My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 78, which is in a similar vein around national benefit. It is quite clear, certainly in the south-west, that if all the fishing vessels with British flags actually landed their catch—or a major proportion of it—in their home port, the number of landings in the UK and the viability of those ports would be hugely increased. Of course, we have here the issue of what used to be called “quota hoppers”, around which everything has gone staggeringly quiet during the Brexit negotiations and the formulation of the Bill.
As we know, a little under half of the English—not Scottish—quota is effectively owned by Dutch, Spanish or Icelandic interests. Grimsby, which I think used to be the world’s or Europe’s largest fishing port, now has a very important fish processing industry, but hardly any activity in terms of landings. Most of the quota there is effectively owned by Dutch vessels that land in Holland.
So, we have a question: how do we change that? The Bill does nothing to change this area. In a way, it suits the fishing industry establishment to keep things as they are, because those are the members. Whether vessels are English or foreign-owned, those are the members of the fishing organisations. That is why, in Amendment 78, I have used the scientifically calculated number of 75%, which came out at the end of my spreadsheet, to suggest what proportion of fish should be landed by English-flagged—or British-flagged, depending on how we want to define the devolution thing—vessels. It is a probing amendment, but only in the sense that something needs to be done in this area. Very few other EU member states have allowed the foreign ownership of quota in the way that we have. We decided to do that. We are where we are, but we need to make sure there is a national benefit; I assume that is why this objective is here.
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I very much support the majority of the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. However, one of them slightly suggests an obligation for foreign
vessels licensed to fish in UK waters also to land in the UK. I am slightly more hesitant about that approach; the last thing we would want is retaliation, or reciprocation. The last thing we would want in, say, Norwegian fisheries, is for British boats to have to land their catch in Norway. I do not really think that that would work. I am not so bothered about foreign vessels that are licensed here; as long as they pay us good money, or we have swaps on quota allowances, that would be sufficient. But we do need to tackle this area of effective foreign ownership of UK quota and bring some of that back home to our ports—so that they can thrive and make the most of the new situation that the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, described.