Fisheries Bill (Second sitting)

George Eustice Excerpts

Tuesday 4th December 2018 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

I shall hand over to the Minister for the first questions.

[The Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (George Eustice)]

Q60 This morning we heard in evidence that the principle of relative stability had served the inshore fleet particularly badly because of the data and the absences of data in the ’70s and ’80s when the track record was established. What are the key priorities of the inshore sector as we leave the European Union and set our own domestic policy?

Jerry Percy: We have long argued that relative stability needed to be reviewed, primarily because of the very bad deal that the under-10-metre sector has always had in the UK, not just because of relative stability but because of the way in which quota was allocated back in the ’90s, when we did not have a seat at the table and therefore, despite being nearly 80% of the fleet, ended up with less than 2% of the overall UK quota. Relative stability really does need to change.

Our priorities are, overall, to ensure that the under-10-metre fleet—unquestionably, it has been massively disenfranchised over the past few decades—comes out of it with a significantly increased allocation. We have argued strongly that the current method for allocating quota is unfair and discriminates against the under-10s, and of course the myriad coastal communities they support. I have been in the fishing industry as a fishermen and in other roles off and on for over 40 years, and I have seen the demise of any number of coastal communities, the fleets that they supported and the people who supported them over that period. Our main aim is to ensure that the under-10s specifically get a fair deal come the new horizon.

[George Eustice]

Q On management, we outlined a number of ideas in the White Paper. Some have suggested that we should move away from a Marine Management Organisation-administered under-10-metre pool and towards a producer organisation for the inshore sector. What is your view of such an approach?

Jerry Percy: You will not be surprised to hear that I am very supportive of the idea, having written the initial paper back in 2012. There is absolutely no doubt about that. To put it into perspective, at the moment I gather that the UK has had infraction proceedings served upon it by the European Commission for failure to manage and regulate its producer organisations adequately. I have not seen the detail but I would have thought that the Commission was concerned that, despite the fact that the coastal PO—the producer organisation dedicated to the under-10-metre sector—has had official recognition by the UK Government and by the Commission for over a year, we are still refused the ability to manage the quota of our own members. This is particularly important with the run-up to the landings obligation, where the ability to acquire quota retrospectively will be vital.

With the greatest respect to the Marine Management Organisation, the disparity between the rationale for MMO management of quota and that by the producer organisations, which are very focused on the commercial benefits of their particular members, is huge. This has resulted in this year to date, for example, in only just over 50% of the under-10-metre quota actually being fished, although that is down to a number of issues. One of them is undoubtedly the inflexibility in the Government trying to manage the quota, so I am particularly supportive of the coastal PO.

I fail to understand why the Government have not permitted us to have exactly the same rights—no more; no fewer—as the existing POs. In fact, in your own words, Sir, in a letter earlier this year, you said that as soon as we had the correct infrastructure in place you would like to see us going ahead and doing this sort of management. We have had the infrastructure in place for a considerable amount of time, yet we are still refused the ability to manage for the benefit of our members.

[George Eustice]

Q But do you accept that there could be more than one PO covering the inshore sector?

Jerry Percy: I do not think so.

[George Eustice]

Q You shouldn’t force everyone to join it if they don’t want to.

Jerry Percy: No, there is always a choice about whether you join a producer organisation or not. To be honest, there is absolutely no reason why any under-10 metre vessel even slightly reliant on quota should not join the coastal PO. The membership fee is £1. More importantly, however, membership should give those vessels access to far more flexible and user-oriented management of their quota, rather than the current situation.

[George Eustice]

Q I have two other points that we raised in the White Paper that I want your views on. First, do you think that the under-10-metre category is still the right criteria to use, or should we look at other measures, such as engine capacity or the zone in which they fish, so that there would be a different way of defining the artisanal, small-scale fleet? Secondly, we have obviously had quite a lot of representations about the possibility of moving more to an effort-based regime for the inshore fleet rather than a quota system. What is your view of that?

