UK government fisheries minister Daniel Zeichner (pictured above) acknowledged the importance of multi-year funding at an event hosted jointly by the All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) on Fisheries and Shellfish Aquaculture. The online event on Wednesday, 25 June focused on ensuring that the £360m Fishing and Coastal Growth Fund would provide effective, targeted funding for the fishing and seafood sector.
Daniel Zeichner said that the government saw the fund as something to support the next generation, listing investing in technology, upskilling the future workforce and promoting the seafood sector as key areas, but emphasised that ‘maximum involvement’ from the industry in designing the fund was required to ‘make sure that we get the best from it’.
He noted that there were ‘lessons to be learned from some of the previous schemes, such as the UK Seafood
Fund’, including that ‘early meaningful engagement is key to making it work’, which he said the government had been attempting from the outset on this occasion.
The minister said that ‘multi-year funding is really important, which is why we have announced it over a long period of time’ and that he was ‘concerned that smaller-scale operators don’t miss out’, suggesting he had been listening to some of the concerns recently raised by the fishing federations.
On the point that the government could not actually guarantee the funding beyond the end of this parliament, he acknowledged there could be ‘no presumption’ Labour would be in power for the full 12 years for which the fund is proposed to run, but that ‘it will last for this parliament and, should we be in government in the next parliament, it will last through the next parliament too’. He also hoped there would be ‘cross-party consensus’ on the funding continuing.
In terms of measuring success, Daniel Zeichner said: “If we can get this fund to work for a number of different places and a number of different people, that would feel like it’s a success for me.”
APPG for Shellfish Aquaculture chair Caroline Voaden MP (Liberal Democrat, South Devon) asked how the minister would ensure that the money goes to fishing and seafood-related projects and not to coastal communities more generally – for example, to pay for street lighting or public toilets.
The minister responded that he was ‘very conscious’ of this. He noted that ‘it won’t just be my decision, because obviously in the end, it is the secretary of state that oversees this’, but said he was ‘making a very strong case for it to be strongly allocated towards the fishing sector’.
Daniel Zeichner referred to food security – also part of his ministerial responsibilities – on several occasions, setting out the logic that he uses with his colleagues in government that ‘if one takes the point that food security matters, we have to find ways of making sure that we can also make those industries work’.
He said that the food system has an important role to play in resilience and national security, noting: “We are fortunate to be on an island surrounded by sustainable low-carbon food sources, which we need to make the most of.”
He welcomed the suggestion that the Fisheries APPG would gather evidence from the industry and make a submission.
At the conclusion of the session, APPG on Fisheries co- chair Melanie Onn MP (Labour, Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes) said that the APPGs ‘should be unequivocal’ in saying that the Fishing and Coastal Growth Fund ‘is for fishing and for fishing communities’.
She added: “I think it would help the minister if we are able to have a collective view on that, and make that something that is a red line in our level of expectation from government.”
This story was taken from the latest issue of Fishing News. For more up-to-date and in-depth reports on the UK and Irish commercial fishing sector, subscribe to Fishing News here or buy the latest single issue for just £3.50 here.
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