Mr Alistair Carmichael

Well, I hope it will. It remains to be seen. As the hon. Lady knows from working with me as co-chair of the APPG on fisheries, along with our independent co-chair the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner), to come up with a fisheries strategy for the whole country—it is that lack of strategy that needs to be addressed—the Government have a bit of a backlog on strategies, and the one she mentions has not even joined the queue yet. That is why we are doing this job: I think any initiative without a strategy is always going to struggle. I thank the hon. Lady for allowing me to junk a couple of pages of my speech there. The House should be in no doubt that if the spatial squeeze on our fishing industry is allowed to continue, we shall soon risk losing its critical mass as a productive industry—that is true in all four parts of the United Kingdom. Once that critical mass is lost, we may never recover it. For the families and communities affected, that would be catastrophic. Fishing families are hard-working and economically productive people. Take away their ability to earn a living at sea, and they will not just sit idle; they will doubtless move with heavy hearts to do something else, somewhere else. That will forever change the nature and character of our coastal and island communities, and not in a good way. I hope that the Government will hear the warning and act before it is too late. Finally, I wish to raise a concern that is very specific to my constituency: Norwegian access to our local waters. There are, as I speak, big, powerful vessels appearing around Shetland that were not there in the past. We often speak about the North sea fishing area, but in reality, so much of the international fishing effort has become concentrated around Shetland. Shetland fishermen have called on the UK Government to reduce the reciprocal catch limits in the UK-Norway annual bilateral fisheries agreement, but that appeal has not been heard. This is effectively the one major fishing effort in our waters over which we can still have some annual control. The official preliminary figures show that the Norwegians caught over 22,000 tonnes of demersal fish in UK waters, while the UK caught just short of 9,500 tonnes in Norwegian waters. That is not a fair or balanced deal. We have long held the view that Norwegian access is a good thing for the Shetland fleet, not because there are many Shetland vessels going into Norwegian waters, but because several larger Scottish vessels go, which takes them and their catches away from our waters. That illustrates well the subtleties and complexity of managing effort in shared waters. A degree of Norwegian access is welcome, but the current agreement and catch limits clearly favour Norwegians at the cost of our fleet. The stats show that Norwegians’ saithe catches in UK waters doubled from 8,000 tonnes to 16,000 tonnes between 2024 and 2025. Saithe, let us not forget, is one of the stocks under pressure. Things are tough enough without a doubling of Norwegian effort on a key stock that is concentrated mainly around Shetland. By contrast, the highest UK demersal catch in Norwegian waters this year has been about 4,000 tonnes of haddock. That is a bit of a disparity, so can I can ask the Minister to give urgent attention to the lowering of the reciprocal cap from 30,000 tonnes a year to 20,000 tonnes a year? There is a commitment in the agreement to reviewing the cap throughout the year. That is something that fishing industry representatives in Shetland have called for, but now it needs to be tackled as a matter of urgency. In this, I am merely the interlocutor. If the Minister wishes to discuss this with the real experts, she will find them in Shetland. I hope that once the days lengthen a little bit, we may see her there.