Jerry Percy: In response to your first question, there is no doubt that the arbitrary under-10/over-10 metre divider has been an unnecessary nuisance, frankly, especially as time has gone on. Yes, 20 or 30 years there was a very significant difference between what was in the ’90s a much more artisanal fleet and today’s under-10 metre boats, which can be 9.99 metres and highly efficient. One of the purposes of developing the coastal PO initiative was that, rather like other examples one might think about in the current climate, you tend not to go to war with people you are trading with, and there has always been a difference of opinion between under-10s and over-10s and their POs.

Losing the 10-metre measure in the fullness of time would be a very positive step forward. Clearly, if you look at the breakdown of the under-10s, which are some thousands of vessels, you see that the vast majority are less than 8 metres in length, and again you can go down. So there is a strong argument for taking any boat up to 6 metres completely out of the quota system, whether or not you replace it with something like effort management. I can speak from experience. While a modern under-10 metre boat has a very significant fishing capacity, far in excess of what it would have been 20 or 30 years ago, it remains the case that boats that are less than 18 feet would really struggle to make any significant impact on stocks.

At the same time, we have said all the way along that although the effort management suggestion is ostensibly a fairer way of allocating access to the resource than quota, with all its issues and problems, we really need to have a proper, full-scale and focused trial before anybody could say unequivocally, “This would be the most effective and efficient way forward.”

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

Q A real consensus is emerging around the Bill that there should be more focus on giving more quota—more fishing opportunities—to the smaller boats. The question is about how we do it. From your point of view, what would be the best way within the Bill, and within the powers it contains, to encourage more fishing opportunities to be held by smaller boats, which generally speaking are the least impactful on the environment and contribute more to their coastal communities?

Jerry Percy: There are two main answers to that question. At the moment, despite the claims that we are going to be an independent coastal state and take back control, nearly 50% of the UK’s allocation of quota is held in foreign hands. Now, although a lot of that is the pelagic species, such as mackerel, herring and blue whiting, nevertheless fish quota, whether we like it or not—we do not—has become a commodity and gaining more access and a fairer balance post Brexit, when the Bill comes in, would be a particular opportunity.

There are opportunities. The Government have always been concerned that if you tried to repatriate quota, then you get a whole queue of people lining up for a judicial review, but it was clear from the judicial review in 2012 and from legal advice subsequently that that is entirely practical. In fact, the Faroe Islands has just instigated a similar sort of system. Rather than us arguing that one should rob Peter to pay Paul, it is at heart the allocation system that is at fault. It is based on historical rights.

As I said, I go back far too many years in this business. In the 1990s, the Government said to the over-10-metre vessels, “Go out and fish and record all your catches, and we will take a three-year average and provide you with your fixed quota allocation—your proportion of the overall UK cake.” Not surprisingly—the larger-scale representatives admitted this in the judicial review I mentioned—they did ghost fishing. If you went out and caught 10 tonnes, you might put down 12 or 14 tonnes just to make sure that you had good opportunities. I dare say that if I had been in that position I might have thought the same. The whole thing was predicated on a lie, frankly, and it has gone on ever since. Historical rights are really not an effective method, for any number of reasons.

The answer to your question, which we put forward in our response to the Bill, is that clause 20 effectively takes in article 17 of the common fisheries policy. We suggest that should be amended so that quotas are allocated according to social and environmental criteria and economic benefit for coastal communities. Some 80% of the under-10 metre fleet use passive rather than mobile gear, so their environmental credentials are better, and their economic credentials are certainly more significant. We would take our chances with everybody else, but that would provide a level playing field, irrespective of size of vessel, and your allocation of the resource would be based on environmental, social and economic criteria.

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[The Chair]

Good afternoon, Mr Haslam. For the benefit of the Committee, could you introduce yourself and your organisation?

Phil Haslam: Good afternoon. My name is Phil Haslam and I am the operations director of the Marine Management Organisation, which is an arm’s length body of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs with the competence to deliver marine planning and licensing and, in this context, fisheries management, control and enforcement regulation.

[George Eustice]

Q I am sure that the Committee will have noticed from your biography that you have long experience in the fisheries protection fleet and the Royal Navy, and most recently at the MMO. Before getting on to the work we have done on future enforcement, I wonder whether you could describe to the Committee what the MMO control room in Newcastle does, how we monitor fishing vessels and how many fisheries protection vessels we currently have access to.

