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8.14 pm
Mr. Nick Ainger (Pembroke): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Mr. Wardell) on an excellent performance. Unfortunately, it may well be his last performance at the Dispatch Box. He displayed again his great skill and his command of detail. The House will be lessened when he is not with us after the next general election.
I will try to confine my remarks to the order. I am sure that if I stray you will pull me back quickly, Mr. Deputy Speaker. As you know, it is mainly my constituency that has been affected by the Sea Empress disaster and by the prohibition order.
As I mentioned when I intervened during the Minister's speech, I am especially concerned by the delay that has occurred, for whatever reason. We had an explanation from the Minister. The Scottish Office acted only 77 hours after the Braer had run aground in conditions that were extremely severe, with gales and huge seas. Was anyone able to carry out scientific monitoring to decide whether
there was a risk to health within 77 hours of the vessel running aground? I have read the debate that followed the imposition of that order. Everybody congratulated the Scottish Office on its alacrity in dealing with an extremely severe problem. As my hon. Friend the Member for Gower has said, the order was a precautionary measure which was confirmed later by scientific evidence.
I put on record my thanks to the fishermenof Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire and West Glamorgan, who imposed their own voluntary ban as quickly as possible and then pursued the Welsh Office and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food to get a proper prohibition order in place as quickly as possible.
There were two reasons for that action. First, the fishermen wanted to try to restore order to the situation. Secondly, once order had been restored, confidence could be given back to the market for products from areas not affected by the oil. Progressively, following testing and monitoring, areas in the periphery could then establish their own clean bill of health for the products that they wished to market.
We can already see the problem. The Select Committee on Welsh Affairs heard evidence this morning about prawns caught between Aberystwyth and New Quay in Cardigan bay, on the periphery of the area affected by the order. Those prawns were not accepted for sale in the market. We are talking not only about products caught within the prohibition area, which was purely voluntary until 28 February, but about products caught some distance away. That is a major problem.
Within hours of the news getting out that the Sea Empress had run aground on 15 February, the people marketing whelks from Carmarthen Bay were informed by the Koreans--their only market--that they did not want the product for fear that it was tainted. The same then happened to products shipped to France and Spain; the market dictated that it did not want products from west Wales and, I understand, from Wales in general at one stage, although I understand that that problem has started to improve.
The Minister has not been able to tell us--at least, not in response to my intervention--why it took from15 February until 28 February to impose the order. In his opening remarks, he mentioned the consultation that had taken place between the Welsh Office and the fishing organisations and industry. He repeated that statement in a memorandum that he sent to the Welsh Affairs Select Committee for our investigation into the matter, from which I quote briefly. In paragraph 21 of that memorandum he states:
That is contrary to evidence that we received this morning from Mr. Phillip Coates, a director of the south Wales sea fisheries committee. When Mr. Coates was asked by the Chairman of the Welsh Affairs Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Gower, what consultation had taken place between the Welsh Office and the sea fisheries committee on that issue, the answer was "zero". There was no consultation whatever about the imposition of that prohibition with the officers or the members of the sea fisheries committee.
More than 90 per cent. of fishermen in west Wales are members of the Sea Empress Fisheries Claimants Association. Their view was faxed to me at 11.42 am on 28 February. I quote from it:
The week before I received that fax, I had received a communication from the Sea Empress Fisheries Claimants Association, which I met that Friday afternoon. As a result of that meeting, I contacted the private office of the Minister in MAFF with responsibility for fisheries, the hon. Member for Banbury (Mr. Baldry), to urge him to institute a prohibition order to restore confidence to the market and protect the rights of the fishermen who were currently exercising a voluntary ban.
I was informed that the Minister was not available, but I explained the position and staff agreed to pass the message on to him at the earliest opportunity. I telephoned his office when I returned to London on Monday morning and was told that he was not available but that we could meet after the vote at 10 o'clock. That is what I did, and I was assured by the Minister that he would do what he could to ensure that order was restored. He agreed with me that the best way was to put a prohibition order in place as soon as possible. He informed me, however, that it was not his responsibility but the responsibility of the Welsh Office.
