My Lords, Amendment 107 in my name follows on from our previous debate about the management of, and criteria used for, allocating future fishing rights, which could be the subject of competitive tender or auction. Without repeating the whole debate, the Minister said in winding up on the previous amendment that consideration is being given to the new quota allocation. She also told the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, that there was support for a new entrants’ scheme. If that is the case, my challenge back to the Government is: why can we not include the principles of that in the Bill? If the Bill is for anything, it should be for those sorts of future planning activities. I hope we can find a form of wording that incorporates that in the Bill.
We have addressed our concerns about how any future auctions will be run, and what the consequences would be if they were driven solely by the highest bidder. Our amendment would require regulations made to deliver the auctions to reserve a proportion of the fishing opportunities for the under-10-metre boats. The previous debate sought new opportunities for new entrants to the sector. This amendment more specifically focuses on the smaller-sized fleet.
We have already explained the importance of the smaller boats to the economic and environmental sustainability of the sector. They generally use lower-impact gear and provide more jobs per tonne, but their current share of the quota is limited to around 6% of the total. Yet in the UK, the under-10-metre boats represent more than 70% of English fishing boats and 65% of direct employment, so we should be using this opportunity to boost their numbers and their share of the sector.
This is a central argument in our bid to revive the declining and impoverished coastal communities, and for that to work we need a spread of smaller boats accessing the smaller harbours and ports. This intervention is particularly necessary as the small-boat sector is shrinking every year. Between 2007 and 2017, the number of fishers on UK-registered vessels decreased by 10%. In his letter to noble Lords of 10 February, the Minister explained that the Government were indeed keen to support the under-10-metre vessels. He explained that in England they were already taking steps to ensure that they received a higher share of the reserve quota and that further consideration was taking place on the distribution for this year. That is all fine as far as it goes, but it does not represent the step change necessary to really revive the under-10-metre sector.
Nevertheless, given the Minister’s previous comments, I hope he will support this very modest amendment. After all, all it does is to require the auction regulations to address the issue of reserving a proportion of the auctioned fishing opportunities for the under-10-metre fleet, so I hope he can support it.
Amendments 108 and 109 address our wider concerns about the competitive tendering and auction processes. They rightly raise whether we should take into account the bidder’s impact on the marine environment when allocating new quotas. As we have debated before,
these amendments have considerable merit and are in line with our earlier arguments and I hope the Minister will support them.
Amendment 110 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, proposes a new Clause 27. Again, she has taken on the Government’s drafting to a considerable extent. I am grateful for her efforts. She specifies in detail what she feels that the ownership and distribution rights of English fisheries should be. These include quite detailed proposals, but they also keep the competitive tendering and auction principles with which we have some concerns. I look forward to hearing the noble Baroness’s explanations for these proposals. It may well be that we will be persuaded at that point. In the meantime, I beg to move Amendment 107.