argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: Agriculture
Michael Andrew Gove (Conservative, Centre-right): No, not at this point We will introduce, as New Zealand, Norway and other nations have, an approach that means that fishermen can catch and can land, but if they exceed the discard ban, they will pay a penalty. That will ensure that we have a sustainable approach to fisheries, that we enable fishermen to carry on going to sea and that we combine their economic resilience with the environmental resilience of the stocks that we wish to preserve. That change is an example of how we can change individual common fisheries policy rules and regulations by giving effect to the Bill and the framework that it will provide. It is clear from all the representative fisheries organisations that they recognise that individual aspects of the CFP need remedial action and reform. That can happen only if we allow the Bill to pass, which is why it is so important that it makes a speedy passage through the House. Another point made by several hon. Friends and hon. Members is about the importance of protecting not only diversity at sea but diversity in the fishing industry itself. We need to ensure not only that the pelagic fleets that sail from Peterhead and Fraserburgh have new opportunities, but that those that fish closer to coastal waters—often, the under-10 metre fleets that colleagues have praised—have an opportunity to take advantage of new opportunities. As a result of this legislation, we will have additional quota that we can reallocate in a way that is equitable, fair and sustainable.
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: Agriculture
Michael Andrew Gove (Conservative, Centre-right): It will be easier for those who are responsible for that bycatch to ensure that they can continue to fish in a way that is both environmentally sustainable and economically resilient. I will come back to the hon. Gentleman in due course.
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: Agriculture
Michael Andrew Gove (Conservative, Centre-right): When it comes to individual species, we will follow the scientific advice that CEFAS and others give us. Overall, however, as we take back control we will have the opportunity to catch more fish in our own waters. The majority of the fish that are caught in UK waters are not caught by UK vessels. Let me give the hon. Gentleman one example. I do not know whether he knows what percentage of cod caught in the English channel is caught by French boats—I do not know whether anyone in the House does—but it is 83%. What percentage of cod caught in the English channel is caught by UK vessels? Just 7%. That is a fundamental inequity in the allocation of national resources. The Bill will allow us to decide who catches what and where, and in line with which environmental principles It is not often that a piece of legislation comes before the House that provides us with an opportunity to say to some of the most fragile communities in our country, our coastal communities, "There is real hope and a chance of an economic renaissance. Your suffering has been recognised and we can make a positive difference." It is not often that legislation comes before the House that, if passed, would see an industry potentially double in size and in its capacity to generate new jobs and new economic opportunities. It is very, very rare that legislation that comes before the House achieves such social and economic goals and at the same time allows this country to underline its credentials as a leader in environmental practice of a kind that other countries would wish to emulate. Not only does this Fisheries Bill manage to bring hope to coastal communities and to reinforce the economic gains of leaving the European Union, but it underlines our credentials as an environmental leader, which is why I commend the legislation to the House.
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: Macroeconomics
Sheryll Murray (Conservative, Centre-right): Will the hon. Lady explain to me why my late husband suffered financially, quite considerably, for 12 years under a Labour Government, but she is now blaming Conservative austerity? I have witnessed it myself. Will she explain why she has not admitted that and apologised for it?
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: Agriculture
Charles Ashley Rupert Walker (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Lady was starting to make a good case for recreational angling before she was dragged away by colleagues who wanted to talk about commercial landings. Recreational angling accounts for about £2 billion into the economy, whereas commercial fishing accounts for about £200 million. If we want to maximise the UK’s fish stocks, as I am sure that we do, we need to focus on recreational angling and the value of recreational angling, and we need to have fish species that are largely kept back for recreational anglers.
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: Agriculture
Matthew James Offord (Conservative, Centre-right): I am listening to the hon. Lady with great interest, but I am finding it very difficult to reconcile the issue of fishing generally with the demise of coastal communities. Does she not agree that, just as in rural areas, it is not just the issues surrounding agriculture and fishing that contribute to a decline in coastal communities; it is tourism, lack of a manufacturing base and the brain drain? When we look in her own constituency, for example, any increase in the fishing industry will not help the village of Flimby, as it needs a greater package than just additional resources for the fishing industry, which she seems to be advocating.
