Marine and Coastal Access Bill [HL]

Clause 185: Size limits for sea fish Debate on whether Clause 185 should stand part of the Bill. It may be a relief to your Lordships to hear that, with the leave of the Committee, I shall speak to my Motions to oppose that Clauses 185 to 244 stand part of the Bill altogether. The object of these Motions is to oppose the Question that Part 7 stand part of the Bill, which the Public Bill Office told me I could not do. Because I feared lest some draconian new prohibitions were proposed against our poor, hard-pressed fishermen, I examined Part 7, Chapter 1 and Schedule 15 rather carefully, checking their provisions with the Sea Fish (Conservation) Act 1967, and soon found that they made no sense at all as in many cases the words that this Bill seeks to alter are not in the 1967 Act. Obviously that Act had been amended, and indeed on asking a librarian here, I found out that it has. The librarian kindly printed out for me 16 pages of amended and additional clauses, the results of innumerable statutory instruments and miscellaneous Acts. This he was able to do courtesy of an organisation called LexisNexis Butterworths to which the Library subscribes, no doubt at vast expense, and without whose help it would have been almost impossible to discover the present state of the law. By the time the law has been amended yet again by the Bill before us, it will be a complete pig’s breakfast, and I pity anyone who needs to know what it is. I then examined Chapter 2 and found that the Sea Fisheries (Shellfish) Act 1967 had also been amended, although not quite so much. In Chapters 3 and 4, the relevant Acts were more recent and had not in the past suffered quite so much mauling, although the Salmon and Freshwater Fisheries Act 1975 had been amended. What I am asking the Minister to do, immediately after this Bill has passed through both Houses, is introduce a consolidation Bill to marry Part 7 to all those Acts, amended and otherwise, which Part 7 seeks to amend; or if that is too much like hard work, at least to marry Chapter 1 and Schedule 15, and perhaps Chapter 2, to their predecessors. Chapters 3 and 4 are less of a mess but it would be nice if the Government were to do the job properly while they are about it. Of course, in the process, Part 7, or the relevant chapters from it, could be repealed. It cannot be right to produce legislation which is such a mess that only a rich clairvoyant with a LexisNexis crystal ball can discover what the law is. At the very least Part 7, Chapter 1, should make it clear that it is the Sea Fish (Conservation) Act 1967, as already amended, that is being amended and so on. But even that is not going to help the fishermen on the boat very much. I wish that were all but there is one sentence in Clause 187(2) on page 108 which reads: ""Any reference in this Act to a class is a reference to a class defined or described by reference to any circumstances whatsoever (whether or not relating to fishing or vessels)"." Perhaps I am very thick but as far as I am concerned that is complete gobbledegook and I wonder how many Members of the Committee can understand it. I began to get a faint inkling when I read the notes to clauses, but the fisherman on the boat does not have the notes to clauses handy, any more than he has LexisNexis Butterworths handy. No doubt the Minister can understand it and perhaps he will be kind enough to tell the Committee what it means. It should be put into plain English even if it is part of an Act of Parliament. I cannot remember when we last had a consolidation Bill through this House or whether we have had any in the life of this Government. It is high time that we had a few to keep the law tidy and comprehensible. It is not good enough to say that there has not been time. There has been plenty of time, just as much as ever there was; it is just that we have had too much new legislation, much of which we would have been much better without.