Shark Fins Bill

Rebecca Pow Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 16th November 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I also congratulate the hon. Member for Neath on bringing forward this long-overdue piece of legislation. It fills in part of a broader plethora of animal-welfare issues, following, for instance, the Ivory Act 2018, which has started to roll back some of the ivory trade. We have lots of those practices globally, and it is important that both individual Members—such as the hon. Member for Neath—and the Government bring forward legislation to resolve them. The Labour Front-Bench team fully support this Bill.

One of the best tools we have in preserving animal welfare is the red list used by CITES—the convention on international trade in endangered species of wild fauna and flora—to identify animal species most at risk. The last three sharks and rays added to that list were all added due to the removal of fins. The silky shark, the thresher shark and the devil ray are all at complete risk of extinction due to the practice.

Hopefully, the UK passing this Bill will start to roll back some of that and can protect those three—and many other—shark and ray species. Once again, I thank the hon. Member for Neath and I commend the Bill.

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

It is a pleasure to serve under you, Mrs Cummins, and it is a pleasure to be back. What a wonderful first Bill to be back for; it is always great to be part of a Bill Committee where there is a general consensus—even with our Scottish friends—because we all agree that it is a good thing to do. It is exactly the sort of thing that we should be leading the way on.

I must thank the hon. Member for Neath for bringing forward the Bill and for all her work on this. Indeed, I thank the whole Committee, because I believe that its members all have some reason for being on it. Possibly they have had their arms twisted, but, individually, each of us has some feeling, experience or knowledge on the issue, and I genuinely think that that is very helpful. It just goes to show that we mean business.

Nobody disagrees that shark finning is a gross practice. It is cruel and unsustainable. In fact, listening to some of the comments this morning makes my stomach turn; it is pretty grim. In the UK, shark finning has been banned for nearly 20 years, but this Bill goes an extra step to ban the import and export of the detached shark fins and shark-fin products. It is the only way that we can be sure that we are not inadvertently fuelling unsustainable practices abroad. The Bill is fully supported by Government, and we will do all we can to support its swift passage.

I am proud of our strong marine track record internationally. I went to the UN ocean conference in Portugal just a few months ago, and it was clear that the UK is considered a world leader on a lot of this conservation action. I do not think that we talk about that enough at home—how we are really seen as leaders. I think that this Bill will be another example; people will be watching us and what we have done.

We have committed to the protection and management of shark species, and the Bill is another step towards that. To reiterate, when we say sharks, that also includes rays and skates. I went to the Birmingham National Sea Life Centre not long ago; I do not know if anybody here has been there but it is a wonderful place to see those creatures. The skates and rays were enormous creatures; they were sort of like underwater flying machines, really. To think that we cause them such damage really brings home why we need this Bill to protect them. As my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay so ably described to us, pulling off a creature’s fins inflicts a gross, cruel, painful and slow death. Sharks produce very few young compared with other fish, making them even more vulnerable if people carry out such practices on the scale mentioned by the hon. Member for Bootle. It affects their whole life cycle.

As we heard on Second Reading, the International Union for Conservation of Nature states that over 25% of sharks, rays and skates are threatened with extinction. Removing these top predators would have a catastrophic impact right the way down the food chain. This what my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford was really referring to. She has a great deal of knowledge in this area, particularly on dolphins. This is impacting the whole food chain.

We have heard some statistics. Something like 73 million sharks are caught I think annually—the exact sum is up for debate. A huge proportion of those—not all of them—would be affected by this, but a great proportion of them would have had their fins ripped off, so this is a really important step on our global journey on shark conservation. It will help us to consolidate our position as world leaders.

I want to touch on the point that was raised ably by the hon. Member for Leeds North West. CITES is holding its 19th meeting of the conference of the parties right now. I spoke to our team out there—it is in South America—and we are co-proponents of a proposal to list a further 54 shark species in the requiem shark family. The hon. Member named some previous species to be listed, and that group of sharks accounts for 85% of the global shark fin trade. I will name a few of them—I do not want to keep us here for hours—because includes sharks most of us never even think about, such as the tiger shark, the bull shark, the lemon shark, the spinner shark, the blacknose shark, the blacktip shark, the grey reef shark, the silky shark, the dusky shark, the blue shark, the copper shark. There are loads of them, and 54 species will now be on the list. That means they have to be controlled much more closely, and people will be given a permit to catch them only if that would not be detrimental to the survival of the species, so that is a really good move that our own Government are involved in right now.

[Elliot Colburn]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way and, through her, also thank the hon. Member for Neath for introducing this Bill.

That is indeed very good news. Will the Minister confirm that the Government will keep the level of the fines in this Bill under review because enforcement of this Bill will be important to deter the practice from happening altogether? Will the Minister assure me that enforcement against the import and export of shark fins will be important in the Government’s application of this Bill?

[Rebecca Pow]

Of course, and I thank my hon. Friend for that good point. We have a paragraph in the schedule about the way the penalties work and the appropriate authority can revoke the exemption certificate if the right information is not supplied. The penalties are up to £3,000—actually, that is for providing inaccurate information about what they are doing. Of course, the whole system will be enforced by ensuring that Border Force and others know what to look for.

I want to highlight that it is leaving the EU that has enabled us to have this opportunity, and we have probably moved much more quickly than we might have done because, had we been in the EU, we would have had to get the agreement of all member states. That would potentially have been slow, so at least we have been able to get this matter taken forward in an individual Bill.

We have had widespread support for the Bill from non-governmental organisations. Organisations such as the Shark Trust, Shark Guardian, the Blue Marine Foundation and the Wildlife Conservation Society have done a great deal of work, for which I thank them. They have spoken to many of our MPs.

