Fishing Industry

Torcuil Crichton Excerpts

Thursday 22nd January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Mr Carmichael]

It is critically important. I heard that for myself from my hon. Friend’s constituents when I visited Brixham not once but twice in the run-up to Christmas. It remains to be seen whether the invasion of octopus will be permanent because of changing water temperature, or whether it is just another of those blips that I think last happened in the 1950s. Whatever the truth of the matter, something has to be done for the industry that is there at the moment when the truth is finally established.

We speak about aquaculture as being all about finfish, but in my constituency and elsewhere the role of shellfish aquaculture is enormously important and deserves more attention, especially as we anticipate the conclusion of a sanitary and phytosanitary agreement with the European Union.

Fishing is still a predominantly community-based and family-run industry. It may not shift the dial massively in terms of UK-wide GDP, but in those areas where it matters it is nearly always essential. In Shetland, caught and farmed fish account for approximately one third of our local economic product. We have benefited over the years from the presence of oil and gas, and now from a growing visitor economy, but they do not define our community in the way that fishing does. I labour that point because it matters. People would be forgiven for thinking that this is an industry determined to plunder the seas and extract every last living organism from it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Fishing is predominantly a family business, and the people working in it want to hand on their business to the next generation. They have more of an interest in ensuring that there is a business to be handed on.

Fishing is an area of Government policy where good co-operation between our Governments makes a difference. That is what the industry needs and expects of us. Sadly, it does not always get it. The recent controversy around the fishing and coastal growth fund illustrates how it is fishers who lose out when that goes wrong. Let us remember that the roots of that fund lie in the decision of the Prime Minister to sign up for a 12-year extension of the catastrophically bad deal that Boris Johnson got us in the trade and co-operation agreement in 2020. Given that the EU was looking only for a five-year extension, it is quite an achievement to have managed to negotiate it up to 12 years. Let us also not forget that the loss of fishing effort traded away by the Prime Minister is worth about £6 billion over the 12-year period at today’s prices. If we were able to get half or even a quarter of that, the fund would never have been necessary.

To my mind, it makes perfect sense for the fund to be administered on a UK-wide basis, as was the case with the previous fund delivered by the last Government. That would, in fact, have been an opportunity for Scotland’s two Governments to work together collaboratively on the delivery, and might have been more reflective of the fact that Scotland’s fleet accounts for more than 60% of the UK fishing effort.

Instead, the Government in Whitehall acquiesced to demands from the SNP Government in Edinburgh to devolve the administration. With devolution, there inevitably followed the application of the Barnett formula, and, as a result, we receive only 8.3% of the fund. Madam Deputy Speaker, I could weep. On one of the rare occasions when they do manage to agree on something, they still manage to do it in a way that works to the detriment of the fishermen in my constituency.

[Torcuil Crichton (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (Lab)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that it is a matter of considerable regret that the Scottish Government asked for the fishing and coastal growth fund to be devolved without first agreeing the mechanism outside the Barnett formula that would reflect the fact that Scotland has a larger share of the fishing industry?

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[Mr Carmichael]

My hon. Friend makes a relevant point, which goes to the heart of how decisions are made. It is critical that Government are able to take on the infinite nuance and complexity in fisheries management, and that is done by being in the ports and on the quayside, talking to fishermen, processors, auction houses, transporters and all the rest of it.

The signs remain, however, that the same attitude persists in the Scottish Government. Members will have heard me speak before about the difficult situation facing our pelagic fleet as a result of the quota cuts, which are yet to be finalised, from the year-end negotiations. These cuts will put our pelagic fleet under serious pressure. At times like this, it is more important than ever that boats are able to land fish where they will get the best possible price, so the increase in the requirement for pelagic boats to land in Scotland limits unnecessarily their scope to maximise their restricted opportunities. Again, it has not gone unnoticed that nationalist voices in The Shetland Times condemn the change, while in the pages of Fishing News, Gillian Martin MSP stridently supports her ministerial colleagues.

It does not have to be like this. Our fishing fleets around the coast and in our island communities ask only to be listened to and heard by Government. They do a difficult and often dangerous job, and they should not have to contend with it being made even more difficult —and yes, occasionally more dangerous—by the people we elect to serve here and in other UK legislatures.

[Torcuil Crichton]

The right hon. Gentleman speaks about the fishing industry being heard. I hear reports of the SNP saying that Shetland would be listened to if it had a seat at the SNP table. I have a message for Shetland: we in the Western Isles have an SNP MSP, and we have not been listened to for 18 years.

[Mr Carmichael]

I am sure that message that will indeed be heard with some interest in the Northern Isles. We island communities need to learn from the experience of each other.

There are lessons to be learned from the management of fisheries in different parts of the country. Before Christmas, I visited Brixham with the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee as part of our ongoing inquiry into fishing and the marine environment, and much of what I heard there was similar to what I hear back in Shetland. In fact, speaking to fishermen around the country, the same issue rears its head time and again: spatial squeeze. The salami slicing of access to traditional fishing grounds as a result of other marine and maritime activities now poses a clear and present danger to the viability of our fishing industries as a whole.

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[Torcuil Crichton (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (Lab)]

I thank the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) and the Backbench Business Committee for bringing this important debate to the Chamber. I pay tribute to all those who have cast a net, hauled a creel or pulled on a mussel rope to sustain us from the seas.

We have been fishing the waters around our islands for millennia. Just like the right hon. Member’s constituency, island life in the Western Isles is still shaped by the rhythms of the sea. The fishing fleet in the islands, while a shadow of the fleet that sustained the international herring industry in the early 20th century, is still a mainstay of the economy. Less than two years ago, these small fishing communities saw off an existential threat from the SNP and Green Scottish Government, which would have effectively wiped out the industry.