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: Agriculture
John Henry Hayes (Conservative, Centre-right): I think it would be reassuring to the House to know that the Opposition share our disdain for the common fisheries policy, which has allowed foreign potentates to devise a policy, paradoxically, that is simultaneously bad for fishermen and bad for fish. The Secretary of State set out his view about how we can improve on that. Presumably Labour would want to join us in condemning the CFP.
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: Agriculture
Neil Quentin Gordon Parish (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention—he is right. I think that DEFRA is working much more with fishermen, and they will need to work more closely to ensure that the collection of that information happens more quickly. We also need to learn from the monitoring of how fish are caught and what is happening on the fishing boats, because all this is important. There needs to be trust between the fishermen and DEFRA officials, because that is sometimes lacking. There is a great deal that can be positive. I know that the Secretary of State and our Fisheries Minister are really driving towards that, and I think we can do it.
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: Agriculture
Neil Quentin Gordon Parish (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend makes a really good point. Fish will move, perhaps because of water temperature or where the food is. Also, of course, they do not always swim together. Cod swim together and haddock swim together, so we can go out and make sure that we catch only one species of fish, but other types of fish swim separately, and we will often catch many species. That is especially the case in the south-west waters, where we are very much a mixed fishery, and that is why the discards are so important. We do not want the fishermen to target particular species, but we want them to be able to catch fish and land it all. The challenge is going to be making sure that we recompense fishermen for delivering fish that they did not have the quota to catch, but do not stimulate them into catching fish that they perhaps should not be catching.
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: Agriculture
Sheryll Murray (Conservative, Centre-right): Does my hon. Friend welcome the study by one of the northern universities and CEFAS to look at zonal attachment as a way of assessing fish stocks within the United Kingdom 200 miles from the median line limit?
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: Agriculture
Neil Quentin Gordon Parish (Conservative, Centre-right): As always, my hon. Friend speaks great sense on fishing, and so she should, given her knowledge of it. Zonal attachment is an interesting way of looking at this. When we are managing our own waters, we should be able to manage that much more quickly, so that an area that can be fished can be opened up, or if an area needs to be closed down, for reasons of the environment or fish breeding, we can do so much more quickly.
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: Agriculture
Sarah James (Wollaston) (Conservative, Centre-right): Further to the point about zonal attachment, does my hon. Friend agree with Brixham fishermen that sprats would be an ideal kind of species to look at, because 90% of them are caught within the 12-mile limit but we have only 52% of the total allowable catch? Does he agree that that would be a much more sensible way to proceed?
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: Agriculture
Neil Quentin Gordon Parish (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend makes an interesting point. By moving to a different system, we perhaps remove ourselves from some of the existing quota restrictions. Because those are historical, and because we did not necessarily get a good deal—far from it—when we went into the common fisheries policy, we have the opportunity to do this.
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: Agriculture
Andrew Campbell Bowie (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank my hon. Friend, who is being very generous with his time. He may or may not be aware that in 2015 Conservative MEPs tried to force the European Union to allow individual member states to use European fisheries funding to help fishing communities to implement the discard ban on the quayside. As we are now coming out of the CFP, will he join me in urging DEFRA and the devolved authorities to use the funding that they have to help to implement these new regulations on the quayside, because we are leaving it up to individual fishermen and organisations to do a lot of the work themselves, and some are working to very tight budgets?
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: Agriculture
Neil Quentin Gordon Parish (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend makes a good point. This is about how we help these fishermen. Can a certain amount of help be given regarding the fuel needed to bring back the fish? What is the value of the fish when it is brought in? Is it going to be sold on the open market, and do we then put a super-levy on it so that bringing it back is not too attractive? These are some of the issues that I am sure that our Fisheries Minister and Secretary of State will deal with in due course, if not necessarily in the Bill.
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: Agriculture
John Henry Hayes (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend is displaying that his grasp of fisheries is at least as great as his grasp of farming. As he develops this thesis, which is essentially about replacing discards and quotas with closed areas and other measures to preserve fish stocks, will he say a word about industrial fishing? While it is true that fishermen should be able to keep what they catch, industrial fishing sweeps the ocean floor, and the CFP has been singularly ineffective at dealing with its environmental consequences.