Phil Haslam: The mechanism we use to conduct fisheries control and enforcement is risk-based and intelligence-led. The mechanism by which we do that ashore is to have up to 75 warranted officers who can be deployed—routinely, circa 50 are able to be deployed—and we are situated at 14 offices around the coast of England. The MMO regulates only within English waters. That is one element of our business: shore-based inspections of landing, marketplace inspections and the like. The risk-based, intelligence-led description is basically what it says. We understand where risk may arise and we have a level of intelligence that we apply to that, which can make our operations targeted.

At sea, our surveillance is conducted by vessels from the Royal Navy fishery protection squadron, which we contract on an annual basis for a set number of hours. They conduct patrol and inspection routines on our behalf on the direction of the Newcastle fisheries monitoring centre ops room. The way that works operationally is that we direct them to conduct a patrol in a certain area, we direct the outcomes we wish to see, and then it is down to the commanding officer in the vessel to deliver them. On the number of ships that are available to us, both because of budgetary restraint or constraint within the MMO and the availability of Royal Navy vessels, the Royal Navy is this year providing 2,000 hours of patrol time within English waters.

[George Eustice]

Q I understand that at the moment there are three offshore patrol vessels, two of which are normally on duty in English waters. Could you explain what has taken place, as part of your planning over the last year for enforcement after we leave the EU, to get additional offshore patrol vessels from the Royal Navy? What discussions have been had and what work has been done with Border Force on the ability to redeploy some of its assets? Could you explain anything you have done by way of procuring aerial surveillance from, say, the coastguard service?

Phil Haslam: As a result of the referendum and the fact that we will be becoming an independent coastal state and taking back control of our waters in the future, a risk-based analysis has been done of what could happen after that exit moment, and based on that analysis we have identified increased risk across the piece. Our work has driven us to look at our current surveillance levels and to judge what we will need to effectively enforce the integrity of the exclusive economic zone from the fisheries point of view. That has led us to bid for an uplift in surface surveillance and within that to move away from having all our eggs in one basket in relation to the Royal Navy, to come to a mixed economy of providers for both the inshore and the offshore element of the patrol requirement.

We have come up with a greater amount of surface surveillance that we need in the round, and the mechanism to deliver that will of course include the Royal Navy. We have dialogue with Border Force as well, to see what utility there is within its vessel fleet—it is predominantly its cutters. Similarly, the inshore fisheries and conservation authorities, which are the small English-based regional organisations that have a jurisdiction of the nought to 6 miles of inshore fisheries, have a fleet of vessels that we may be able to get some utility out of. Also, we are speaking with colleagues in the devolved Administrations to see what utilities are there. We are trying to get a blended provision of surface surveillance.

Aerial surveillance is a capability that is being reintroduced. The idea is to have routine overflight of our waters so that, should there be vessels that should not be there and are not discernible through remote location devices, we have, basically, a set of eyes in the air that can see them. In terms of monitoring vessels at sea at present, there is a system called the vessels monitoring system, which gives us the position statement of vessels of 12 metres or longer.

[George Eustice]

Q Finally, the Ministry of Defence recently announced that it had delayed the decommissioning of the existing three offshore patrol vessels, and it intends to introduce four new ones, I think. How much difference will having that extra capacity in reserve make, should it be needed?

Phil Haslam: It will make an enormous difference. As you stated earlier, at the moment the fishery protection squadron is relatively constrained in the number of vessels it can put to sea, and that matches our constraint in being able to contract them. Having more vessels available to us to police a very large EEZ gives us that flexibility to deploy ships to the right place at the right time. By keeping the batch one offshore patrol vessels in service for longer and introducing the batch twos incrementally, as they come off the build, there will be a larger hand of cards to be played with.

[George Eustice]

Q I have one other final point. Enforcement is obviously devolved, so what you have described is what is taking place and what is planned for in England. Could you describe how the challenge differs, for instance in Scotland, where we obviously have a large interest? What work do we do with Marine Scotland and its enforcement vessels?

Phil Haslam: Fisheries enforcement is devolved, as you state. The way the Scottish do it is to have three vessels that conduct enforcement up to 330 days a year within their waters. They contract two aircraft as well, to provide oversight. At this moment, they have the kind of surveillance capability and control and enforcement capability that we are building up to.

