Sixth Standing Committee on Delegated Legislation
Tuesday 27 July 1999
[Mr. Bowen Wells in the Chair]
Food Safety (Fishery Products and Live Shellfish) (Hygiene) Amendment (No. 2) Regulations 1999
4.30 pm
Mr. Andrew George (St. Ives): I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the Food Safety (Fishery Products and Live Shellfish) (Hygiene) Amendment (No. 2) Regulations 1999 (S.I. 1999, No. 1585).
It is a great pleasure for me to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mr. Wells.
I have requested formal consideration of the instrument because the fishing industry is already so weighed down by red tape and regulation that it deserves to be taken into account before the regulations are approved . I want to speak about new schedule 4A, especially part II, in relation to hygiene inspection charges. The new schedule provides for the extension of a charge to the fishing industry for hygiene inspection in compliance with European Community directive 96/43.
Following consultation by the joint food safety and standards group, the regulations implement the directive's provisions. On direct landings, the directive intends to make the first United Kingdom sale of directly landed fishery products a chargeable transaction and to require the vendor—a fishing vessel owner or agent—to submit written returns of landings for each accounting period for which the vendor will be charged. It is regrettable that the directive was not stopped in its tracks in Europe in 1996. The official Opposition will speak in the debate; perhaps they will explain why that did not happen. Apart from bivalve molluscs, fresh fish becomes objectionable before it becomes dangerous.
I do not oppose appropriately recovering costs, but the directive adds bureaucracy, which is disproportionate to the charge that the Government seek to recover. Fishing vessel owners will have to provide evidence of their log book returns to local authorities as well as to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and producer organisations. Rather than employing existing industry structures, namely the Sea Fish Industry Authority, each vessel's owner or agent will be required to submit returns showing the total weight of landings to local authorities. The charge will be levied on that basis. The industry views that as farcical because the owner or agent can recover the charge from the first purchaser of the fish—the fish merchant or processor. Civil debt recovery is available to oblige recalcitrant purchasers to pay the charge, but fishermen believe that that means going along two sides of a triangle rather than directly approaching those required by the directive to pay the charge.
The directive points out:
``hygiene charges shall be collected at the time of first placing on the market unless already collected on landing and shall, in any event, be charged to the first purchaser.''
The National Federation of Fishermen's Organisation believes that the Government have made the collection of the charge unnecessarily complicat ed and that it strays beyond the terms of the directive.
The Sea Fish Industry Authority levy is collected by people who purchase any fish on first-hand sale. It would have been far easier to have tacked the charges on to the system for collection of the sea fish levy, albeit that the levy and landing charges are payable to different authorities. The NFFO has told me—as well as the Minister and the Department of Health—that the Government could have used existing mechanisms and structures to make easier the administrative burden of the collection of the charge.
On the question of timing, I should tell the Committee that fishermen are also unhappy that the Government's detailed implementation legislation was promulgated only one week before the 1 July start date required by the directive. For vessel agents and owners, who will have to adapt software and invoicing procedures, that is a ridiculously short lead time, which has caused and will continue to cause disruption. The NFFO has written to the Minister, asking for the regulations to be introduced after a more reasonable period has elapsed. Will the Minister address the question of timing, and tell the Committee whether the introduction of the regulations could be delayed?
Member states are obliged to collect the hygiene charge from the industry . The charge is set at 1 euro per tonne, which translates, according to the regulations, to 0.66p a tonne. However, a reducible element—fish that has been graded to EC size and freshness standards, as it usually is when landed at ports—is subject to a 55 per cent. rebate. That means that the charge for most white fish is about 31p per tonne. The issue is not so much the level of charge, which is currently moderate, as the cumbersome mechanism adopted for its collection and the fishing industry's concern that the charge will be increased at any time or ratcheted up in future years.
The NFFO has stated that
``what was proposed would apply another layer of unwelcome bureaucracy, was impracticable, inequitable in effect, and would generate the most strenuous resistance.''
It went on to state that the
``fundamental point was that many, perhaps the majority, of vessels will not pay this charge. Vessels of under 10 metres in length (68 per cent. of the fleet in number of vessels) have no legal obligation to complete or submit EC Logsheets. Government has only the most rudimentary means of checking landings from this class of vessel''.
That approach involves a certain amount of fisherman-versus-fisherman activity, as fishermen with larger operations are concerned that they will feel no obligation or desire to meet the levy charge as it is not being imposed on smaller fishermen at the same rate.