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: Agriculture
Neil Quentin Gordon Parish (Conservative, Centre-right): My right hon. Friend makes an interesting point. We were talking earlier about pulse fishing, which is used in particular by the Dutch. That causes huge damage to not only the seabed but, potentially, fish stocks. I often think that going out to fish should be much more a question of licking a finger to see which way the wind is blowing, but it does not work like that anymore. We use huge sonar equipment so that we know exactly where the fish are, and we can hoover them up in massive amounts. As we fish, we therefore have to be careful that we keep the stocks sustainable. I always say that the difference between fishing and farming is that with farming, we can at least replace the stock if we want to, but fish are a wild stock and must be bred in the sea, so we cannot take out too many fish if we want to keep the stock sustainable. Those are very good points You probably do not want me to go on for too much longer, Madam Deputy Speaker, so I will do my level best to move on quickly. We need more clarity in the Bill about the practical arrangements, which we have talked about a lot, and I look forward to seeing more detail. In particular, I am concerned that fisheries might get bogged down in unnecessary bureaucracy. Many of these companies are made up of five employees or fewer, so we must ensure that the burden of bureaucracy is as small as possible There are concerns that once we have left the EU, we will no longer have an automatic right to land fish in any EU ports. That interesting point has already been raised today. While I am very enthusiastic about our getting out of the common fisheries policy and getting back these stocks of fish, we have to ensure not only that we have access to EU markets, but that too much of our fish is not landed in EU ports, because we have to make the best of the processing. All these things are essential. I know that some of them are not covered in the detail of the Bill, but they need to be recommended I feel that we can do a much better job with our own Fisheries Bill and by taking back control of our waters. Our fishermen, fish processors and anglers can and must have a better deal. I am sure that the Secretary of State and Ministers are aware that there is a huge expectation that we are going to do much better as an independent coastal state than as part of the common fisheries policy. Let us welcome the Bill, make a few little alterations that might be necessary, and do a much better job than has been done in the past under the CFP.
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: International Affairs
Douglas Gordon Ross (Conservative, Centre-right): Could the hon. Lady give us a history lesson about what a former Member of this House did? Does she agree with me that my predecessor as the Member of Parliament for Moray, in the most recent general election campaign—[Interruption.] I notice she is getting a whisper from the hon. Member for Dundee East (Stewart Hosie). In the general election campaign last year, when asked umpteen times on the BBC whether the Scottish National party would agree to go back into the CFP if Scotland became independent and wanted to get back into the EU, my predecessor said yes. The party’s sole aim is to go back into the CFP.
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: Agriculture
Charles Ashley Rupert Walker (Conservative, Centre-right): May I mount a bit of shameless lobbying? To tackle illegal lobster potting, the Scottish Government have put a limit on recreational lobster fishermen, such as myself, of one lobster landing a day on the west coast of Scotland. As the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Angus Brendan MacNeil), who represents Barra, will know, it is often very difficult to get your boat out more than once every four or five days. Will the hon. Lady ask the Scottish Government whether, instead of putting on a limit of one lobster a day, they will look at a limit on the number of pots a recreational fisherman can have—say, five or six—beyond which they would need to get a licence?
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: International Affairs
Luke Patrick Graham (Conservative, Centre-right): This is a characteristically divisive speech from the hon. Lady. On the subject of division, can she explain how, under Scottish National party policy, Scotland will be better served when it has to go into negotiation with England for access to its waters, and how Scotland would somehow get a better result under the SNP policy when it has to negotiate with Europe alone and trade with an even smaller WTO box?
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: Agriculture
Owen William Paterson (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Deidre Brock)—it is always good news when she finishes. In a competitive field, fishing is a clear winner of the stakes of the area in which the EU has shown maximum incompetence and caused maximum damage. I was made the shadow Fisheries Minister a long time ago, way back in 2004. I travelled all around the coast of the United Kingdom, down to South East Cornwall and up to Whalsay in Orkney and Shetland. I also went right across from east to west, seeing really successful fisheries in Norway, the Faroes, Iceland, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and down the coast of the United States, and I went to the Falklands. My conclusion, which I do not resile from, is that the common fisheries policy is a biological, environmental, economic and social disaster. It is beyond reform, and I do not resile from a single word of my Green Paper, written back in January 2005.
