UK Shellfish Exports

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Monday 8th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[George Eustice]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. Under the trade and co-operation agreement, there is provision for a specialised committee dealing with SPS issues. There are some early discussions on what that would look like—it would probably be a senior level technical group, probably led by our chief veterinary officer. At the moment, the issue is that the EU, because it has not even got around to ratifying the TCA, is not yet in a place to have formal discussions on how we would form those groups. That of course does not prevent us from doing what we are doing, which is working very closely with the EU at a technical level to iron out the difficulties.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

The Prime Minister and Conservative Ministers made grand promises about how they would take back control of our fishing waters and how the fishing industry would prosper. The Leader of the House stood there recently, smiling and saying that

“they are now British fish, and they are better and happier fish for it.”—[Official Report, 14 January 2021; Vol. 687, c. 510.]

The reality, however, is that our shellfish industry is on the verge of collapse and that, thanks to this Government, costly new red tape and bureaucracy are holding back British businesses and our economic recovery. Does the Secretary of State accept that no business, consumer or community should have to pay the price for this Government’s incompetence?

[George Eustice]

The reality of the trade and co-operation agreement is that its fisheries section delivered a 25% uplift in fishing opportunities, a rebalancing of the sharing arrangements and an abandonment of relative stability as the quid pro quo for granting the EU continued access to our waters for five and a half years. We are free to review it after that. We also have the freedom to set our own regulations in this area. But we recognise that there have been teething problems. That is why the Government announced a new £23 million fisheries disruption fund to support those businesses that struggled with the paperwork in the initial weeks.

EU Trade and Co-operation Agreement: Fishing Industry

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Thursday 14th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[George Eustice]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point, and that is why the Prime Minister has announced this new £100 million fund, which will support the infrastructure at ports to cope with a growing share of the catch. We will also look at supporting processing as well, so that we can add value to the fish we catch.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab) [V]]

The National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations described the Prime Minister’s EU trade deal as “minuscule, marginal, paltry, pathetic” and some British fishers are now landing their catch straight on to the continent to avoid the Government’s red tape and the impending lorry queues chaos at the border, so does the Secretary of State agree that this is driving jobs away from the UK and hitting hard our coastal communities?

[George Eustice]

I do not agree with that. As I said earlier, we do recognise that fishermen would have liked a larger uplift, and we absolutely recognise that throughout the negotiation we were arguing for a move to a share that was closer to zonal attachment, but this does represent a significant step in the right direction, with a 25% loss of what the EU currently catches in our waters, and that will bring additional fishing opportunities to our own sector.

Trophy Hunting

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Wednesday 15th May 2019 Westminster Hall

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered trophy hunting.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. This debate about trophy hunting takes place within a much wider context. For example, we learned from a recent Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services report published just a few days ago that humanity threatens a million species with extinction—species that cover the full range of biodiversity. Although extinctions have always occurred, the report makes it clear that we are witnessing a man-made tragedy on an unprecedented scale. Since 1970, the world’s human population has doubled. The global economy has quadrupled in size and international trade has grown tenfold, and yet as the human footprint has expanded, nature has suffered dramatically. In that same timeframe, we have lost half of the world’s wild animals. We continue to lose around 20 million hectares of forest a year. Only 13% of the world’s wetlands that existed in 1700 still survive today. A third of fish stocks are now harvested at unsustainable levels and live coral cover has more than halved. Perhaps most starkly of all, a quarter of all animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction. That is a rate of destruction hundreds of times higher than the average of the past 10 million years.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this important debate. The world’s pre-eminent experts have highlighted that we as humans have wiped out more than 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles just within the past 50 years, implying that the annihilation of wildlife is an emergency that threatens civilisation itself. On top of that, we have pathetic, reckless, foolish individuals engaged in trophy hunting. Does he agree that a lot more needs to be done by the Government to tackle the evil wildlife trade and to clamp down on trophy hunting? I hope we will hear some concrete measures from the Minister today.

