European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Debate between Owen Paterson and John Hayes

3rd reading & 3rd reading: House of Commons
Thursday 9th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Paterson]

No. I’m not giving way. We know where the Scottish nationalists are coming from, because they make the same point every time. Just to keep them happy, though, I will give them a little anecdote.

In the town where I was born, Whitchurch, we have six polling stations in one building, the civic centre. On referendum day, people came up to me off a building site, covered in dust, and said, “It is good to see you here, Mr Paterson, because it’s about them”. I asked, “Who’s them?” They said, “We can get rid of you, we can vote you out, but we cannot get rid of them”, and then they made the very telling point, “You can do nothing about them either”.

We had an interesting debate yesterday about this. We can do absolutely nothing about European law, which is imposed upon us. I had the honour to serve on the European Scrutiny Committee with my hon. Friend the Member for Stone. One day, a Labour Member was ill and a Liberal Democrat got stuck in the lift and we managed to vote that a measure on the dairy industry—of great interest to my constituents—would be passed for a vote on the Floor of the House. It would not have been amendable, but we could have made our points. What happened? The Leader of the House at the time, the right hon. Member for Derby South (Margaret Beckett), turned up at business questions and said, “You’re not even having a debate”. That was the amount of scrutiny we had. I find it extraordinary that people do not welcome the chance to scrutinise Ministers. From now on, they will be able to harpoon Ministers who make bad decisions. They can have Adjournment debates and criticise law. We can get law amended and repealed. None of that will apply to European law until we pass the Bill.

There are so many areas where European law has damaged this country, but the winner by a mile is still fish. In 2005, as shadow Fisheries Minister, I wrote a green paper called “A Consultation on a National Policy on Fisheries Management in UK Waters”. It is the paper on which we fought the 2005 general election. For the first time, a serious political party proposed repatriating a power. I come from North Shropshire. One of the most fascinating experiences of my 22 years here was going all around the coast of the UK—right up to Whalsay, right down to Cornwall and Dover—but above all going to the maritime nations of Norway, the Faroes, Iceland, Newfoundland in Canada and then down the east coast of the United States. I also went to the Falklands. It was extraordinary to see how modern techniques could bring thriving fishing communities—some of the most remote communities in the world—wealth, prosperity, jobs and investment.

By contrast, in this country we have utter devastation. This wonderful occupation delivered wealth and jobs for centuries until we were stupid enough to give the power to the continental level, and we now have the shameful, wicked waste of 1 million tonnes of fish thrown back dead into the sea as pollution every year, and yet Opposition Members this afternoon are defending staying in the EU and the common fisheries policy.

[Sir John Hayes]

My right hon. Friend will remember that I was shadow Fisheries Minister before him. I was very good and he was even better. The truth is—this is the question that Opposition Members in particular need to answer—that the CFP was not only disastrous for fishing communities and fishermen; it was also a conservation disaster for our oceans. Anyone who signs up to the EU signs up to the CFP and the decimation of our oceans.

[Mr Paterson]

My right hon. Friend is quite right. The opening line of my paper said:

“The Common Fisheries Policy is a biological, environmental, economic and social disaster; it is beyond reform.”

Today we are giving ourselves the power to reform it and take back this power. I would like those on the Front Bench to remember that this is a crucial, totemic issue. We have to take back full power and complete control over our exclusive economic zone and all the marine resources within it.

Fisheries Bill

Debate between Owen Paterson and John Hayes

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Wednesday 21st November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Paterson]

I remind the hon. Gentleman that this Green Paper was the policy on which we fought the 2005 general election, and his party opposed it. I will have no more humbug from the Scottish National party. We are sick to death of hearing from a party that supports the EU and then tries to weasel around on the CFP. The fishermen listening to this debate will be sick to death of this petty party political bickering. We have seen catastrophic damage to our most remote coastal communities, which could really benefit from a wonderful resource. We are world leaders in this area, yet we have allowed foreign fishermen to come in and take that resource. This resource could be a massive benefit to some of our most remote rural communities. We currently only take £900 million. That could go up to £1.5 billion to £2 billion, and if we processed the fish we could be talking about a £6 billion to £8 billion boost. That is a massively disproportionate benefit considering the remoteness of many of these rural communities.

[Mr John Hayes]

My right hon. Friend has highlighted the role that he played as shadow Fisheries Minister, and he did a great job. I was his predecessor in that job, and throughout the period that he described, the Conservative party was resolutely and entirely convincingly—to most people at least—hostile to the CFP, when parties sitting opposite had not woken up to the problem. The Conservative party has opposed the CFP consistently; other parties have failed to wake up and see the writing on the wall.

