Chamber and committees

My question is for DS Telford, who has raised some interesting questions.

DS Telford, I realise that you are not here to say what the law should be, but we have discussed whether some of the complications that you have talked about would exist if a limit of two dogs was applied to rough shoots so that there could only be two dogs at a shoot. Whether that proposal is right or wrong, I am interested to know, given that we have discussed it, whether you think that it would be a simpler and more enforceable solution.

However, you would not be open to vexatious allegations in the hypothetical situation in which you had only two dogs.

I am the MSP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar.

The Government has offered some clarification on the proposal to permit two dogs per person on a shoot. I am curious to know what your view is of those clarifications.

In addition, as we have discussed, one of the alternatives to that is to have two dogs per shoot as a whole. Although the witnesses have mentioned this, I would be interested to know what the implications of that would be for a rough shoot. Would it be possible to have a shoot with a limit of two dogs for the shoot as a whole? Would that restrict what you do on wildlife control or would it merely restrict the shoot as a social event?

I have a brief observation. I understand the points that people are making about retrieving birds but, to be clear, the bill is not about birds—it is about mammals. As interesting and useful as those points are, the bill would not touch on them, as far as I understand.

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. I would have put a shilling in the meter and voted no.

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. I would have voted yes. The system would not work.

The disruption to EE’s 4G mobile service, which my constituents in Uig have now been enduring for six weeks, has effectively cut off a huge geographic area from all broadband access and severely impacted on medical and other essential services. Given that, does the minister agree that EE’s response has been truly woeful? Will he commit to facilitating a meeting in Uig between the R100 team and the community?

The on-going coastal state negotiations are of the utmost importance to Scotland’s fishing industry. As others have pointed out, the results of those negotiations will dictate the industry’s short-term opportunities as well as fishing’s future in the longer term and they aim to secure sustainable management of fish stocks in the seas that surround us.

In a country with as rich a coastline as Scotland, it is little wonder that fishing remains a key part of our economy, not least in constituencies such as mine. During the on-going negotiations with neighbouring coastal nations over the strategic management objectives and approaches for shared fish stocks, the Scottish Government is rightly working to achieve the best possible outcome for Scotland’s fishers, coastal communities, the seafood sector as a whole and for our environment.

It is vital that the Scottish Government continues to respond to the key challenges facing Scotland’s fishing industry. There are many of them but I will name a couple of recent ones: the leap in fuel prices over the past year and the impact of labour shortages, which other members have pointed out. It is also important to recognise that the needs of the west coast, such as in my constituency, can differ radically from the needs that are specific to the east coast or northern isles fishing industries.

Inshore fisheries in particular, and the produce that they export, play a vital part in the local economy of the islands. There remains a strong demand for the export of high-quality Scottish fish and seafood, which accounted for an impressive 63 per cent of the UK’s total seafood exports last year.

However, all the available evidence shows us that, in fishing, as in many other areas of our lives, most Scots see Brexit as an extraordinary act of national self-harm to the UK’s economy, hampering our ability to trade efficiently with our closest neighbours. A number of small seafood businesses in my constituency have expressed grave doubts about whether it is now practical to export to the EU at all due to the increase in paperwork, delays and costs that they have experienced since Brexit.

Brexit has, of course, created myriad other issues. Almost every industry is having to contend with the shortage of labour across the country and fishing is no exception. The UK Home Office continues to refuse to engage its common sense on that matter as it clings to its damaging anti-immigration rhetoric at all costs while jobs across countless sectors go unfilled. That affects the long-term viability of many businesses, not least in the fishing industry, and crushes the potential growth that the UK Government insists that it is working to create.

For example, the requirement for overseas labour on many types of fishing vessel is now the norm. Much as we want to recruit from within Scotland, overseas labour is increasingly needed. Following amendments to immigration regulation after Brexit, transit visas have begun to be used regularly to employ fishers, mostly from Ghana and the Philippines, on boats around Scotland. The Home Office is now closing the loophole—as it sees it—that allows those visas to be used in that way and, more significantly, in response to allegations of human rights abuse aboard a handful of UK fishing vessels where transit visas have been in use.

It remains a mystery to me—as it clearly does to Fergus Ewing and to many others, I am sure—what the Labour Party’s position is on labour coming from other countries or, indeed, what it might be on Brexit more broadly.

In the time that I have left, I underline my hope that the Scottish Government will continue to engage proactively with the UK Government on such issues. However, the labour force issue is just one example of the avalanche of challenges that Scotland’s fishing industry currently faces. They provide a context for the negotiations that we are discussing in the debate. Such pressures affect all sizes of fishing enterprise and mean that the outcome of this year’s coastal states negotiations has never been more important.

When it comes to protecting our marine environment and ensuring the continued viability of the fishing sector in Scotland’s coastal communities, it is not a question of either/or; we must work to find the correct balance for both the fishing industry and the environment. The key role of fishing in Scotland’s rural and coastal economies must be preserved and encouraged and our marine environment protected. It is my hope that this year’s coastal states negotiations will be an opportunity to be proactive in ensuring the long-term sustainability of our seas’ fish stocks and of our fishing industry.