[Luke Pollard]

Q A moment ago you gave the figure of 2,000 hours of surveillance. Could you give us a sense of how the number of hours that have been deployed for enforcement has changed since 2010?

Phil Haslam: Yes. Royal Navy vessels used to be contracted on a 24-hour-day basis. That was always non-exclusive, so they were not passed to the MMO, where we would have command and control of them; they would conduct our business but always with the risk of higher priority national tasking taking them away. But we did have more of them in 2010, and over time, with reductions in the MMO budget, we have had to roll back the number of hours, or days, we can contract, moving from 24-hour days to 12-hour days and then to nine-hour days.

When I came into this job we were relatively constrained regarding where we could deploy them for that part of the day. The idea of going to hours was to give us the flexibility to deploy them where the need was, rather than where they were shackled. So there has been a reduction, but on the other side of that, with the vessel monitoring system we have an understanding of what is going on in our waters. We have a picture against which we can patrol. So it was risk-based.

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[Mr Sweeney]

Q I was asking whether there should be a specific capability defined in the Bill about what our asset should be for fisheries protection.

Phil Haslam: No, because I think it involves over time the introduction of technology that may come downstream. At the moment, the reason we do what we do in the manner that we do it is to get evidential quality, should we need to take compliance activity. We still need inspectors to step on board fishing vessels.

[George Eustice]

Q I want to come back to a couple of points that were raised earlier. Could you tell us what work has been done in terms of personnel to identify people who have recently served in the Fishery Protection Squadron and who, if you needed a surge in capacity, might be able to be deployed again and already have the required training?

Phil Haslam: We have spoken about increased surveillance as part of the package to deliver an enhanced control enforcement capability. People are central to that. In the first instance, we are recruiting additional people into the MMO, so I will go from the cadre of warranted officers I have now to an increased number. That is actively under way. Also, to provide contingency planning, we have looked within the Royal Navy at who is currently qualified to conduct warranted fisheries business and who has recently been qualified. There has to be a cut-off, because obviously you will time out. There is a cadre of people still within the Royal Navy who could, should the need arise, be deployable to carry a warrant and conduct the inspection capability.

[George Eustice]

Q Secondly, in terms of managing access, additional access is sometimes granted in fisheries agreements. We do this in Scotland now; for instance, we allow the Faroes to catch 30% of their mackerel in UK waters. Could you explain how that process works? How does Marine Scotland enforce that process of managing conditional access?

Phil Haslam: Basically, if you allow access to your waters you have to control who is coming in and who goes out. There is quite a sophisticated way of checking in and checking out: a vessel has to declare its catch on entering and its catch on exit. Indeed, the point of exit and point of entry is conditioned as well, so you can establish gates at sea where people have to actively come through, so you can understand who is in your waters at any given time. I know that within Scottish waters quite a dynamic mechanism has to be in place to manage the inflow and outflow of vessels.

[Mr Carmichael]

Q You have a tremendous range of experience. To what extent do you think that non-compliance can be driven in the mismatch between quota and stocks? Let me give you an idea of my thinking. Some 20 years ago I used to make modest sums of money in Banff sheriff court defending constituents of Mr Duguid who had caught their monkfish one side of the 4 degree line when all the quota was on the other, which led to misreporting. That was just a classic mismatch between where the quota was and where the stock was. To what extent do you think that that sort of mismatch drives non-compliance?

Phil Haslam: It provides an opportunity for non-compliance, provided you are minded to do that. I would not want to perceive something adversarial, with the regulator running around trying to catch fishermen out. The way this works best is that the rules work for the industry. We, as an enabling regulator, support them in the pursuit but within the bounds of the regulation. As I understand it, that is what we are working towards—that is rather more of a strategic partnership.

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[The Chair]

We now move on to our sixth witness, from the Blue Marine Foundation. Would you please introduce yourself and your organisation?

Dr Appleby: I am Dr Tom Appleby. I am a non-practising solicitor but I have been in property law for about 20 years. I am also an associate professor of the University of the West of England, and I have been operating in this sphere—ports, marine conservation and fisheries—for about 15 years.

