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Marine Environment

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer rose to ask Her Majesty's Government what is the current state of the marine environment and what progress has been made in establishing a marine landscape classification.

The noble Baroness said: My Lords, one does not have to live by the sea to value it. Indeed, the earliest and some of the happiest memories for many in Britain include days with bucket and spade messing about on the sand. For young people, that continues with the rise of the surfing culture. We are an island nation with thousands of miles of coastline and I think that we make the best of it.

I declare an interest. I spend many happy weekends sailing, walking by the sea and bird watching. Some of the most memorable events of last summer were the tens of thousands of jellyfish swimming up the Torridge estuary. Another memorable event involved sailing to Lundy to watch the birds and seals on the rocks.

The importance of the marine environment is fundamental. I shall return to the topic because it is the main subject of the debate. However, first, I emphasise its importance to the economy. The attraction of coastal areas is critical to many of our rural areas such as the south-west and East Anglia, and towns like Blackpool and Bournemouth. Recreational fishing accounts for £538 million annually. According to 2002 figures, the direct income from commercial fishing is £536 annually but there is a great deal of added value in terms of processing, and so on, which may account for up to another £1 billion. There is also shipping, offshore wind farms—we are shortly to have them—the possibilities of tidal energy and all the renewable energy resource that the sea can offer.

A lot depends on the sea, both environmentally and economically. However, in the world of politics and in Parliament as a whole, it is not really regarded as an important issue. The importance accorded it does not reflect the fact that ordinary people treasure in their hearts much to do with the sea, as I explained at the beginning of my speech. Successive governments have given the marine environment pathetically little attention, which is why I warmly welcome the media attention that was given to the report of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, Turning the Tide.

The report addresses the impact of fisheries on the marine environment. Its conclusions make stark reading. I welcomed the fact that it was widely covered by many newspapers and radio programmes. However, the Royal Commission is by no means the first organisation to raise the alarm about the appalling state of our marine environment and the very pressing need for government action. It has been pointed out by the Marine Conservation Society, the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, and Charles Clover in his excellent book, The End of the Line. The World Wildlife Fund has been running its excellent oceans campaign for at least a couple of
 
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years. The Royal Commission's report was simply one in a series of reports, none of which has so far resulted in decisive government action.

I thank in advance the speakers this evening for taking part in this debate. Several of them will refer to the common fisheries policy and blame that for much of the problem. To a large extent, I agree. The common fisheries policy has been highly damaging to our fisheries and our marine environment. However, it is not solely to blame. A great deal can be done by the Government besides negotiating the very needy reform to that policy. Calling simply for us to leave the common fisheries policy is not an answer. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is not in his place, but when he was a Minister in 1996 he said that leaving it was not a realistic answer. Nothing has changed since then. However, what has continued is a lack of urgency to address the question.

That is why the UK Government must do everything in their power, while negotiating the reform of the common fisheries policy, to make some of the changes that they have the power to make in UK waters. They must not wait for the end of the negotiation process. They should act urgently, because fish stocks are certainly in crisis. There has been a crash in fish stocks so serious that we face the death of an ecosystem. That will not affect only marine life but all life that depends on the sea, such as sea birds and the fishing communities themselves.

We do not differentiate nearly enough between the small-scale inshore fishermen with a keen interest in preserving their local fishery and the huge factory ships that trawl and move on. The Government must energise their work with our coastal communities, where fishing is still a very important part of community life, and commit to extending some of the excellent voluntary schemes. If the Government look around, they can see some good examples of work that could be built on, despite the common fisheries policy.

I am talking, for example, of the work in Lyme Bay off the coast of Dorset and Devon, where there has been some excellent action to limit the effects of trawling and to try to regenerate the whole of the bay for the benefit of the local fishing communities. It has received considerable success. Last year, the local sea fishery committee established a marine protected area around Lundy island. Although it has been going for only a year, it has produced some very interesting results. Is the Minister aware of those?

The second exciting development, for which the Government should take some credit for initiating, is the work being done in the Irish Sea on mapping the underwater environment and overlaying it with activity. That allows people to see where the gravel beds are likely to be fish spawning grounds, and where that might conflict with gravel extraction. That is one example of a conflicting interest. Another might be kelp forests where certain species breed but that are trawled through and destroyed.

The scheme is not stopping activities, but planning for them and where they should be. A lack of planning is like building unrestricted industrial zones in our
 
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national parks on land. The problem has been that the activities happening under the sea are out of sight and out of mind. However, there is a chance now, with the Irish Sea pilot, to start to address what activities are suitable in which places. Is there a plan to roll out that project so that it can apply to all UK waters?

