Fisheries Bill (First sitting) Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateAlan Brown
Main Page: Alan Brown (Scottish National Party - Kilmarnock and Loudoun)Department Debates - View all Alan Brown's debates with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
(5 years, 8 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesQ
Barrie Deas: On increased fishing opportunities and how they could be allocated, for a number of reasons, including case law in the English courts, but also the stewardship that comes along with rights of tenure, which have been an important factor in stabilising our fisheries over the last 20 years, our federation takes the view that for existing quota it should remain the same, but for additional quota we think there is a conversation to be had on the most appropriate use of that. There is a range of options.
Perhaps we are being a bit narrow here. You alluded to the division line at under-10, which has, I think, caused distortions in the fleet and unintended consequences —you have a cohort of high-catching under-10s, sometimes called rule beaters or super-under-10s, that have kind of distorted fishing patterns. There is recognition that we need to move beyond that now. In that context, there is an issue about how you define genuine small boats—genuine low-impact vessels—and I accept that. My organisation would be very interested in taking them out of the quota system altogether. That does not mean not taking into account their contribution to mortality. In a sense, it is a reversion to what we had in the early days of under-10 metre management, where sufficient quota was allocated and we did not have to have monthly quotas for that class of vessels. There is a very interesting conversation to be had about the future and new entrants and how the genuine low-impact fleets fit into that.
Equal access has been an important principle and there are dissatisfactions wherever you have a nomadic fleet arriving on the doorstep of a local fishery. That would be true of our boats fishing in bits of Scotland, I suppose, and certainly you hear these kinds of things about Scottish boats fishing off the Northumbrian coast or down in the south-west. Fishermen are competitive. They are competing with each other as well as with foreign fisherman. That is the context in which you have to situate that particular issue.
Bertie Armstrong: Mr Aldous, your question was about new entrants in under-10s. The enabler for a better deal for new entrants in under-10s will be the uplift in opportunity for fishing that comes with Brexit; otherwise, we presumably have fixed the problems already with the fishing opportunity available. The situation is different as you go around the coast. The small-vessel fleet in Scotland has a different character and tends to use creels, or pots, to catch shellfish—that is a great generalisation; there are others—so there is a different set of problems. It is generally inshore and small scale and is therefore best sorted out locally, but I think there will be a better deal for all with the uplift in opportunity.
There is another abiding principle here. If you are going to make alterations to arrangements for fishing, the fish need to be there to be caught. It is one thing to give someone tons of fish; it is quite another if the fish are not there in prime condition with a business plan for getting them landed and into a logistics chain. Much is made of the big mackerel catchers in the pelagic fleet, and much is made of rather lurid statistics about what percentage is held by what number. You cannot catch 250,000 tonnes of mackerel in winter, 100 miles to the west of the British Isles, with hand line under-10s—you simply cannot. But a few hundred tonnes to the hand line under-10s, provided the local arrangements pay attention to making sure there is a whole logistics chain and they are going to get that fish to a place where somebody wants it, is where the opportunity lies.
My final input, on behalf of slightly larger-scale fishing, is: be careful what you mean by low impact. The carbon footprint per kilogram of fish of a pelagic trawler catching mackerel is very much smaller than any other form of fishing, because you catch volume efficiently and quickly. There are many aspects to this.
In answer to the question, yes, there is extra opportunity, but there has to be extra opportunity to distribute. The problems are largely regional and should be sorted out regionally. We need to be careful not to place excessive detail on the face of the Bill. I suggest that a lot of this is best done by secondary legislation.
Q
Bertie Armstrong: I would wish to dispense with the flexibility to extend for fishing the implementation period by placing a date on the face of the Bill. There will undoubtedly be some resistance, but that would not be up to me. That is why we would like to see that in there. We are on record as being less than completely happy that the implementation period applies to fishing at all, because legal sovereignty over the waters and the resource therein comes on Brexit day. However, we are where we are, and we recognise that the withdrawal agreement has compromises all over the place. We therefore, with reluctance, accepted the implementation period compromise, but we would not wish to see it extended at all.
