European Union Bill

Those issues should be given proper and due consideration. As it stands, the Government and the devolved Administrations collectively exercise control and restrictions in our territorial waters up to the 6 nautical mile limit, and access is for British fishermen only. Access to our territorial waters between the 6 and 12 nautical mile limit is restricted to a handful of neighbouring countries. Those arrangements exist only by regulation, so at any time they could be amended by qualified majority voting and Britain could effectively lose control over access to its territorial waters within the 12 nautical mile limit of our shoreline. The current regulation, passed in 2002, details the common fisheries policy arrangements for national territorial waters, and it expires at the end of 2012. As we know, the EU has plenty of flexibility to determine the future of our territorial waters, and I fundamentally believe that that is not in our national interest. The European Commission is, however, consulting on the post-2012 arrangements, and my significant concern is that through either that reform or future measures the majority of our European counterparts in the European Parliament or in the Council of Ministers will be able to determine the future of our territorial sovereignty. I have been in touch with the Minister for Europe about the issue, and he has very kindly written to me to confirm that currently the Commission has no plans to change the arrangements, but I do not believe that we should leave it to chance, as it is simply not in our national interest to have other EU countries determining the future of access to our territorial waters.