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: Agriculture
Owen William Paterson (Conservative, Centre-right): I remind the hon. Gentleman that this Green Paper was the policy on which we fought the 2005 general election, and his party opposed it. I will have no more humbug from the Scottish National party. We are sick to death of hearing from a party that supports the EU and then tries to weasel around on the CFP. The fishermen listening to this debate will be sick to death of this petty party political bickering. We have seen catastrophic damage to our most remote coastal communities, which could really benefit from a wonderful resource. We are world leaders in this area, yet we have allowed foreign fishermen to come in and take that resource. This resource could be a massive benefit to some of our most remote rural communities. We currently only take £900 million. That could go up to £1.5 billion to £2 billion, and if we processed the fish we could be talking about a £6 billion to £8 billion boost. That is a massively disproportionate benefit considering the remoteness of many of these rural communities.
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: Agriculture
John Henry Hayes (Conservative, Centre-right): My right hon. Friend has highlighted the role that he played as shadow Fisheries Minister, and he did a great job. I was his predecessor in that job, and throughout the period that he described, the Conservative party was resolutely and entirely convincingly—to most people at least—hostile to the CFP, when parties sitting opposite had not woken up to the problem. The Conservative party has opposed the CFP consistently; other parties have failed to wake up and see the writing on the wall.
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: Agriculture
Sheryll Murray (Conservative, Centre-right): First, I want to thank the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) for her tribute to the bereaved families of fishermen, and I also want to put on record my grateful thanks to the Secretary of State. My family would also like me to say thank you. I would also like to pay tribute to the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen and to the rescue services who go out in all weathers to ensure that our fishermen are safe The Bill provides the legal framework for the UK to operate under the United Nations convention on the law of the sea after we have left the European Union on 29 March 2019, something that my late husband and I worked towards since the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, it is important to look at the wider matter of the terms of our exit from the European Union and at the political declaration that the Prime Minister is in Brussels talking about now. I know that the terms will be a cause of concern for many of my constituents and for the fishing industry throughout the UK It is no secret that many people feel that the UK’s rich fishing resources were sacrificed when we joined the European Economic Community. Agreeing to the principle of equal access to a common resource—the total EU pond—at the time was in my opinion a dereliction of duty by the then Conservative Government, and I would like personally to apologise, even though I was not a Member of this House in 1972. Indeed, I was not even old enough to vote. It was a dereliction of duty, and the disastrous permanent share-out of the catch for each species in UK waters from January 1983 has left the UK fishing industry a shadow of its former self. An example is that of channel cod, of which the UK is permitted to catch 9% a year while France takes about 80%. We now face a situation in which other EU vessels take five times more in monetary value from the UK exclusive economic zone than UK vessels take from all the other EU EEZs. I have to say to the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge that the massive value of that fish could benefit the economy of the United Kingdom, but at the moment it is just being given away, with other member states coming in, catching and taking away. There is no benefit to us in that arrangement On the morning of 14 November, it was reported that Sabine Weyand—Michel Barnier’s deputy who leads the EU’s negotiations at a technical level—said that the UK would be forced to concede on fisheries as part of the withdrawal agreement, meaning that Britain would have to "swallow a link between access to products and fisheries in future agreements" The French are leading a group of other member states in demanding a link between access to waters and a trade deal. Lots of reports have shown this, but we must not accept such a link. That would be a complete repeat of what happened in 1971 when the UK Government caved in at the last minute and allowed equal access to a common resource.
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: Foreign Trade
David James Duguid (Conservative, Centre-right): I should like to associate myself with my hon. Friend’s comments in paying tribute to the various associations and organisations that support our fishermen. Does she agree that there is no precedent anywhere for access to a third country’s natural resources forming part of a trade agreement?
Fisheries Bill — House of Commons, 2018-11-21
Topic: Agriculture
Kirstene Janette Hair (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Gentleman talks about UK Government support for the fishing industry. Will he welcome their support in the recent Budget of £12 million that will support our fishing communities across our United Kingdom as we leave the EU?