My Lords, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Deben, not to worry too much because the fishing industry will have already assumed that it will be sold out. It always does. I suspect that it hears all the expectations, but is very cynical about them. That certainly seems to be the case in Cornwall, where I come from.
I do not wish this debate to be a Richard Benyon love-in, but I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Deben. When I was a Member of the European Parliament, along with the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, I was very critical of the common fisheries policy. I was on the fisheries committee of the European Parliament.
We said that there had to be regionalisation of this policy. We also said that the way international agreements, which I will come on to, are implemented has to change so that there is some conservation of the stocks of African or Mediterranean states, rather than them being completely pillaged. We also covered areas such as discard, which I will come on to as well.
The fact is that Britain took on that agenda. Whichever DG it was, I think DG14, the Fisheries Commission, was one of the most conservative and backward-looking directorates that I found in Brussels, yet we changed that. The irony is that we are leaving the common fisheries policy when we actually had significant regionalisation for a couple of years—that is still being implemented—a landing obligation, although I will come back to its effectiveness, and many other reforms.
The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames, and the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, brought up control of our waters. We have absolutely no control over the fish. In fact, the spawning grounds are often in a different EEZ from where they are caught. We have negotiation over quotas, with relative stability being the problem where we can maybe negotiate, but we should never forget that we have total control of enforcement over our own EEZs, whatever nation is flagged on a vessel. If we are not controlling them that is our problem.
I can now talk a little about that, because I ceased to be a board member of the MMO at the end of January after six years of the privilege of being in that position. The MMO, like most Defra organisations, suffered budget cut after budget cut. Its main concern, which comes back to environmental protection, is that it was to do the minimum—I exaggerate slightly; it wanted to do the most it could—to avoid infraction. It did a great job with reducing resources—much better than most private industry could do. That was its challenge.
I come back to the SIs. As we have said, we are waiting for the Fisheries Bill, which is not here, but one of the most important preparations for day one of a no-deal Brexit—which is of course not in the SI and I am not asking the Minister to respond on it—is how we cope on the high seas with the very high emotions of fishermen and fisherwomen who will be excluded from their traditional fishing grounds. We saw last year at the Baie de la Seine how tempers rose very strongly over a completely different issue. There was actual conflict and physical abuse, not of people, but of vessels, and danger to individuals because emotions understandably run very high in the industry, where there is high danger to individuals considering the conditions it has to operate in. If we get it wrong on day one and there is conflict on the high seas because of it, it will be the first area where there will be physical conflict because of Brexit. It is a real issue. Both sides have to be very clear on enforcement and how they will respond to provocations. If there is one area where there will be conflict it will be this one. I very much hope that there will not be, as we all do, because there is danger on the high seas. Anyway, I am not asking the Minister to respond to that. I am sure the authorities are making sure that will be the case.
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I thank the Minister for having a meeting with us, during which we went through some of these issues. I have to ask the House’s forgiveness in that I do not particularly understand the status of the North Sea multiannual plan. I understand all the other international agreements—the North-West Atlantic Fisheries Organization, the north-east Atlantic fishing organisation and the Atlantic tuna organisation. That is all being sorted out. They are international agreements and we will be a member of them. I do not understand the status of the agreement with the North Sea multiannual plan, which we know is crucial. It has been very successful in regenerating stocks in the North Sea, which effectively became an ecological desert and has become far better. I would be interested to understand whether it is an international agreement. I know that my EU sub-committee has looked at the other three international agreements, but we have not looked at that one. I would be very interested to understand what its status is and how we will continue to play a full part in it. Just for the record, I would like to ask the Minister how much the other three agreements will cost British taxpayers. I know it will be in the hundreds of thousands of pounds. It would be useful to put on record the extra cost to the British Treasury from our becoming individual members, rather than sharing EU membership.
The SI’s Explanatory Memorandum says that we are not bothering about the southern fisheries agreements that the EU has with a number of other nations in the Mediterranean and Africa, but I would like confirmation as to whether any British-flagged vessels take advantage of those agreements. Will they then be excluded from Brexit day?
One of the other areas that the Government have not declared a position on is what happens to the quotas agreed in December last year if we have a no-deal Brexit in the next couple of months. Will those quotas remain until the end of the year? At the moment the fishing industry does not know what access it will have to stocks in the rest of the year. That is one area where the Government could give a greater deal of certainty.
Coming back to money, I note that the Explanatory Memorandum says:
“The draft Regulations propose the transfer of fee raising powers”.
I would like the Minister to confirm that no additional charges on the industry will be made as a result of these SIs.
I come back to the point from the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh—in fact from all noble Lords—that these are common stocks; they are a common resource. Advisory councils have been a great innovation. The Explanatory Memorandum effectively says that we will come out of them. I guess we have to, but that is not an acceptable solution. We have from day one to continue to work with other coastal states—I include Norway, which is an EEA member, as well as member states—to make sure that consultation and working together on the range of fish stocks will carry on, whether in the North Sea, the western waters or the Irish Sea. I would be very interested to understand the Government’s intentions.
One of the number of EU institutions that exists in the UK as a result of the common fisheries policy is producer organisations. They are very much an EU institution. They are very important organisations that allocate quotas between their members. They carry out a number of other functions to do with the common commercial policy and marketing. Will these remain exactly the same and does this SI cover that?
Finally, I want to come to conservation and sustainable yield, which the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, mentioned. It is really important. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, will speak more about this, but I just wanted to deal with a statistic mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Byford. We in the EU Energy and Environment Sub-Committee were very concerned, and wrote to the Minister, about the fact that at the last agreement of the CFP in December, the number of stocks achieving maximum sustainable yield was decreasing from 69% in 2018 to 59% in 2019. That is unacceptable. The statutory target in the common fisheries policy is for all stocks to meet maximum sustainable yield by 2020, which is now next year. I would like to understand from the Minister what we are doing to achieve that, and why we are not including MSY in this area.
I completely understand that some of those quotas were increased because of the landing obligation and because there should be fewer discards. I went to an EU conference in Copenhagen earlier this year, the purpose of which was the landing obligation. All the northern European states that did fisheries were there. Not one—including the United Kingdom—was actually applying the landing obligation. It is not happening. It is not being enforced. The indicator is the number of non-discarded fish outside quota that are landed. There are hardly any port facilities for them to be landed, and there have been hardly any landings. That concerns me in its own right but, in the context of this SI, I am more concerned that perhaps we have increased quotas to take account of what is not discarded, while in reality discarding is continuing.