Fisheries: EU Landing Obligation (European Union Committee Report)

Duke of Montrose Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2020 Lords Chamber

[The Duke of Montrose (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to sit on the committee and to follow the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. As a member of the committee which produced the two reports, I express my admiration for the patience and stoicism of our chairman, who has waited patiently for the opportunity to bring them before your Lordships.

We can also thank the staff of the committee, who amassed evidence from far and near for our consideration. It has been quite a revelation to hear from scientists and fishermen’s representatives of all sorts about how they view the regulations they currently have to deal with. As the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, pointed out, we are considering such a swiftly moving topic, and even more time has now elapsed since our last report, so it is equally as dated as our first one was. Perhaps the current developments that my noble friend the Minister, who we welcome to the Dispatch Box, can give us will serve as an update as to where the industry sees the progress.

Perhaps it is going back a little far, but I want to look at how the situation developed. By including our fishing waters as a way to secure our entry into the Common Market, we opened up a rich vein of opportunity for fishermen from all around Europe, but there was no desire to oversee or conserve the fish stocks. Gradually, elements of the stock were eroded to a point where recovery was in question. In those early days, it was almost inconceivable that rational controls could be imposed. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, pointed out what we in Scotland call the thrawn nature of fishermen; they were most unlikely to accept any kind of imposed direction. Who knew where the fish, the boats or the stocks were, or what chance the fishermen actually had of catching them?

In the intervening years, great effort and quantities of new technology have begun to offer the answers to some of these questions, but this has progressed to the present crisis. I think we are all familiar with the fact that, when Brussels sees a problem with a production system, the time-honoured policy is to impose standards and rules and to introduce quotas. It then comes down to enforcement of the rules if they are not adhered to, and the enforcement is ultimately pretty draconian. A number of your Lordships are, like me, familiar with the scene in my own industry of agriculture, where all support and finance can be withdrawn for relatively small infringements.

Fishing has, for some time, seen quotas and they have been complied with, but the practical way compliance was achieved was by discards of overquota landings or unwanted species. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, has just quantified what that amounted to. This is a totally destructive way to look after a finite resource. The immediate remedy appears to be to ban discards. In our reports, we worked out how this would work in practice and suggested ways that the Government could most efficiently implement this ban. It appeared that the Government were quite ready to ignore our recommendations. I think I can say that most of us on the committee were dismayed to find that, within the UK and more widely in other European countries, the letter of the regulation was not being enforced.

The difficulty for the fishing industry that is now apparent is that, with a large proportion of fishermen being involved in mixed fisheries, if one species has a restricted or no quota and you are likely to catch them, the result of compliance will mean the closing down of the enterprise. What could be more draconian than that? As we now pass the first anniversary of the policy, it is a good moment to assess what has worked out.

It appears that the fishing industry in general is profoundly dissatisfied with the discard regulation. Scotland administers the largest part of the UK’s marine economic zone, and I have taken an interest in it for a great many years. I took the opportunity to find out what the experience of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation has been. The good news is that the fishery managed to complete the year within quota, and with no fishermen suffering through having to abandon their activity because of choke—which was explained by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. At the same time, the fishermen can see that, next year, with their cod quota being halved, there will be serious problems for the industry within a few months.

The federation asked me to look at a paper put out by the Shetland Fishermen’s Association last April. It sees the approach of the present regulation as being based on the idea that fishermen can easily choose which fish to catch and which not to. In a mixed fishery, this is an impossibility. The association shows considerable approval for the way discarding is managed in Norwegian fisheries, where they suddenly voiced a policy of no discards but with a regime of exceptions which reduces this to the absolute minimum. One outstanding aspect, in its idea, is that there should be rules on discards but a requirement to record all discards, so that these can be taken into account when assessing the overall health of the stock. The association goes as far as to suggest that there is a role for having observers on boats, who can report on the circumstances surrounding discards. But it certainly thinks that all discards should be recorded. In general terms this appears to be favoured by the Scottish federation, but certainly the fishing industry is looking for a new approach. Can the Minister and his officials look into this?