On Tuesday morning, I contacted the private office of the Under-Secretary of State for Wales, the hon. Member for Clwyd, North-West (Mr. Richards). Unfortunately,he was not available until about 4.30 on Tuesday afternoon. I spoke to him just before he went into the Standing Committee on the Nursery Education and Grant-Maintained Schools Bill. I was assured by him that the argument had been accepted and that the prohibition order would be in place as soon as possible.
I received no information the following day until I saw the Minister in the precincts of this place and asked him what was happening. He said that he would check and find out what was going on. He understood that the Secretary of State was dealing with it. That was at4.50 pm. I then received a phone call from a member of the Press Gallery, informing me that the order had already been put in place. As you will see from the order,Mr. Deputy Speaker, it is timed 4 o'clock that afternoon.
I can understand that at times there may be lack of communication between Departments such as the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and the Welsh Office, but it is beyond me to believe that we had such bad communication within the Welsh Office between the Secretary of State for Wales and the Under-Secretary of State. I understand that the Secretary of State signed the order at approximately 2.30 pm, for imposition from4 o'clock onwards, but obviously no one had bothered to tell the Under-Secretary of State what was going on. That exemplifies one of the problems that we have had in getting the order properly in place.
My hon. Friend the Member for Gower made a point about leisure angling. To help my constituency and the constituents of my hon. Friends the Members for
Carmarthen (Mr. Williams) and for Gower and the hon. Member for Ceredigion and Pembroke, North (Mr. Dafis), I hope that everyone, at least from Wales, will try to restore the reputation of that most beautiful part of our country. The problem is that while the order is in force leisure angling is prohibited.
This morning I learned that an international sea angling competition scheduled for September, in which 25 boats would have been involved and for whose competitors several hotels would have provided accommodation--in other words, an opportunity to restore confidence and put some money back into the local economy--had been cancelled. That will cost my constituents many thousands of pounds, because most of the competitors had intended to stay in the Tenby area and charter boats from Tenby, Saundersfoot and Milford Haven.
I support the call by my hon. Friend the Member for Gower for the leisure angling part of the prohibition order to be removed as soon as possible. The case was well made by my hon. Friend. Everyone accepts that people who enjoy angling as a sport or as a leisure pastime know what they are doing and there would be no suggestion of those fish products finding their way on to the market. We can at least begin the process of tackling the obvious problems that the tourist industry and the leisure industry generally will suffer as a result of the spillage.
The Minister rightly alluded to compensation problems, despite assurances given by the insurers about the payment of hardship funds and compensation. I am sure that he departed from his prepared text, as I am aware that he met members of the Sea Empress Fisheries Claimants Association before the debate. As he knows, we received evidence from them this morning and in the early afternoon and we learned that there are clearly serious problems in relation to hardship payments and general compensation.
What worries me especially, even though I have met the insurers, is that people who are rightly starting to make claims seem to feel that, apparently because there were problems with the payment of claims following the Braer disaster, the insurers may well be taking a different view and acting differently in the way that they treat claims arising from the Sea Empress disaster. I quote from an article that appeared in The Times on 24 February in which Mr. Michael Thorpe, deputy director of Skuld--the insurers of the Sea Empress--said:
referring to the Braer--
The experiences so far of the few people who have submitted their claims, and the reactions of the insurers to those claims, bear out the fears that the insurers are following a far more tight-fisted policy in relation to justified and reasonable claims made by those who have suffered consequential loss as a result of the Sea Empress disaster. I am assured by the insurers that that is not the case, but the experiences of the people making the claims seem to bear out those fears.
"Throughout the period before the placing of statutory restrictions, there was close and continuous liaison with the fishing industry about adherence to their self imposed ban on fishing which enabled the Department to have full confidence that the action being taken ensured the consumer was fully protected."
"The MAFF Office has offered all the assistance that can be given to the Welsh Office but we understand they have rejected it. The association need a definitive answer to the closure problem as soon as possible as our members are becoming a little angry to say the least. Could you please contact the Welsh Office and lend your weight to our problem."
"Unfortunately we created a claims mentality"--
"which led to a number of spurious and over-inflated claims.
Our experience with the Braer incident might make us more reluctant to pay out claims for the Sea Empress in full even if we are satisfied that claims are bona fide. This is because we do not want to find in three years' time that we have paid too much too early".
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