Torcuil Crichton

I thank the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) and the Backbench Business Committee for bringing this important debate to the Chamber. I pay tribute to all those who have cast a net, hauled a creel or pulled on a mussel rope to sustain us from the seas. We have been fishing the waters around our islands for millennia. Just like the right hon. Member’s constituency, island life in the Western Isles is still shaped by the rhythms of the sea. The fishing fleet in the islands, while a shadow of the fleet that sustained the international herring industry in the early 20th century, is still a mainstay of the economy. Less than two years ago, these small fishing communities saw off an existential threat from the SNP and Green Scottish Government, which would have effectively wiped out the industry. The hated highly protected marine area proposals, which would have closed 10% of Scottish waters, were seen off by protests and songs by Skipinnish and Vatersay fisherman Donald Francis MacNeil, but there is a lingering suspicion that the agenda has not gone away. Since the collapse of HPMAs, there have been fears that the existing marine protected areas and other designations will become pegs on which further restrictions could be hung. The rebranding of HPMAs, without the colourful measures of banning canoeing and paddleboarding, could be a danger. It is understood that the Scottish Government will be consulting on 173 sites. Although the Outer Hebrides sites have not been confirmed, it is expected that up to 20% of those total sites may be in Hebridean waters. There are a couple of lessons to be learned from the HPMA debacle. The first, for anyone across the UK tempted to back the Greens today, tomorrow or next May, is that the combination of Greens and SNP in Scotland has set back marine conservation by a decade and a half at least. The other is that, if we are to sustain the fishing industry in communities such as mine, we need to end uncertainty. To ensure conservation, we need conversation. We need talks about sustainable management with the fishing industry and fishing communities—the experts on sustainability—on what is essentially their self-interest. Nobody knows how to responsibly steward our waters better than the fishermen themselves. There is powerful evidence from my constituency that self-imposed controls by the community itself increase the value of landings. In the last year, the value of landings in the Western Isles has gone up to £16 million—a 4% rise—and that increase in value is the result of pot limitation efforts and various other measures, including banning larger vivier crab vessels from operating within six miles. Those statistics demonstrate what folly there was in trying to impose top-down conservation measures. When the local fishing fleet provides the conservation measures, the dividends are obvious. The majority of income generated by Western Isles boats comes from the prawn sector, at £9 million. Scallops catches were down 14%, but nephrop landings were up by 25%, mostly due to the presence of processing in the islands. The Macduff Shellfish factory in Stornoway, which has attracted more boats, and there are other processors in the islands, but they face massive logistical barriers not just in getting to the continent, but in getting to the mainland in the first place, thanks again to the ferry debacle that the SNP presided over. As well as successes, there are major challenges. The hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway (John Cooper) hinted at the problems of recruitment to the sector; in an area such as mine, where depopulation and demographics leave a “doughnut hole” where the working-age population should be, that is a huge challenge. The proposals by the Migration Advisory Committee on skilled worker visa changes would have a profound effect on recruitment to the industry. If overseas hiring for fishing roles ends in December 2026, parts of the country—including mine—would be significantly impacted. While that is not this Minister’s Department, her support and the Government’s support in flexing those requirements would be appreciated. The effect on the sector is quite obvious. A skipper from the Western Isles has been in touch with me recently to say that seven years ago he had a local crew of seven, but he is now forced to employ three crewmembers from Ghana. He and his son now skipper the vessel back to back in order to fish at every opportunity and ensure that they pay their foreign crews the right wages—considerably more than he or his son take home themselves. That is a challenge facing the local fishing fleet, but it is not the only one; others include high fuel costs, access to markets and sometimes red tape from Whitehall itself. Again, this is not the Minister’s Department, but the Western Isles council, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, and, I suspect, other local authorities across our coastal communities, have faced a recent challenge from His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, about which I have written to the Treasury. The council may lose its authority as a registered dealer of controlled oils, supplying 14 fishery piers across the 10-island chain that makes up the Western Isles. Those sites are in remote location, which, combined with the physical geography and the need to have fuel supplies available out of normal hours, means that the sites cannot possibly be physically or remotely monitored, as HMRC says they have to be. The council has been informed that, unless the sites are monitored and HMRC is satisfied that all sales are for legitimate licensed use, the sites and the licences may not be approved. We see there, as we saw with conservation measures, the disconnect that often exists between bureaucracy and the reality of island and fishing communities. I welcome the Government’s £360 million fishing and coastal growth fund and regret, as I said in an intervention earlier, that a direct proportion is not going where it should be—to Scotland, where a large part of the UK’s fishing effort is—because the Scottish Government demanded control of the fund without agreeing a mechanism beyond the Barnett formula. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall (Anna Gelderd), who is no longer in her place, that that fishing and coastal growth fund should be directed towards the recruitment of new entrants and young people into the industry. There are commendable efforts in the Western Isles to get young people into the industry, with some success, but our populations are so small that they can only go so far. That fund should be directed towards small, inshore coastal communities, to help to revive them and those coastal economies, rather than being handed out to the mackerel millionaires or the quota barons who currently rule the oceans. Fishing quotas themselves, which could be the subject of a whole other debate, should serve the public good, not narrow interests. If we are serious about the future of the seas and our coastal communities, quotas must be looked at again. They should have a social value and be aimed at the long-term benefit and sustainability of our coastal communities.