Meeting of the Parliament 07 December 2017
Here we are again at the annual series of bilateral, trilateral and multilateral summits that determine next year’s fishing quotas for EU, Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic fishing fleets. We await the lobbyists, politicians, commissioners, Council officials, European Parliament staffers and journalists at the annual two-day, all-night bun fight at the Berlaymont emerging exhausted and waving the various deals and agreements that they have wrestled over.
It is of course, in the main, a front. The summit is, for the British fleet at least, a rubber-stamping exercise, with the major deals having been agreed with little fanfare. The big decisions for our North Sea fleets, for example, were taken last week at the EU-Norway summit, with deals struck on cod, haddock, whiting and herring.
The December council is fundamentally about dividing the EU’s portion that has been decided through the coastal states arrangements. That is concerning because, currently, fishing quotas are allocated to the UK as part of the EU’s common fisheries policy, with individual UK countries having devolved responsibility over their share of the UK quotas. This is the final time for that; this time next year, we will be about four months away from being a coastal state, sitting at the table, negotiating for ourselves.
That is good news because currently, non-UK EU fishing boats land, on average, 700,000 tonnes of fish and shellfish, worth almost £530 million, from the UK exclusive economic zone each year. Non-UK EU fishing boats therefore land almost eight times more fish and shellfish by weight from the UK EEZ than UK boats do from other areas of the EU EEZ.
Brexit is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as it involves a systemic change in restoring the UK’s exclusive economic zone. That gives the country the potential to become a world leader in seafood production and exports. That is not to say that the UK’s position will be one of isolation, of course. After Brexit, the UK will still need to co-operate with the EU on quota setting. Co-operation on sharing stocks is required, as many fish stocks—as was pointed out earlier—are migratory and cross boundaries. Such co-operation is currently seen in Norway and other non-EU European countries and is enshrined in international law. The United Nations agreement on straddling fish stocks and highly migratory fish stocks and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea require co-operation on the conservation and management of fish stocks, and the UK has ratified both of those.
That leads me to the motion’s call for the best outcome for our fishermen, because they work to give themselves that best outcome. Our fishing industry is innovative and hard working and has been at the forefront of pioneering new nets to reduce discarding practices, the voluntary use of closed circuit television monitoring on boats and an on-board observer scheme.
When on board fishing vessels in Peterhead and Stonehaven, I have been struck a number of times by the thought that fishermen are among the country’s best entrepreneurs. There are supertrawlers of more than 70 metres, with yards of flat digital monitors and suites costing some £20 million; there are family businesses with shareholder crews; and there are fishermen who foresaw that pelagic fish would be worth something and invested—as the cabinet secretary pointed out earlier, the mackerel that they fish is the biggest value species not just in the UK but in the whole of the EU. That locally driven investment benefits the industry, the locality and the local supply chain. That is why I commend the motion and the Scottish Conservative amendment in calling for support for our innovative, pioneering and hard-working fishing industry.