Richard Tice

It is a pleasure, Mr Efford, to serve under your chairmanship, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth (Rupert Lowe) on securing this debate. Boston has a long and rich history in fishing; indeed, fish landed in Lincolnshire ports constituted about 20% of all fish eaten in Britain in the 20th century. However, my fishermen in Boston have been let down by decades of European Union membership—they were delighted to leave the EU—and by over-regulation. In fact, they are deeply concerned about the regulatory pressures from the Environment Agency and from inshore fisheries and conservation authorities, which frankly seem designed more to strangle what is left of our fishing industry than to enhance it. So 2026 is an opportunity for the great reset—an opportunity to take back control of our waters properly and to start again. We all know that the previous Government, under the leadership of Theresa May and then Boris Johnson, failed to secure the promised good deal for fishing, in the same way that they failed to secure a good deal for Northern Ireland. In business, we all know that no deal is better than a bad deal, and that must be the starting position for the negotiation. EU members are desperate to start negotiating as soon as possible, but as the hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (Seamus Logan) rightly identified and as the Minister may know, there is a serious risk that they will use the renegotiation of the energy deal, which ends at the same time, to create unacceptable pressure and leverage for the fishing deal. It is therefore vital that the two elements are decoupled and that we work on the basis that no deal is better than a bad deal. Frankly, that is true for both those renegotiations, but they must not be linked, otherwise we will end up with a bad deal. I urge the Minister and the Government to start from that position.