Contribution
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq. I thank the Backbench Business Committee and the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) for this important debate. I particularly thank the right hon. Gentleman for the tribute he paid to our fishermen who face dangers at sea each day—“For those in peril on the sea”. The hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway (John Cooper) referred to the loss of the Solway Harvester; I well remember covering that tragedy as a journalist, and the shadow it cast on the Isle of Whithorn and Kirkcudbrightshire.
My fishing community and the other communities I represent are quite different from those constituencies. The Western Isles account for 22% of the inshore waters in what is mostly an inshore fishery, although that might well have been 0% of Scotland’s inshore fishing grounds if the SNP-Green coalition had got away with its ludicrous plans for highly protected marine areas, which the hon. Member for Gordon and Buchan (Harriet Cross) highlighted. Although those plans were defeated, pushed away by a rebellion across Scotland’s coast and the songwriting power of Skipinnish, and have been put away for now, they have created a high level of uncertainty, which means that some fishermen are deciding whether to stay or leave the industry.
In the Western Isles, the picture is mixed and somewhat rosy. We have had some £12 million-worth of tonnage landed in the past couple of years—something like 3,000 tonnes, of which almost 90% is shellfish and only 11% is white fish. Marine Scotland shows that there are 215 registered fishing vessels—small fishing vessels, like those for which my hon. Friend the Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner) has just made the case—and something like 290 fishers, or about 7% of Scotland’s national total.
The industry faces many different challenges in different constituencies, but we have a lot in common. I will give some attention to one of the biggest challenges facing the industry and the associated processing sector in the Western Isles. It was a pleasure to go to the annual general meeting of the Western Isles Fishermen’s Association a couple of weeks ago and see so many young faces among the attendees. There are young entrants to the industry, helped by locally administered schemes that encourage entrants. One such scheme is community quotas, which the Western Isles council, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, has bought and which it licenses from quota to new entrants. That all helps people into the fishing industry and has a significant impact.
That glimmer of hope should not mask something that is a problem for the islands’ industry, the Scottish industry and the UK industry: the lack of skilled crews. The demographics in the Western Isles are not good. Although I have talked about young entrants, the working-age population has dropped by 12% over the past 10 years, and there has been a 26% rise in the elderly population. All employers are competing for a reduced number of school leavers, and virtually all sectors are dependent on sourcing migrant labour to grow their business.
The most important ask from the Western Isles fishing industry is that the Minister recognise that there has to be some flexibility in immigration policy to allow the needs and demands of rural and island areas to be accepted. The current sponsored employment scheme seems to have been based on city and urban salaries; it ignores the variation in wages in rural and island communities, which of course are lower and are coupled with increased food, energy and transport costs. I suspect that the £70,000 salary for a processor that my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes (Melanie Onn) mentioned has as much to do with the lack of skilled people as it does with the skills involved in doing the job.
Only this week, I had some correspondence from the Isle of Barra. Barratlantic is one of the large seafood processors on our island chain. Christina MacNeil, the general manager, tells me that in 35 years of working in the seafood industry, things have never been more difficult. There is huge demand for langoustine and scallop, but supplying customers is becoming increasingly difficult because of the lack of staff. We can imagine how difficult it is on a small island. She has four Filipino workers, who have been employed there since April 2023; they came through the sponsorship scheme, but given the nature of the work and the lack of available staff, the company needs some flexibility in order to retain them. It can just about manage the salaries now, but if they increased to £38,000 a year the operation would be impossible. The company has been in operation for 50 years, but its future is in the balance because of restrictive immigration schemes.
It is the same for fishermen. It is impossible to employ UK crews, as we know, so they must look overseas. Once again, cost is a criterion, but so too is the visa system. Crews need an English qualification at a very high level, which means that they are almost barred from entry. That creates huge difficulties for fishing boat owners and processors in my constituency.
My plea to the Minister—it is echoed by others such as the hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (Seamus Logan), who is no longer in his place, as well as the Migration Advisory Council and almost every coastal community—is that there be flexibility in the visa system. We do not need a separate visa system, as some Scottish colleagues might argue. There is no need to replicate the system: we just need enough flex to take into account the needs of island and rural areas.