Why Brexit will be fishing industry’s salvation – Grimsby MP Lia Nici

When I am out and about in Grimsby, the most commonly asked question I get is: “When are we going to get our fishing waters back, and are we going to get them back?” I say to my constituents: “Yes, absolutely.”

Grimsby’s association with the fishing industry goes back centuries, but the modern industry started in the 1800s. By 1900, 10 per cent of all the fish eaten in the UK was landed in Grimsby.

In the 1950s, Great Grimsby was the UK’s and the world’s premier port. What fishing brought to Grimsby was wealth, investment into the docks and a direct train link to London.

That was the power of the fishing industry to us. Unfortunately, that industry has been taken away from us, first because of the cod wars with Iceland, which rendered us unable
 to fish in Icelandic waters, because
Iceland wanted to be a sovereign fishing state, and secondly because of the
impact of the Common Fisheries Policy, which gave foreign trawlers more and more power to plunder our fishing waters.

What the industry has been telling us for the last few years, is that although we hear the EU talk about reciprocal arrangements, there is nothing reciprocal about the current arrangements.

The fish that the EU catches in our waters is eight times the value of what we can catch in EU waters. We talk about the Common Fisheries Policy following sustainability, but it does not.

To take a particular cod species, under the Common ​Fisheries Policy, we can currently catch 20 per cent of the North Sea saithe. If we had zonal attachment where the fish are actually in our waters, we could catch 75 per cent, but at the moment our fishers have to steam away from our own fish. It is therefore absolutely vital that we are able to build on that.

The Common Fisheries Policy, as we all know, is not fit for purpose. We need to make sure that we change it so that we are in control of what we want. The Common Fisheries Policy is what really tore the heart out of Great Grimsby. For 40 years we have struggled to recover from that.

The decline in the fishing industry in Grimsby is because we are not able to catch in the way that we want to or do what we want to ensure future sustainability. The reason for a decimated fishing industry in my town is not that we were not efficient in catching or because our customers did not want to buy fish from us.

We would like to process and fry more British fish, but unfortunately we are not able to catch it at the moment.

I had a meeting with Seafood Grimsby and Humber a few weeks ago. It said that if every household in the UK had one extra portion of fish, it would bring in an additional £2bn per annum for the Grimsby fish processing industry – and that is just to Grimsby.

Think of the power of us being able to have more influence on how, when and where we catch our own fish in our own waters.

The decline in the fishing industry is something we really need to consider. Our constituents in Grimsby are looking for us to make a change.

What happened with our fishing industry was caused by political events and decisions over which people in Grimsby had no power or say, and our industry was cut.

After 40 years there is ongoing anger and resentment about that, but we can change it. We now have the ability to become an independent coastal state.

The Fisheries Bill is the first step in this Parliament to making sure we are able to bring these decisions and accountability back home.

The people of Grimsby are under no illusion that we will go back to the glory days of the 1950s, when they say you could walk from one side of the dock to the other on trawlers and not get your feet wet.

What they are looking forward 
to is having a new modern fleet that
they can welcome to the port. Our
local trawler companies, with whom I have been speaking, have said that they have the men, they have the trawlers
and they are ready to go from January 1, 2021.

Lia Nici is Conservative MP for Great Grimsby. She spoke in a Commons debate on the Fisheries Bill – this is an edited version.

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Thank you

James Mitchinson