Common Fisheries Policy

Baroness Primarolo Excerpts

Thursday 15th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

I have been listening carefully to my hon. Friend. My constituency is miles from the coast, but it does seem that the CFP is a disaster and that things are going to be really dreadful. A little fisherman—one in the under-10 metre fleet—will have to be illegal or will go out of business, as is clear in Lowestoft. Does he agree with that perception?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. Before the hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) starts speaking again, may I remind hon. Members that we have an 11-minute time limit? We are going to overshoot because of interventions, so either the interventions will have to decrease or the time limit will go down. Time has not been docked from the hon. Gentleman, but we will not conclude this debate on time if we do not follow that approach.

[Peter Aldous]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I agree entirely with what my hon. Friend has just said.

We also need to have regard to our fish stocks. Three quarters of the EU fish stocks are over-fished, and only eight of 47 fish stocks in UK waters are in a healthy state. There is a need to protect spawning grounds and to manage fisheries responsibly.

Fisheries from the Mediterranean to the sub-Arctic are so varied that a one-size-fits-all approach cannot continue. There is a need for a range of tailored measures designed to suit the needs of individual fisheries. Maria Damanaki’s vision of the EU as a lighthouse, with member states steering the ship, is the course that we should look to pursue. There is a need to involve local fishermen, such as those in Lowestoft, to make full use of their expertise and knowledge, which has been built up over generations. They should be working alongside scientists, such as those at the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science, which is also in Lowestoft.

The European Commission has stated that it wants a scientifically set maximum sustainable yield for all fisheries to be in operation by 2015, while the Environment Food and Rural Affairs Committee has questioned whether that is realistic and whether we should instead be aiming for 2020. I am aware that in reaching that conclusion the Committee has carried out much research and its approach is underpinned by pragmatism, but I am worried about whether the recommendation sends out the right message. Commercial fishing in many of Britain’s coastal communities is in the last-chance saloon and some fish stocks are severely depleted. There is no time to waste. We need to be tackling the problems that we face now, putting in place a more sustainable management regime as quickly as possible.

The campaign to eliminate discards should be stepped up as soon as practically possible. That is what the nation wants and as their representatives we must do all that we can to deliver. There is no single solution; there is a need for a range of measures. We should develop new markets for less valued species. Consumers and retailers have responded positively in this regard in the last year and the Government need to work with them to go a step further. For example, we should be considering clearer labelling so that shoppers can make informed purchasing choices. An extension of the catch quota system that the Minister has piloted should be considered, alongside the adoption of more selective fishing practices as trialled in CEFAS’s Project 50%. Fishermen should also be making full use of modern technology, using the equipment that organisations such as CEFAS are developing.

There is a need to win over the hearts and minds of groups and countries that might see things differently. MEPs have a role to play and, indeed, in the east of England, Geoffrey Van Orden is doing that work in Brussels, while through the media Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is taking his campaign on to the international stage in France, Germany and Poland and, some might say, going into the lion’s den in Spain.

An issue about which I feel strongly is quotas, the system through which the domestic industry is managed. The current arrangements are discredited and do not work in a fair and equitable way. The fish in our seas are a public resource yet they seem to have acquired proprietorial rights with companies and organisations, often with no connection to fishing, leasing them out for substantial profit. The under-10 metre boats that make 76% of the domestic fleet have access to only 3% of quota.

--- Later in debate ---

[Barry Gardiner]

rose—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. Would the hon. Gentleman ensure that he faces the Chair when replying to that intervention? I could not catch everything he said when he responded to the previous one.

[Barry Gardiner]

Yes, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Of course ecosystems interact with each other, and in so far as the hon. Gentleman makes that point it is absolutely unexceptional. None the less, scientists and fishermen look at those ecosystems. Of course there are migratory stocks, straddling stocks, nurseries where fish spawn and spawning grounds that need to be protected, but the point is to look at this as part of the ecosystem and not simply to divide it up into national countries’ interests. We need a regionalised framework based around significant ecosystems so that we can manage those stocks more effectively.

At present, even detailed technical decisions are taken centrally in Europe. The Lisbon treaty provides that the EU has exclusive competence under the CFP. However, the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee report makes an interesting case for a lawful way of qualifying the EU’s exclusive competence over the conservation of marine resources, thereby creating a framework for genuine regionalisation. It argues that exclusive competence does not apply where the CFP does not apply. Therefore, if the CFP regulations were amended to exclude certain marine conservation policies, the scope of the exclusive competence would be limited to the amended CFP.

