My Lords, I am very glad to have the opportunity to contribute on Report. I declare an interest in that I am a director of a company that is in partnership with another company whose client is UK Fisheries. It is not a very direct interest, but I would not want anyone to be unaware of the connection.
We discussed this in Committee, when I contributed, and then and now I express my support for the intention behind the amendment. It seems entirely right that we put sustainability, and environmental sustainability in particular, at the heart of what we set out to do. But as the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, quite rightly said, he is intending to support the Government’s own intentions in that sense. Sustainability is not outwith the Government’s intentions but central to them. The debate has already demonstrated through its contributions—for example, that of my noble friend Lord Blencathra, and subsequently that of the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville—the way in which the sustainability objective interacts with other fisheries objectives. The precautionary objective, the scientific evidence objective, the ecosystem objective and effectively all other objectives interact with the sustainability objective in one way or another. Putting the sustainability objective as the prime objective simply asserts in a literal sense that it comes first, but to suggest that it is somehow more important or overrides any of the others would be misplaced, since actually integral parts of the sustainability objective are reflected in other fisheries objectives. The point of the Bill is for the fisheries policy authorities to express clearly in the joint fisheries statement what their balance and their mechanisms for achieving the objectives overall are to be.
That said, if the sustainability objective were by virtue of this amendment to be treated as the prime objective in statute, we would have problems. The first is that I am not sure that the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, was accurate in how he described his own amendment, since he described it as putting environmental sustainability above other objectives. Actually, if one looks at it, it puts the sustainability objective as the prime fisheries
objective, and under the sustainability objective are both proposed new paragraphs (a) and (b). Proposed new paragraph (b) deals with
“economic, social and employment benefits”
and economic viability. By stating that the sustainability objective is the prime fisheries objective, we do not simply state that environmental sustainability must come first. It is already more complicated than that, so I am not sure that it adds the simplicity for which the advocates of the amendment are looking.
My second problem—people can argue about the other points I have made, but this and my next point make it very difficult to accept this amendment—is that attaching this statutory provision to one of the objectives, which is in a series of objectives that must be prioritised and balanced in the joint fisheries statement, would create unacceptable legal risk. From then on, every time any of the fisheries policy authorities says how it thinks meeting the objectives should be balanced in the statement, somebody can say that—particularly in the short term—it might be prejudicial to environmental sustainability, and, because that is not fundamentally defined in the statute, by whatever definition of environmental sustainability they attach to it they could directly challenge the decisions set out in a joint fisheries statement and throw the legal certainty the statements are intended to convey out of the window. That is a serious problem.
Thirdly, while the structure of the amendment incorporates the original text of the sustainability objective, it has rewritten it in a rather odd and disturbing way. The economic, social and employment benefits, the availability of food supplies and having fishing capacity without overexploiting marine stocks are all still mentioned, but under the heading “fishing fleets must”. What does that mean in statute? Does it mean that it is the responsibility of the fisheries policy authorities and of the Government? Or is this a statutory provision telling the fishing fleets that they must accept responsibility for all the other secondary objectives and that these are no longer the responsibility of Government?
I do not understand how the amendment works, and I am afraid that the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, did not explain why it has been written such that, subject to the environmental sustainability objective being met, fishing fleets “must” do these things. By what mechanism will they do them? Who tells them to do them? How is it set out in statute? This amendment does not deliver any of that. For those two latter reasons in particular, the amendment is flawed and I cannot support it.