White, Fish and Herring Industries (Grants)

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 16 July 1963.

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Photo of Mr Anthony Crosland Mr Anthony Crosland , Grimsby 12:00, 16 July 1963

The hon. Member's knowledge is slightly out of date in this respect.

The three points which I want to make are all brief. First, looking back to 1962, the trouble with the industry was quite simply that production went up and consumption went down. Those are the two main figures which stand out in the calculations, and they led to lower average values for production. There are two possible alternative ways of dealing with this. One is the way which the British Trawlers Federation wants, which is to reduce production, and the other is to do something about increasing consumption. I very much agree with those hon. Members who have stressed that there cannot be any question of accepting some B.T.F. inspired restriction plan until far more has been done by the industry itself to improve the distribution and marketing side and to increase consumption by increasing quality and the efficiency of distribution.

The second point concerns the Minister's remark about subsidies coming to 10 per cent. of gross income. When I pressed him on this, he went on to say that profits in the industry were virtually zero so that the subsidy amounted to the whole of the industry's profit, as it were. This gives a correct impression provided that one is not thinking in terms of actual financial units in the industry. If one is thinking in terms of trawlers, it gives an accurate impression, but if the trawlers are owned by particular firms and one then thinks in terms of those firms, it gives a rather false impression.

For the two largest firms in the industry, Ross and Associated, trawling amounts to less than 50 per cent. of group turnover. Ross Group trawling is only about 8½per cent. of total group turnover and for Associated the figure is about 38 per cent. Most of the rest of the turnover is perfectly profitable and although these two companies had a bad year in 1962, with a decline in profits, over the last five years—and I am happy to say this because the prosperity of Grimsby is founded upon them to a considerable extent—there has been a substantial rise in trading profit, net profit, and the amounts earned on ordinary capital and paid on ordinary capital.

This has always been one of the difficulties about subsidies. We all want to pay subsidies to the industry, but this involves paying money to companies making very healthy levels of profits. I do not know a way out of this. It would be very hard to discriminate between one company and another and it may be that there is no solution, but it remains an anxiety about the whole subsidy scheme that while all the money goes to individual vessels which need it some goes to companies which do not.

The third point is that we have heard a lot from the British Trawlers Federation and others about the threats which imports pose to the prosperity of the industry. But imports cannot be used as the scapegoat for 1962, because in that year they showed a rather surprising and sharp decline. One of the few encouraging things about 1962 was that it was a year in which the balance of imports and exports for the fishing industry changed substantially in our favour. There was a marked decline in imports and a marked increase in exports.

I very much welcome this increase because a Grimsby firm, Britfish, is largely responsible for it. It has been extremely go-ahead in opening up markets in frozen fish, in Soviet Russia and Australia particularly, but all over the world. It is an encouraging sign that these efforts are now beginning to reflect themselves in steadily rising export figures.