Two minute read from
Councillor Liz Simpson, Labour Councillor for Newbiggin Central and East.
One of the few things the extremely poor
handling of the pandemic has done to improve my lot was to remind me that I
needed to take some exercise daily.
Most days my husband and I wander along the
prom at Newbiggin by the Sea and I look at the improvements to the beach behind
the breakwater planned and delivered by a Labour Council. It reminds me to look
around and see what has been delivered by the current Tory controlled unitary
Council based in Morpeth, and I keep coming back to Paul Daniels and his catchphrase
of ‘not a lot’.
The Newbiggin bay improvements were designed
to save the town from rising sea levels and would be cost prohibitive on a
larger scale, but looking around further I have noticed that the rocks at
Church Point and the Quarry are worn smooth now by the tides and are beginning
to wear faster. So how can we improve fishing for both anglers who bring
tourist pounds, protect our shores and homes whilst helping traditional
communities who rely on an industry lied too in the Brexit deal improve their
lot.
The Euorpeans always expected that they would
retain fishing within UK territorial waters and armed with a confident
assumption that Britain would sell out the industry, reduced fish catches in
the Medditeranean by 20% in 2019 and plan a further 15% reduction this year to
help stocks recover, while investing heavily in inshore fishing reefs and
commercial breeding programs to replenish depleted stocks much more easily in
future while they can still raid UK waters to cover any shortfalls. So with a
Government who appears to have abandoned an industry to simply raise its own
profile, what can we do to help our traditional communities survive?
History and the Welsh,Scottish and Yorkshire
embryonic but growing rapidly, coastal rewilding programs can give us pointers
on some simple things that smaller levels of Government support and investment
from established sources such as the Coastal Communities fund can achieve.
In Scotland, Wales and Yorkshire, the
Government is investing in expanding commercial Oyster production activity and
reseeding oyster beds to protect the coastline. Oysters and the reefs they
develop protect our shores from erosion and filter our coastal waters free from
algae developing a more oxygen rich environment within our inshore
environments, allowing other marine animals and shellfish species to survive
the batterings from rising sea levels, increasing quality fish stocks into the
bargain.
In the past, history shows that huge oyster
beds and their ecosystems protected our shores from Tynemouth to the Firth of
Forth and now that better and more effective sewage treatment by Northumbria
Water is online, they can again.
The benefits for Northumberland and North
Tyneside if rewilding projects got underway would offset the cost particularly
in areas reliant on tourism as sea angling is still a huge draw for the Tourist
Pound.
As the County Councillor for a traditional
fishing community I would really like to see any rewilding program start here
in Newbiggin by the Sea and will push for it over the next four years. It would
be nice to be able to watch as other shellfish began to revive and save the
rocky shoreline around my Town. But wherever a program begins we would all
benefit in some way and the spin off is that once oyster ecosystems become
established they spread to surrounding areas.