[Zac Goldsmith]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. The statistics he cites are absolutely right. That is a mere blink in evolutionary terms; another blink of inaction, and we could wipe out what remains. I will come to the point about trophy hunting soon.

We are exhausting the planet, and we need radical and immediate action to reverse that. I will not claim today that tackling trophy hunting will reverse this mass extinction—far from it—but I put the debate in that context to remind us all of what is at stake and the situation we find ourselves in.

Draft International Waste Shipments (amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Wednesday 27th February 2019 General Committees

[Sandy Martin (Ipswich) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hosie. The Opposition acknowledge the need for legislation to ensure that, post-Brexit, waste shipments can continue in a timely and effective manner between the UK and the European Union, but we will abstain on the regulations because of our concern about how the Government are tabling such secondary legislation with limited means of scrutiny.

The Government’s last-minute rushing through of SIs has massively constrained our ability to examine in depth their real implications. We have not had the necessary time to consult all stakeholders or to satisfy ourselves that this SI raises any problems. We do not think that the Government have allowed themselves enough time to do that either, which is worrying.

The Commons sifting Committee agreed with the Government that the SI did not require debate in Parliament, but the Lords Committee disagreed. I understand that its decision was made in response to a EU document and because it had concerns about the lack of approvals issued by the UK and EU competent authorities that authorise the shipments of waste.

At the time of the Lords decision, there had been only 61 responses to the 533 letters seeking agreement to roll over the process of waste shipments after Brexit. The Minister assures us that now only 11 approvals have not yet been agreed and that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is working with Spanish authorities to authorise the shipment of UK waste to Spain. However, that accounts for only 68,700 tonnes of waste, and there is a worrying degree of uncertainty for the exporters of that waste.

I thank the Minister for her update, but I must ask her how many businesses are waiting on these approvals. What happens if those approvals are not agreed before the UK leaves the EU on 29 March, and what would the cost be to businesses if there were no approvals? If the Spanish Government do not agree to those 11 approvals, is there a plan B in place? If so, can she tell us what it is? Given the risks involved, why have the Government not produced an impact assessment?

In the longer term, how are we going to proceed with waste policy? If, for reasons such as non-alignment between UK and EU waste legislation, we no longer have access to EU recycling facilities in future, where will that waste go? Will material that has previously been recycled at European facilities be incinerated in the UK? How can we ensure that it will not go to less suitable countries that have a dubious record in recycling waste that is registered as having been recycled?

China stopped taking UK waste about a year ago, but during the 12 months to October 2018 the UK exported 611,000 tonnes of recovered plastic packaging to other countries, such as Malaysia and Indonesia, which are both in the top 10 countries for the quantity of waste plastics polluting the oceans. The Basel convention supposedly prevents shipments of waste to countries without sound environmental management, but that has not stopped the UK shipping huge quantities of plastic to Malaysia and Indonesia, where much of it ends up in the sea. What confidence can we have in UK regulations preventing unsustainable waste exports in future? We need a comprehensive and robust strategy to reduce waste and improve UK waste and recycling infrastructure, to not only be more responsible for where our rubbish ends up but to benefit the UK economy and create green jobs.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

On the long-term vision, does my hon. Friend agree that rather than having a vision for building the nation’s recycling infrastructure and dealing with core issues right now, the Government’s waste strategy merely talks about voluntary action and distant target deadlines?

[Sandy Martin]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. This is not a debate about the Government’s waste strategy, but leaving the European Union will have an impact on it. The Government need to be cognisant of the fact that without an effective waste strategy that prevents pollution and encourages recycling, leaving the European Union will exacerbate the problem.

The SI cannot guarantee anything, because it is just an administrative tool, but there is a real danger that the UK will become a cheap and less regulated alternative for EU member states to offload their waste on us. What expert advice has the Minister obtained about whether the new arrangements could result in any additional environmental impact compared with our current legislative arrangement with the European Union?

