Brexit: Fisheries (EUC Report)

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2017 Grand Committee

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the sub-committee on an excellent and very interesting report and welcome, in particular, the opening remarks of noble Lord, Lord Teverson, about the opportunity that this represents and about the need to manage being crucial to delivering an improved fisheries policy.

It is worth starting with the point that, despite recent improvements that have been mentioned, the common fisheries policy has been an abject failure in comparison with other policies around the world. Some 80% of EU fish stocks are still overfished, which compares without about 25% globally. EU catches are 25% below their peak in 1997. Most other fisheries are getting better at managing stocks. The EU is getting better, but it is rather too slow, and 1 million tonnes of fish have been thrown back in some years, which is equivalent to 2 billion fish dinners.

Rightly or wrongly, the common fisheries policy was seen as a great act of betrayal in 1973, so it is symbolically important that we should regain control of it in leaving the EU and that we should resume our full place on the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission alongside Norway, Iceland, Russia, Greenland, the Faroe Islands and, of course, the European Union.

The report states:

“The UK Government will be in a position to renegotiate its quota of Total Allowable Catches”.


Can the Minister explain how that point interacts with the historic rights issue raised by a number of other speakers—in particular, the sale of fishing licences to foreign vessels over the past few decades? I do not fully understand that spider’s web myself. The organisation which I think is called fishermen for Britain says that 70% of the total allowable catch is likely to come back; some are bound still to remain in foreign hands. Is that number right, and what can we expect?

My main point is that, outside the perverse incentives of the common fisheries policy, which has imposed rather than evolved solutions to fisheries management top-down, whether from politicians or scientists, we should be in a position to design from first principles, on a blank sheet of paper, using best practice from recent experience around the world, a system of fisheries management that works much better. In taking best practice from around the world in casting the net as wide as we can, we should take into account the possibilities opened by new technology, in particular, to make fisheries management much more robust and sustainable than it has been in the past.

I want to touch on two examples of good practice from around the world that emphasise individual as opposed to national quotas. The first is the Falklands, which fortunately has something to do with this country, where the squid fishery was a free for all from 1986; by 2007, it was decided to impose individually transferable quotas, whereby each vessel bought a proportion of a total quota and was able to transfer it through sale. Since it was a proportion, it could increase in total tonnage. Therefore, they had skin in the game—they had the right incentives, and they were interested in policing the management of the fishery themselves. It has turned into a highly sustainable and successful fishery, economically and ecologically; it is very productive, and it deals with the problem that is rightly addressed in the report, that of shared stock. In this case, it deals with the illex squid, which come in from Argentinian waters at a certain time of year. Likewise, a similar system is working extremely well in South Georgia.

The other system, which is slightly different, is in the Faroe Islands, at the other end of the Atlantic, which regulates fishery by days at sea—by regulating effort rather than catch—and insisting that all catches be landed on shore so as to be able to check that there is no bad practice going on at sea. Again, it is crucial that those days at sea are transferable between vessels; in a sense, you can sell your days at sea.

In both cases, the Falklands and the Faroes, real-time information is being used to manage the fisheries. Instead of politicians sitting around a table in Brussels at two o’clock in the morning using two year-old data to decide a quota, in the Falklands there is live transmission of data overnight on what each boat is catching. Any vessel taking on too much by-catch is moved on the next morning. Iceland does the same thing at an hour’s notice. So technology has brought great improvements as a management tool, with transponders on vessels and things like cameras on nets.

In designing that blank sheet, we need to take into account the latest science on no-take zones. It seems clear that, if you shut off certain parts of the ocean from fishing, you have remarkably good effects on the ability of stocks to replenish themselves, as long as you choose the zones carefully. Practice around the world has proved surprisingly successful in that respect.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that we are seeing competition increasing for taking fish in the sea. What I mean by that is that seal and whale numbers are recovering remarkably well throughout the north Atlantic. For example, off Iceland, humpback whale numbers have gone from 1,800 in 1987 to 14,000 today. They are now eating 6 million tonnes of fish around Iceland. That compares with the total Icelandic catch of 1.5 million tonnes, so the whales—all of the whales, not just the humpback whales—are taking four times as many fish as the fishing fleet. That does not mean that we should kill all the whales or anything like that, but it does mean that we have to take these factors into account.

The UK grey seal population has grown from 30,000 in 1985 to roughly 100,000 today. Of course, as was mentioned by my noble friend Lady Wilcox, that is all pointing in the direction of aquaculture. It is very important to note that the proportion of fish eaten in the world that comes from farmed, as opposed to wild, fish—I had very nice piece of farmed salmon for lunch today—is now about 50%. It is overtaking wild fish, and that is the right way to go, because it worked on land to go from hunting-gathering to agriculture, and it will work in the sea as well, although, of course, marine aquaculture still depends heavily on wild-caught fish as a feed stock.