To wind up, I am so grateful to the hon. Lady for her work on this important Bill and, of course, to the Committee. The Government will do all that we can to support the Bill’s passage through both Houses and get it on to the statute books so that we can protect this iconic and critical species for generations to come.

[Christina Rees]

I am blown away, as they say. Committee members cannot know how much their support means to me—I am getting quite emotional.

I will go through the greatest hits of thanks. I want to thank everyone present for their contributions and interventions. I also want to thank the Members who are not present but who spoke on Second Reading and enabled us to get to Committee. I thank all the organisations the Minister mentioned—welcome back, Minister; it is great to see her in her place again—which, I am sure, will continue to support this Bill as it goes through, because it is so important to them. I also thank you, Mrs Cummins, for chairing superbly today.

We could not have done it without the Clerks, who work tirelessly and have managed to get me on some sort of straight line, and the officials, who never get thanked and are absolutely brilliant. I thank the Minister and the Government for their support. I look forward to getting the Bill on the statute book—I will probably be even more emotional then. Thank you again.

Shark Fins Bill

Rebecca Pow Excerpts

3rd reading
Friday 20th January 2023 Commons Chamber

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

I am delighted to be here speaking again on this important subject. I am very grateful to the hon. Member for Neath (Christina Rees) for all her great work to introduce this Bill and for navigating it through to this stage. I also thank all Members who have contributed not just today with their perceptive speeches and interventions but on Second Reading and in Committee. It has massive support right across the House. I am delighted that we will continue to assist in every way that we can to ensure swift passage through both Houses so that this important Bill gets on to the statute book.

I normally work so closely with the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel), but I was a little concerned about his slight negativity and the shadow he threw over the Bill by asking whether it should be brought forward in some other Bill. We consider this issue so important that we specifically allocated time for it. We want to support this individual issue because it will make such a difference, as we all agree, to protecting this glorious and precious species. It is just another measure to be added to all the other work we are doing as a Government internationally to help with shark conservation.

Sadly, this species has undergone the most immense suffering. One of our Whips was singing the “Jaws” tune before I took to the Dispatch Box, but the other day I heard the director of that film apologise for the fact that he has caused that horrible feeling that we all have about sharks, being scared and fearful of them instead of revering them for the precious and amazing creatures that they are. They play such an important role in their hierarchy in our food chain, because once they go, all the other creatures below them are under threat. They face enough threats as it is with global warming, warming seas, coral reefs changing and, critically, overfishing—a point mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Ynys Môn (Virginia Crosbie), who has incredible marine knowledge. We have so many other threats, including plastics. We are working on everything else we can do to help on the international front, but things such as this Bill will be so helpful.

Shark finning is a practice that has been banned in the UK for almost 20 years. We also have a “fins naturally attached” policy, which means that sharks must be landed with all their fins on their bodies. This Bill means that we can go even further and ban the trade in detached fins—that is critical point—and in shark fin products. The Bill outlines our determination that shark finning must stop wherever it takes place. I have already said how irreplaceable these animals are.

The call for evidence that we ran through DEFRA showed how strong the opposition to shark funning is among individuals and all the other marine organisations who worked on this Bill. I must thank them because they played a great role. The sheer grossness of it was outlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Watford (Dean Russell), for which I must thank him. My hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd South (Simon Baynes) made a sensible input on the stats involved—a very good point. We have widespread backing.

A point that was raised that is worth reiterating is that when we were in the EU it would have been extremely difficult to take action on this issue. Any restrictions on the shark fin trade would have needed agreement from all member states. The great news is that we now have much more freedom to introduce stricter measures and we are demonstrating through this Bill that we are doing exactly that.

I will give a few details about the Bill itself. It will ban the import and export of detached shark fins into and out of Great Britain. The ban applies not only to whole shark fins, but to parts of fins and products made from fins, such as tinned shark soup—we had a lot of discussion about that on Second Reading, but that has been covered. In that context, “shark fins” means,

“any fins or parts of fins of a shark, other than the pectoral fins”,

which are part of skate and ray wings, and “shark” means,

“any fish of the taxon Elasmobranchii”,

as set out in clause 1.

Clause 2 amends the existing shark finning regulation 1185/2003, which forms part of retained EU law and includes the amendments in regulation 605/2013. The amendment in this Bill is to ensure that shark finning is not taking place by any other country’s fishing vessels in UK waters or by any UK vessel wherever it fishes—that is an important point. We remain firmly committed to building on the UK’s strong position on shark conservation.

We have done so much internationally; I wanted to mention that, very positively, even since this Bill was introduced last year almost 100 shark and ray species have been afforded greater protection under the convention on international trade in endangered species at the 19th meeting of the conference of parties in November. That list brings the majority of global trade in shark fins under CITES regulation for the first time. That is an important move and shows how we work globally on this issue and how important our position is in leading the way on conservation, not only on sharks, but on the wider ocean work.

I thank all hon. Friends and hon. Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby), who is no longer in her place but who raised the important fact that we are now banning the 20 kg personal allowance for consumption. I was pleased that she mentioned the egg cases—did you know, Mr Deputy Speaker, that some sharks lay their eggs in little egg pouches and they wash up on the beach? I thought they were bits of seaweed, but they are actually pouches in which one finds some shark eggs, and they are great to look at.

In winding up, I thank again the hon. Member for Neath (Christina Rees) for introducing the Bill and all hon. Members across the House who have taken part in the debate. I wish the Bill all the best on its way and reiterate the Government’s support for it.