Beyond that, the Government could choose to extend the limit of our exclusive zone from six nautical miles to 12. That is an extremely important step that the Government could take now. They could introduce without delay legislation that could protect areas that need protection. I gave the example of Lundy, but many other areas will need protection. If one objection is raised to the creation of a marine protected area at the moment, that area will not be created. How ridiculous that 6,000 people could ask for an area, with one objection enough to overrule that.

Does the Minister believe that satellite monitoring of enforcement, to see where ships fish, is sufficient? If we expand our territorial waters to 12 nautical miles, we will need to know who is within them and who obeys the law and stays outside.

We need to strengthen local fisheries committees and expand their remit to be local marine committees. We must look at that scale, with real local involvement from those who love the sea and make their livelihoods from it, those who volunteer to look after its wildlife, those who earn their living from it in many other ways, and those who simply enjoy it for its own sake. It is from those people that solutions will arrive on a sustainable way to protect and look after our seas for all future generations.

Lady Saltoun of Abernethy: My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Baroness for having asked the Question this evening; she has saved me asking one at a later date.

The report of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution is a remarkably interesting document. It is well set out and, as a bonus, contains many beautiful photographs of various types of plankton living on the seabed, which are a joy to look at. It makes a number of recommendations with regard to the fishing industry, and I shall concentrate on those. It was with a certain degree of cynicism that I read them, as those of us who have had the fishing industry and its future at heart for some years have been crying out to have some of those very same steps taken to preserve stocks while helping our fishermen to survive.

The first recommendation that I have in mind is the reduction of by-catch—the catching of species and sizes other than those which are specifically being fished for. A certain amount has already been done to try to reduce by-catch, but much more could and should be done. I was interested to read this morning that trials carried out by Marks & Spencer showed that it is possible to catch almost only haddock and hardly
 
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any cod by setting the nets at a higher level above the seabed. That would avoid damage to the seabed as well.

The second recommendation is the prohibition of the wicked practice of discarding fish over and above the quota allowed to be caught. This practice is the inevitable result of the total allowable catch and quota system, and it must be stopped. How can it be right from any point of view to catch more fish than the stocks will stand, and then throw them away because they cannot be landed? It is not the UK boats that are the worst culprits. Dutch boats discard 80 per cent of cod catches, and some French boats 100 per cent of them. Admittedly, those fish do not necessarily go altogether to waste, since they will be eaten by the sea's scavengers, such as cod itself, at the best, and predatory birds, such as skuas, at the worst. But there are too many of them and of a good many other predatory seabirds. I do not see how discarding can be stopped as long as there is the TAC and quota system. I do not think it can be stopped.

The report also presses for the banning of bottom trawling, gillnetting and longlining for deep sea species in EU waters. These methods have caused a great deal of damage to the seabed, whose plants and other marine life form the habitat and food of the fish they catch, particularly of the immature fish that should not be caught in any case. It is essential to stop the catching of immature fish to allow them to develop to maturity and breed in their turn. Our fishermen have increased the mesh sizes of their nets to allow more immature fish to escape, but I do not think that our European competitors have done so.

The report suggests the monitoring of the performance of individual boats by human observers or by electronic means. I have no objection to that, although some boat owners might have. Most important of all, and crucial to the above, is the decommissioning of a proportion of the existing European fishing fleet. About 60 per cent of the Scottish fleet has already been decommissioned. But, so far, such decommissioning as has been done by the rest of the EU fleet has been largely negated by the building and licensing of new, bigger and better boats with the help of EU grants. That has got to stop, but I do not believe that the CFP will ever stop it, and therefore it is essential that we take our fisheries out of the CFP.

The noble Baroness said that that would not help. It might not help marine conservation as much as it would help fishermen, but it would help fishermen and that is what I care about. Moreover, since one of the recommendations of the report is that 30 per cent of fishing grounds in British waters be closed to all commercial fishing, the time has come to preserve the remaining grounds for our own UK and, particularly, Scottish fishermen, who mostly do not want to fish in the Bay of Biscay, the Atlantic, or the Mediterranean, which are the traditional fishing grounds of French and Spanish boats. The CFP has never been of any benefit to this country. Joining it was the price we paid to join the EU. It has not been worth it.
 
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I have one last point to make. The Government have been recommending that everyone eat at least two portions of fish a week, of which one at least should be oily fish as a source of polyunsaturated fatty acids. That advice, if taken, will not help the situation at all. I was very interested to learn recently that hemp oil, which may be obtained from various supermarkets, provides an excellent source of the polyunsaturated fatty acids found in oily fish. Hemp grows perfectly well in this country and has done for centuries. Its cultivation provides an excellent alternative crop for our hard-pressed farmers, and, if expanded, would help to relieve the pressure on fish stocks. Linseed oil is also very good. Moreover, hemp, flax and other crops could replace some of the fishmeal and fish oil at present used in aquaculture, further relieving the pressure on deep-sea fish stocks.

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