject comes from ICES. We believe that we are catching about 5,000 tonnes and that that is about 30% of an 18,000 tonne biomass. However, if we look at breeding biomass, the figures appear to be lower. I see the hon. Member for Ogmore is looking at a piece of paper. Does he want me to give way briefly?

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

I thank the Minister for a very detailed answer, which is focused on the science. The ICES evidence points to the necessity of an 80% cutback in the year ahead and a 90% cutback after that. Those cuts are massive and stringent. Will the Minister respond to the suggestion that we will actually be looking at about 20%? Is that accurate?

[Rory Stewart]

I notice that since the emergency of Daesh, people have really struggled to pronounce ICES. It is causing more and more of a problem. Foreign affairs and defence appear to be entering into fishing debates.

To answer the hon. Gentleman, the 80% reduction is a reduction from a current maximum sustainable yield, which we believe to be about 13%—that is the best science—from the current catch rates and landings, which seem to be striking at about 30%. The question clearly is whether the measures taken in December Council will achieve those targets. I will come on to that now.

The key thing is that most of us in this Chamber agree that we need a solution—in fact, everybody in the Chamber probably agrees that we need a solution—that achieves a healthy bass stock. Again, I am very much not speaking as an expert, as this is outside my field. The measures that were taken at the Council were, broadly speaking, steps in the right direction. I think hon. Members would agree with that. The most important actions that were taken—this relates to the question from the hon. Member for Ogmore about the 80% reduction—were those that related to the pelagic fleet. In particular, the measures on drift netting—not on fixed gillnets, but on drift netting in general—were important, especially in relation to pair trawlers.

One debate in this House is about what kind of impact those measures will have. Will they reduce by 70% or even more the amount that is caught, as one would hope, or does more need to be done? I think that we would also embrace the move from 36 cm to 42 cm. The reason for that, which I do not need to point out to the House, is that we will get more spawning stock because the animals will get to a greater age.