The NFFO has also stressed that the Department should consider closely experience of the recent extension of light dues and proposed changes in the under-12 m safety code, to judge the likely response of fishermen to a hygiene tax, albeit one that is set at 31p a tonne. The fishing industry put up a storm of protest about those two impositions, although the under-12 m safety code has been withdrawn and the Government are reflecting on it.
Those examples give a flavour of the type of reception that hygiene charges might meet, even if such reactions are unprovoked. The NFFO claims that many vessels would simply choose not to submit returns unless they are forced to do so by court proceedings. Such an outcome would clearly be regrettable.
I do not wish to get into the disagreement between fish merchants and fishing vessel owners about who is and who is not the first purchaser —there is some debate between the two about the interpretation of the regulations in that regard—but I urge the Minister to accept that the regulations as presently operated place a disproportionate burden on fishermen and that the lack of sufficient advance notice of their detailed content is unacceptable to the industry. It has suffered from a tremendous burden of red tape and regulation over recent years and, for many, this is the final straw.
If the Minister is not persuaded by the weight of my arguments, I would urge her simply to withdraw the regulations to delay their implementati on. In that way, she can at least allow fishermen an opportunity to establish proper software and invoicing mechanisms to cope with the regulations. Secondly, she could promise an early review of the bureaucratic impact of the charges and give a commitment to amend the regulations when she discovers their disproportionate impact on this country's fishermen.
4.40 pm
Mrs. Caroline Spelman (Meriden): It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mr. Wells. I have every confidence that you will put me right. As the Member of Parliament for Meriden—the very middle of England—I am perhaps the least well placed geographically to speak about fishing. I shall perhaps need to prey in aid the help of my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier), who, geographically speaking, is the nearest of my hon. Friends in Committee to the fishing industry.
The Conservative party is keen to place on record its concern about his measure, which is very unwelcome for the crisis-torn fish processing sector. It comes on top of other burdens that have been placed on the industry, such as cuts in quotas and water treatment charges. Those measures have brought many fishermen to a state of near despair. Indeed, Robert Milne, the secretary of the Scottish Fish Merchants Association Ltd. is on the record as saying that he sees in the Government
``no willingness .ÿ.ÿ. to support the industry''.
We want to emphasise the difficulties that that will cause the industry.
We understand that the purpose of the statutory instrument is to avoid the distortion of competition. Of course, we cannot, as the official Oppositi on, advocate a breach in compliance with the treaty of Rome. But—and there is a big but in practical terms—our experience of measures such as that before us is that other countries are less vigilant in applying them. Perhaps the Minister has evidence of the way in which other countries are approaching the enactment of this law, which technically came into force on 1 July. In particular, is there any evidence of how the Mediterranea n fishing industry is applying the directive, given that there has been less willingness to obey the letter of the law in that part of the European Union than there has in our own waters? Is there any evidence of the practice , which is not unusual among our European partners, of bringing in compensato ry measures when a common European directive forces additional charges on the industry? Is there any evidence of delays or reviews of the kind for which the hon. Member for St. Ives (Mr. George) called?
The other cautionary tale that we have learned in dealing with such inspection measures is that we in this country are prone to a touch of gold-plating when it comes to their implementation. I urge the Minister to be on guard against that. Who will carry out the inspections, and what qualifications will the inspectors have? The Minister will recall that we recently debated the Food Standards Bill in Committee. One thing that the Minister of State, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food said about people who were empowered to carry out inspections was that there was not always a level playing field in Europe. He said that the veterinary inspectors used for food standards inspections across the European Union were not always qualified vets. Will the relevant qualifications be uniform throughout the European Union?
There are also inconsistencies in the fish hygiene regulations when compared with the food hygiene regulations that we
debated in the Food Standards Bill Committee. The Government decided not to place a food tax on the food processors in that case, whereas under these regulations a hygiene tax is clearly being placed on fish processors. What is the reason for such inconsistency?
One feature in the regulations that was absent, conversely, from the Food Standards Agency regulation, which provided for similar inspections, is the allowance for an appeals procedure. That is a welcome feature.
Under part II of the regulations, the level of contribution towards the cost of hygiene inspection charges is set, as the hon. Member for St. Ives said, at 1 euro a tonne for the first 50 tonnes of fishery products. When I read that, I thought that the discretionary halving of the charges on more than 50 tonnes would put a disproportionate burden on smaller processors. Will the Minister clarify that point? We certainly do not want to enact a piece of legislation that pits one fisherman against another
—that would be highly undesirable.
We shall not oppose the regulations, because we cannot be seen to advocate something that would place us in breach of the treaty of Rome. However, we draw the Minister's attention to the rather despairing cry of the Scottish fisherman who said of the introduction of these charges:
``Our politicians seem to be out of touch''.
4.46 pm
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