[Mr Paterson]

Let us move on to what we proposed in that Green Paper, on which we fought the 2005 election. There are a whole range of points, and looking at the clock, I see that I do not have time to go through them all now, but one is absolutely key.

First, there is the insane hostility of the European Union to modern technology. In Manomet in Massachusetts, I saw really interesting work on selective gear, but when I went back to Kilkeel, I found that that was being stopped by EU regulations. That is something that we really should look at.

The other issue is the insanity of discards. What is wicked is trying to fix a really local activity at a continental level. Someone mentioned that the data on which the European Union makes its annual decisions is guaranteed to be completely inaccurate because of discards and is probably six months to two years out of date. We do not know the level of discards—it is thought to be possibly 25%. It is absolutely disgraceful.

I remember going out on a trawler from Fleetwood and seeing baby plaice being cast back, because the mesh sizes were wrong. I went with the Secretary of State to North Shields not long ago. We saw baskets of whiting—completely healthy fish—that had to be cast back. I remember during the referendum campaign going to Looe with my hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall (Mrs Murray), who is a witness to the terrible suffering in the fishing industry when people cannot afford enough labour—her husband died because he was alone on a boat. We should not forget that. We saw on the harbour wall a drawing for tourists of lots of different fish, but the one fish that was not there was haddock, and what is the problem off the coast? Her constituents are catching masses of haddock, because the fish have moved, but they have to be cast back. It is absolute insanity to have a bycatch problem and to address the discards without addressing the cause of it, which is the quota system.

I learned a clear lesson in the Faroes. The situation has been modified since, using techniques such a catch composition, but I ask the Minister to promise that we will do some pilots around the coast on catch composition-based effort control, because it means working with the grain of nature. It was mandatory in the Faroes to land everything. The Fisheries Minister there said, “You may not like what you find, but at least you know what’s going on.” Our scientists do not know what is going on because we discard so much. Technology has advanced enormously, as I saw at Succorfish in North Shields, which used modern equipment to track not just the boats, but soak times, catches, and so on. If we did this using modern technology, we could monitor every single fishing boat every hour. Every fishing boat would become a scientific vessel sending back data.

I saw that in Iceland years ago now. Fisheries management there would send out radio signals, and boats around Iceland would be told to move on because there were too many discards. Way back then, the UK was doing it in the Falklands—the same management based on accurate, instant data. I appeal to the Minister. I am not thrilled with clause 23 on discard prevention charging schemes—those will be good, healthy fish that should be sold to consumers. We should work out pilot schemes for mixed fisheries. I admit that Scotland is different—pelagic fisheries probably need a quota system—but I really make that appeal.

Probably the most important issue is whether we really will take back control. That was the promise in the referendum and in our manifesto, in which we made it clear that we would take back control:

“When we leave the European Union and its Common Fisheries Policy, we will be fully responsible for the access and management of the waters where we have historically exercised sovereign control.”

I would like the Minister to address this point. He is being bombarded with a helter-skelter of questions, but I ask that he take careful note of article 56 of the UN convention on the law of the sea, relating to exclusive economic zones—as he knows, those are 200 miles or the median line. Article 56(1) reads:

“In the exclusive economic zone, the coastal State has…sovereign rights for the purpose of exploring and exploiting, conserving and managing the natural resources, whether living or non-living, of the waters superjacent to the seabed and of the seabed and its subsoil”.

Can the Minister absolutely guarantee that every decision affecting our marine environment, as well as that which lives in it and that which is extracted from it, will ultimately be decided by sovereign UK politicians who come to this Dispatch Box and answer to this House? Can he think of any circumstances after we have left the CFP—I would like him to tell us exactly when that will be—in which decisions would be imposed on our fishermen that ideally our politicians would like to resist? That is the nub of the CFP.

The most shocking mismanagement has been imposed on this wonderful industry and these incredibly brave people because we have always been outvoted. When I was Secretary of State—we have discussed this in respect of the common agricultural policy, too—my right hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon), who has just left his place, bravely did his best, but we were outvoted. I want an absolute guarantee that article 56(1) of UNCLOS will prevail and that the Minister will be able to come back and be answerable to every one of us for fishing decisions. There must be no circumstances in which appalling decisions can be imposed on us once we have left. That cannot happen. If it does, we will have let down the 17.4 million, as well as the 16.3 million who voted for us in the general election, and all those Labour voters—do not forget the 85% who voted in the general election to take back control. Can he please guarantee that?