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8.6 pm
Mr. Austin Mitchell (Great Grimsby): The Minister started by painting a rather glowing picture of the industry. He said that it was prosperous, well-invested and coming along well under his ministrations. But the reality is rather different. The industry is in severe financial difficulties. It is not making enough to invest and finds it difficult even to keep going. Many people have to continue to fish to maintain a return on the borrowing with which they are lumbered. That is the real state of the industry and it is why British licences have been sold to quota hoppers.
I want to smash the television screen every time I see a European Commission official saying that British fishermen have sold licences to Spanish fishermen. They did that because they were in debt and were not making enough money. The Spanish were able to buy those licences because they had reached their multi-annual guidance targets by reflagging many of their vessels as British and therefore got access to European funds. That brought them within the target and opened the route to European money, but by the same token our fishermen were above their target and did not have access to European money and were forced to sell their vessels. It is a vicious circle.
The industry is not as prosperous as the Minister says. It faces threats and uncertainties and a reluctance by financial institutions to lend it money. That is one of the real problems. There is no confidence in the future because of constant threats of massive shutdowns and cuts in the British fleet, which has not had adequate backing from the Government, and because the common fisheries policy is not only wrong, as several Ministers have said, but is a conservation disaster.
The CAP is so disastrous that I am surprised that it has not been endorsed by the Spice Girls because it is on the same level as the disaster that the Government are achieving. The Commissioner is disastrous. Commissioner Bonino changes her mind so often that it seems from reading the press releases that there is a different Commissioner every month. She goes in for frequent changes of policy. She said at the beginning that she did not want the portfolio and did not understand it. She has demonstrated that at some length over the years.
The policy puts fishermen in competition with each other so that the natural character of fishermen to be hunters is not alleviated by any tendency to make them
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The system is still not adequately policed because the control at ports of landing in Europe is totally inadequate. They do not care about British quotas. Why should they bother to enforce them? Vessels, particularly the quota hoppers, land not here, but in Europe, where they are not adequately policed.
Some quota hoppers of course come here to collect benefit, not to land fish. We cannot have a proper policy unless we have effective European policing. The policy goes for broad, lowest common denominator measures that will not work, such as the proposed increase in the mesh size to 110 mm. That is too big to provide an economic future for fishing.
I find it appalling that the industry's proposals for conservation--I refer in particular to those from the National Federation of Fishermen's Organisations in 1993--have never yet had a considered reply. They are the path of the future. They include technical and national measures and greater control for the coastal state. The NFFO put them to the Government, but there was no answer. Without consulting the industry, the Government made their own proposals to the European Commission, which came back with appalling conservation programmes that would never have worked.
The Commission insisted, for instance, on dealing with the Spanish catching and landing of small fish by reducing minimum landing sizes. It tried to deal with the discards problem by providing that discards did not have to be dumped overboard immediately, but could be carried until the end of the voyage, which we know means outside British waters, where the fish would almost certainly be landed before they were required to be dumped.
The only sensible proposals on conservation have come from the NFFO. It has proposed square mesh panels. The Commission has made that messy by insisting that such panels should be the same size as diamond mesh panels, which is impracticable. The NFFO has proposed a ban on industrial fishing, which we need immediately, and a system of sustainable fishing, which is to be achieved partly by more selective fishing, which is right in itself, but partly by technical conservation measures under the management of the coastal state.
That is the future. We need to devolve power down, under what might be called subsidiarity in other mouths, from Brussels and from the Commission to management by the coastal state and, within that, to regional management systems that involve people fishing in the region. In other words, we need systems that empower, involve and bring fishermen into consultation with scientists because there is far too little of that. The fishermen feel that they are being totally ignored and that their practical knowledge has been rejected. The systems should empower them to manage the system.