The establishment of regional advisory councils is cited as a key success of the 2002 CFP reform because they have served as forums for stakeholders to inform policy implementation at a regional level. The trouble is that they have no decision-making powers. Although the draft basic regulation that sets out the main rules for the CFP would address centralised decision making through a combination of multi-annual plans and regionalisation of decision making, I think that a fully regionalised management system should include the following features: quotas allocated on the basis of ecosystem regions in order to manage fishing pressures according to the necessities of those different ecosystems; regular scientific assessment of all marine species, not just fish stocks, within a given eco-region in order to establish the impact of fishing on the ecosystem as a whole; and quota allocation on the basis of eco-regions with different licences used in different ecosystem regions and with no transfers between those regions.

Certain decision-making powers need to be devolved to regional management bodies in order to tailor the application of central policy objectives for EU fisheries to the specifics of each ecosystem. The main tool for fisheries management is the annual setting of total allowable catches. Currently, the European Commission requests scientific advice for the establishment of fisheries management plans on the basis of sustainability. However, the European Council is under no obligation to adhere to that advice when agreeing total annual quotas for stocks.

The result is that the European Fisheries Council sets total allowable catch limits that are on average 34% higher than scientifically recommended sustainable limits. In the period 1987 to 2011, European Fisheries Ministers set fishing quotas above scientific recommendations in 68% of their decisions. In the case of one hake stock, quotas were set 1,100% higher than scientists advised.

Over-fishing has made the fishing industry economically vulnerable, but over-fishing does not have just economic costs; it has social and environmental ones as well. At the Johannesburg world summit on sustainable development in 2002, the EU committed to achieving MSY—maximum sustainable yield—for all fish stocks by 2015 at the latest, but in 2010 it estimated that 72% of its fisheries remained over-fished, with 20% fished beyond safe biological limits, risking the wholesale collapse of those fisheries.

The zero draft for the forthcoming United Nations sustainable development conference in Rio calls on states to maintain or restore depleted fish stocks to sustainable levels, and further to commit to implementing science-based management plans to rebuild stocks by 2015.

The EU marine strategy framework directive requires that all EU fisheries achieve good environmental status by 2020, including the attainment of sustainable fishing levels for all stocks.

[Barry Gardiner]

Discards have been widely debated in this Chamber, and I shall try to come on to that issue, but time is limited, so I must press on. I acknowledge the force of the hon. Gentleman’s remarks, however.

MSY is the largest catch that can be sustained over the long term, but there is FMSY and BSMY, fishing maximum sustainable yield and biomass maximum sustainable yield. The argument that I made to the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil), who speaks for the Scottish National party, was precisely to that point, because we can go on getting FMSY out of a small stock, but if we want to achieve the largest possible catch we need to build the biomass MSY to ensure that we then get a sustainable yield out of that much larger biomass.

That is why I absolutely urge the Minister to support Commissioner Damanaki in saying that we have to achieve FMSY by 2015, albeit that biomass MSY might not be achieved until sometime after that—I hope as soon as possible, but no later than 2020, as the stocks demand.

Achieving that aim by 2015 will necessitate the following key measures: first, rendering scientific advice binding, thus preventing quotas from exceeding biologically sustainable limits; and, secondly, introducing stock assessments and management plans for all fish and shellfish, including non-commercial species that are currently unmanaged, in order to establish sustainable limits for harvesting. Ensuring that all fish and shellfish are harvested at sustainable levels is an absolute prerequisite of the future profitability and survival of EU fisheries.

But we also need to think about the issue in terms of biomass—something that the Committee’s report does not address. A biomass MSY is the biomass that can support the harvest of that maximum sustainable yield. Achieving MSY as set out in the draft CFP means rebuilding fish populations to a level of biomass maximum sustainable yield in order to support the level of annual catches—and viable fishing communities, their economies and their social needs.

In an effort to limit fishing to sustainable levels, EU regulations under the common fisheries policy prohibit the landing of commercial species above a given annual quota. In practice, however, that often results in the discarding of thousands of tonnes of saleable fish—but just at the point when I am about to answer the question asked by the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George), I fear, Madam Deputy Speaker, that you are going to tell me that I have run out of time.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. Absolutely spot-on. The hon. Gentleman is quite correct.