The backstop has been much described, particularly over the last few days. Clarity is helpful on what happens. There are two preconditions: if the backstop clicks in and is applied and there is no fisheries agreement in place by that stage, and there is no prescription of what is in the fisheries agreement, tariffs will apply. Fishing will be cherry-picked out of the trade arrangements. Tariffs will apply to fish—which, by the way, the Scottish Government study indicates would not necessarily be a terminal problem—and access to our waters for other UK fleets would cease. So it would be a mess of large proportions and we are rather hoping that it would not apply.
I see some puzzlement about the lack of access for anybody else. If there is no fisheries agreement—and there is precedent on this, with EU-Norway arrangements, for instance—there is no access to each other’s waters.
May I lay down a red line, particularly for our detailed consideration of the Bill, starting next week? The backstop and all that is not in the Bill. Those are, of course, important matters and they do have some relevance to and bearing on it, but our purpose today—and, indeed, during the process of consideration in detail, as of next week—is to consider in detail the words that are on the face of the Bill. Therefore, next week I will take a tough line on the broader political considerations and say that they are, I am afraid, simply out of order. They are important, but let us focus on the Bill.
Q
Bertie Armstrong: To be honest, that is not where our focus lies at this point in time; it is on making sure that the Bill as an enabler of—I will use the phrase “the sea of opportunity”—makes it on to the statute book, rather than on the details of what does and does not happen to Northern Ireland in the event of a backstop.
Going back to Mr Pollard’s question about UK vessels landing elsewhere, for example Norway, can you say a little about what motivates fishermen to land elsewhere? What changes are required in our ports or onshore infrastructure to make landing in the UK more attractive, and is that covered by the Bill?
Barrie Deas: Money. That’s it, really. [Laughter] I had better say a bit more. Over the last 20 years, markets for fish have developed and diversified. Peterhead has become the pre-eminent white fish port in Europe. Flat fish tends to go to Urk in the Netherlands. South-west ports are sending prime, high-value fish to the continent, and then there is the shellfish market. From time to time there will be price differentials. Also, it can reflect where the vessel is fishing: for example, it might make sense to go to Denmark and land for one trip and then land back into Peterhead for the next, or to land into France. Fishermen are commercial animals. They are very much driven by catching fish but also by marketing fish, and price is key.
Bertie Armstrong: I would reinforce that. At the slight risk of crossing the red line again, and as I keep saying, the elevation of the UK to the world stage would mean that, in the simple arithmetic of volume and value, we would overtake Iceland. It would allow us the sort of conditions that our own processing industry would want to entice not only all our own landings but perhaps some from others as well. However, it is a matter of commerce and business, generally.
Q
Martin Salter: We are not calling for that to be in the Bill; it would tie the Minister’s hands. If we are to adopt world-leading sustainable fishery management practice, it is important that Ministers and decision makers are able to take the best scientific advice without having to come back to Parliament to change quotas and reallocate bass stocks from 30% recreational to 37% recreational, for example. That clearly would not work. They have to have that power, but that is why it is important that we put a duty in the Bill for Ministers to set sustainability targets.
The point about resource sharing is more about achieving an optimal economic and societal return for the stock. I find it very sad that protected species such as the grey mullet that we see swimming around harbours in the UK have very little commercial value, yet at times of spawning aggregations we see entire year classes of those stocks totally netted, flooding the market and getting less than £2 a kilo. This is a slow-growing species: a grey mullet takes anything from 10 to 12 years to achieve a size that makes it a useful recreational angling target. It is a very poor use of that resource. As a good business calculation, which is the better use of that stock? Would reserving more of it for recreation give us more jobs for the UK economy—more bites for our buck, if you like? That is something that good fishery management practice would seek to achieve. It will not be achieved by legislation as such, but it could be assisted by a power and duty for fishery Ministers.
That is a complication, because trying to get a legislative framework that gives that certainty—
Order. We are strictly limited by time and it is now 11.25 am, so I fear I have to call this evidence session to an end. The Committee will meet again at 2 pm. The Committee Room will be locked in the meantime, so hon. Members may leave their papers here if they wish. I thank the witnesses very much indeed for their useful evidence.