The Minister has moved a little way by talking of regional measures, but those are consultative proposals. We need regional management structures that involve
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All that has been proposed by the NFFO and by North East Lincolnshire council. We shall put those proposals to the Minister. That is the way that the industry needs to go for power to be handed down from Brussels and for the producer organisations not only to manage their quotas, but to stop the transfer of licences outside their region. We have had a steady drain of Grimsby quotas to Scotland.
Under pressure from the House, the Minister has moved some way in our direction. I approve of his proposals on quota hoppers. I ask him not to agree to multi-annual guidance programme IV until quota hoppers are taken out of the equation. If he does agree to cuts in effort, they must be made after quota hoppers have been taken out of the equation because 20 per cent. of our fleet is made up of quota hoppers. The reduction in effort that will be demanded of us under MAGP IV is about 20 per cent. Take out the quota hoppers and we are bang on target and we have access to European funding. That is the way to go. The Minister must therefore resist MAGP IV until quota hoppers are taken out of the equation.
I hope that the Minister will resist too the barmy proposals--I disagree with my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen, North (Mr. Hughes) who spoke earlier--on satellite monitoring because they will be divisive in the fleet in relation to vessels over 24 m. The proposals will be expensive and who pays? As usual in Britain, the fishermen will be asked to pay. The proposals will provide no guide to what fishermen are doing. If a boat is sat there with either its satellite transmitter or engine broken, it is committing an illegality under the system. It reduces other methods of control in favour of this broad brush approach that will not work.
I am not as critical of the Minister this year as I have been in previous years. He has helped and moved a considerable way in the direction of sense, particularly on quota hoppers, but also in considering regional structures and in giving a greater role to the coastal state. Having pushed him this far, we should vote against him to push him further because, obviously, nothing works on the Government as effectively as a lost vote, which produces the sort of help and support that they have denied to the industry.
The basic problem in the Government's approach has been that fishing has been hit by a double whammy. It has had a battering from Europe by a common fisheries policy that is unworkable, unsuitable and damaging to our industry. That has been compounded by the withholding of Government help, which has been provided to every other competing industry in Europe, but not to ours. That is the double whammy. The industry has been hit both ways.
Mr. John Townend (Bridlington):
As someone who has represented a fishing port for 17 years, I have seen the industry progressively damaged by the common fisheries policy. In retrospect, we must be honest: it is clear that the industry was betrayed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Sir E. Heath), who signed up to a treaty that forced the United Kingdom to surrender British fishing grounds to Europe. The industry was equally betrayed by the late Lord Wilson, who, at the time of the renegotiation, did not put the treaty right.
Fish inside our waters have ceased to be a national resource and today are a Community resource. It has always seemed strange to me that we pump up oil from the North sea and that oil is British oil, but the fish swimming around the oil rigs are European fish.
Leaving aside those objections, one must be fair. The CFP's aims were sensible. They were to improve conservation so that fish stocks would increase year on year and we would have a growing and prosperous fishing industry. No one, however, could believe that the CFP has achieved any of its aims. The British industry is in a parlous state. We have an aging fleet. There is a lack of investment and we are under continual pressure from the Community to reduce the size of our fleet and our quotas.
What are the specific failures? Far from stocks increasing every year because of the CFP so that we can increase quotas progressively every year, the stocks of many species are going down. Once more, there are proposals to reduce our quotas. The Community has failed to put into operation effective technical conservation measures. How can the policy be said to conserve when thousands upon thousands of tonnes of fish--the discards--are put back into the sea dead to pollute the oceans?
As my hon. Friend the Member for Holland with Boston (Sir R. Body) said, there has been a complete failure to ban industrial fishing. There has been no attempt to deal with the growing problems of seals. The population is increasing dramatically in the North sea, with damage to salmon and to other fish stocks.
Above all, however, the policy discriminates against the UK. We provide much the largest portion of the waters of the northern seas of the European Union, yet we receive only about a quarter of the quota. May I give an example of how the restrictions affect Bridlington boats? Is it not nonsense that, in the British section of the North sea, we have virtually no quota for coley?
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