The hated highly protected marine area proposals, which would have closed 10% of Scottish waters, were seen off by protests and songs by Skipinnish and Vatersay fisherman Donald Francis MacNeil, but there is a lingering suspicion that the agenda has not gone away. Since the collapse of HPMAs, there have been fears that the existing marine protected areas and other designations will become pegs on which further restrictions could be hung. The rebranding of HPMAs, without the colourful measures of banning canoeing and paddleboarding, could be a danger. It is understood that the Scottish Government will be consulting on 173 sites. Although the Outer Hebrides sites have not been confirmed, it is expected that up to 20% of those total sites may be in Hebridean waters.

There are a couple of lessons to be learned from the HPMA debacle. The first, for anyone across the UK tempted to back the Greens today, tomorrow or next May, is that the combination of Greens and SNP in Scotland has set back marine conservation by a decade and a half at least. The other is that, if we are to sustain the fishing industry in communities such as mine, we need to end uncertainty. To ensure conservation, we need conversation. We need talks about sustainable management with the fishing industry and fishing communities—the experts on sustainability—on what is essentially their self-interest. Nobody knows how to responsibly steward our waters better than the fishermen themselves.

There is powerful evidence from my constituency that self-imposed controls by the community itself increase the value of landings. In the last year, the value of landings in the Western Isles has gone up to £16 million—a 4% rise—and that increase in value is the result of pot limitation efforts and various other measures, including banning larger vivier crab vessels from operating within six miles. Those statistics demonstrate what folly there was in trying to impose top-down conservation measures. When the local fishing fleet provides the conservation measures, the dividends are obvious.

The majority of income generated by Western Isles boats comes from the prawn sector, at £9 million. Scallops catches were down 14%, but nephrop landings were up by 25%, mostly due to the presence of processing in the islands. The Macduff Shellfish factory in Stornoway, which has attracted more boats, and there are other processors in the islands, but they face massive logistical barriers not just in getting to the continent, but in getting to the mainland in the first place, thanks again to the ferry debacle that the SNP presided over.

As well as successes, there are major challenges. The hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway (John Cooper) hinted at the problems of recruitment to the sector; in an area such as mine, where depopulation and demographics leave a “doughnut hole” where the working-age population should be, that is a huge challenge. The proposals by the Migration Advisory Committee on skilled worker visa changes would have a profound effect on recruitment to the industry. If overseas hiring for fishing roles ends in December 2026, parts of the country—including mine—would be significantly impacted. While that is not this Minister’s Department, her support and the Government’s support in flexing those requirements would be appreciated.

The effect on the sector is quite obvious. A skipper from the Western Isles has been in touch with me recently to say that seven years ago he had a local crew of seven, but he is now forced to employ three crewmembers from Ghana. He and his son now skipper the vessel back to back in order to fish at every opportunity and ensure that they pay their foreign crews the right wages—considerably more than he or his son take home themselves. That is a challenge facing the local fishing fleet, but it is not the only one; others include high fuel costs, access to markets and sometimes red tape from Whitehall itself.

Again, this is not the Minister’s Department, but the Western Isles council, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, and, I suspect, other local authorities across our coastal communities, have faced a recent challenge from His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, about which I have written to the Treasury. The council may lose its authority as a registered dealer of controlled oils, supplying 14 fishery piers across the 10-island chain that makes up the Western Isles. Those sites are in remote location, which, combined with the physical geography and the need to have fuel supplies available out of normal hours, means that the sites cannot possibly be physically or remotely monitored, as HMRC says they have to be. The council has been informed that, unless the sites are monitored and HMRC is satisfied that all sales are for legitimate licensed use, the sites and the licences may not be approved.

We see there, as we saw with conservation measures, the disconnect that often exists between bureaucracy and the reality of island and fishing communities. I welcome the Government’s £360 million fishing and coastal growth fund and regret, as I said in an intervention earlier, that a direct proportion is not going where it should be—to Scotland, where a large part of the UK’s fishing effort is—because the Scottish Government demanded control of the fund without agreeing a mechanism beyond the Barnett formula.

I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall (Anna Gelderd), who is no longer in her place, that that fishing and coastal growth fund should be directed towards the recruitment of new entrants and young people into the industry. There are commendable efforts in the Western Isles to get young people into the industry, with some success, but our populations are so small that they can only go so far. That fund should be directed towards small, inshore coastal communities, to help to revive them and those coastal economies, rather than being handed out to the mackerel millionaires or the quota barons who currently rule the oceans.

Fishing quotas themselves, which could be the subject of a whole other debate, should serve the public good, not narrow interests. If we are serious about the future of the seas and our coastal communities, quotas must be looked at again. They should have a social value and be aimed at the long-term benefit and sustainability of our coastal communities.

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[Seamus Logan]

I want to address that now. Under the European maritime and fisheries fund, when we were part of the European Union, the UK received approximately £207 million over six years, of which Scotland received 46%—46%, not 7.8%. That is why Scotland wanted that matter devolved: so that we could properly support the Scottish fishing industry, in the same way that the European Union and the UK did in the past. Why change the approach?

[Torcuil Crichton]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way and politely decline his offer to stand for the Scottish Parliament, because Na h-Eileanan an Iar has an excellent candidate in Donald MacKinnon. Next May he will wipe out the SNP and give us a real voice for the islands, which have not been listened to in 18 years.

We have much to agree on when it comes to the share of the fishing and coastal growth fund, and I remind the hon. Member that the fund will be there for a decade. What is past is past, and without rancour, we could work together through the fisheries APPG and other organisations to ensure that more of this fund goes to our coastal communities, and particularly our fragile inshore coastal communities that need support—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

Order. Interventions should not be that long.