This instrument is about the status quo and ensuring that the current environmental protections on the shipping of waste remain in place on the day of Brexit. However, it is clear that when it comes to the UK’s waste and recycling strategy, the status quo is far from adequate. Plastics and other recyclable materials are piling up in the UK and are being dumped illegally on the other side of the world. Like every other SI in preparation for Brexit, this may be portrayed as simply a copy-and-paste job that amends references to the EU and replaces them with UK equivalents, but we fear that there may be real problems associated with leaving the EU that the Government have still not fully understood.

Environment and Rural Affairs (Miscellaneous Revocations) Order 2018

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Monday 22nd October 2018 General Committees

[Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That the Committee has considered the Environment and Rural Affairs (Miscellaneous Revocations) Order 2018 (S.I., 2018, No. 739).

I am delighted to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. The Opposition believe that the order, which is dated 19 June 2018 and a copy of which was laid before the House on 20 June, should be revoked; in other words, we wish to revoke the revocations order. We know how many such statutory instruments we may face, so we do not necessarily wish to keep the Government for long tonight, but we have a few important points to make.

I make no apology for the fact that most of my speech will be about the Agricultural Wages Board, although no doubt we will have plenty of time to revisit the matter in our debates on the Agriculture Bill, which has been discussed in Parliament today. However, I will begin with a few general questions to the Minister. It is interesting that the Government are still trying to revoke orders on the milk quota. I am somewhat surprised that something that ended in 2015 is still being dealt with in 2018. It would be helpful if the Minister explained that.

As someone who supports the way in which land drainage works at a local level, I am surprised that we seem to be revoking orders on flood defence operating authorities. The question is really what we are putting in their place, because they are important to areas such as mine that are affected by flooding. Land drainage committees are essential to allow our areas to function without the threat of flooding.

On the issue of hay and straw, I would be interested to know why we are revoking something that seems to be standard practice. Given how difficult this year has been for many of our farmers as a result of rising hay and straw prices, where does that fit in? The explanatory memorandum from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs states that it is to do with the threat of foot and mouth. It would be interesting to know why and how we are controlling that, and why the existing legislation is being revoked.

The order is a bit of a curate’s egg; the orders that it revokes do not seem to have much in common. However, no doubt the Minister will be able to explain why we are doing what we are doing. I make no apology for speaking mainly about agricultural wages. It is sad to see what is left of the protections for workers in agricultural areas disappear completely. As a manifesto commitment, our party would reinstate the Agricultural Wages Board, but the agricultural committees, which were separate from it, are also worth trying to protect.

There is a labour crisis in rural areas. The supply of people working in the industry has been affected by the migrant issue. We have talked a lot about the seasonal agricultural workers scheme and whether the Government’s current attempt will make much difference, but unless we can provide more domestic labour, where will the labour come from? Farmers tell me that they cannot get labour, partly because we have no structure for payment any more. People are receiving lower incomes, which is not good either for them or for the way in which rural areas operate.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that post Brexit, the resourcing of labour in rural areas is paramount if those local economies are to flourish, and that the Agricultural Wages Board should be reinstated?

[Dr Drew]

I agree with my hon. Friend; it is important that we make that point. We differ from the Government on the issue and will continue to do so when we debate the Agriculture Bill, so I am not going to rehearse those arguments in detail now. There was quite a debate on Second Reading in relation to some of the proposals in the Bill about how poorly England has done. Scotland and Northern Ireland still have parts of the Agricultural Wages Board and, of course, Wales has its own code. In England, we have nothing. I gather that about 60% of farmers—this is not necessarily the view of the National Farmers Union, with which we will agree to disagree—said in their submissions that at the time of the Government’s decision to get rid of the Agricultural Wages Board, they were worried about how negotiations would take place. All the evidence suggests that wage levels have fallen in the agricultural sector, so it is difficult to recruit the people we desperately need, whether to pick fruit and vegetables, look after our dairy cows or do more general work. There is a crisis, which we all know about, and one way to put that crisis behind us is to ensure that we fund those workers properly—sadly, that is not currently the case.

I have touched on the inequality between the different territories in the United Kingdom, and I ask the Minister what research the Government have done on the impact of the removal of the Agricultural Wages Board to see if that is at least partly responsible for some of the crisis.