[George Eustice]

Q May I ask for your general impressions of the Bill? Does it do the things that you would expect a domestic fisheries policy to do, or are there other elements that you would like to see included?

Dr Appleby: First off, it has been drafted in short order to deal with the situation that we have. By and large, and given the constraints that the drafters had—you can see that it is drafted in different forms and it does not sit together very well; it is not very beautiful—it does what it says on the tin, but it could be improved. I was looking at some other legislation. The Australian Fisheries Management Act 1991 has 168 sections, the MACA—the Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009—has 325, but this has 43. You can see that more could have gone in here, but there were time constraints on the people who drafted it, and I think that they produced what they could in the timescale.

[George Eustice]

Q Are you happy that clause 1 broadly brings across the marine environment objectives from European legislation?

Dr Appleby: It does. Clause 1 leads you into the devolution minefield. One thing it has to try to deal with in drafting is repatriating legislation on the one hand, and then delegating it around the four nations of the UK on the other. It tries to do that. Given the constraints on the drafters, there are fisheries plans to bring these objectives in.

There are potentially some bits missing. We do not have marine planning in there, which we could possibly put in. Quota could possibly go in there. There could be a method of dealing with quota at that stage, on how, if and when quota comes back, what happens with climate change and fishing opportunities. That could be put into the plans as well.

However, I recognise that the drafters sat there not only having to operate from the UK perspective but also having to take the devolved Administrations with them, which inevitably is slow. The clause could be improved if we had a little more time.

[George Eustice]

Q We obviously have to look at marine planning in the context of the retained EU law coming across and that we have other bits of legislation. Some of those things are already provided for.

The second point I want to raise is on the fixed quota allocation—the FQA units—which has been the basis of quota allocation inside the UK, attached to individual vessels, as you know. We have been explicit in the White Paper, and we take the powers in the Bill to make a break from that, and to say that any additional fishing opportunities that come as we depart from relative stability could be allocated on a different basis. What is your view of the FQA units system?

Dr Appleby: What has happened is that the UK fishery has essentially been, for want of a better word, squatted. We gave it out free to two people, who then sold it and it became propertised. The UK Association of Fish Producer Organisations case held that unused FQA became a property right.

The White Paper talks about quota being a public asset, so we have to make a decision on whether the UK fishery—particularly if we are getting more back; it will be very expensively brought—starts off as a public asset. That means unwinding the FQA system. You can potentially do that under existing powers, or you can do it under some things in the Bill. When you actually look at the auction, I think you have probably constrained yourself a bit too much. If you auction off quota, you are looking at people who have the cash to buy the quota in the first place. A royalty, for instance, is the sort of thing that you would charge—I think we would call it turnover rent in the property sector. That would be a way of charging people and then not having to come up with the cash. Even in the Bill, it only says “may” use an auction. Without constraining yourself, you could expand your powers on what we do with repatriated quota and, indeed, what we do with FQA generally.

We went through some debate when first drafting our amendments. We thought that we needed to put a stop to FQA, but a legal argument will come back the other way that says quota is a property right. We thought, “Well, if you give eight years’ notice, that’s probably sufficient to deal with any compensation that would arise,” but even then, I did not feel comfortable putting that in the Bill, because you reify the situation as soon as you do that. We put it in to start with, then we took it back out again on the basis that there needs to be a proper conversation about what we do with quota. Given the time restraints, we will not be able to do that in the Bill, even with the best will in the world. We can reserve the powers in the Bill to ensure that whatever we decide to do with FQA in the long run is settled, and that we can do some interesting things with it. I think that balance is there if you pull back just slightly on the prescriptive language about what you do with it.

[George Eustice]

Q Do you think a legal power is needed to do that? They passed legislation in the Faroes that effectively put people on notice, and said that after 10 years they would depart from an FQA system. Our view is that the Government could state that intention, at which point the clock would start ticking without the need to have a provision on the face of the Bill.

Dr Appleby: We reallocated quota last time—unused quota—without compensation or additional legislation, so I think we could do that. I think you have to be careful when you do that, because a lot of people borrow money by using their quota as collateral. One the one hand, there are some very rich people sitting on quota—the quota barons we read about—but on the other hand, there are people who use quota to support their running a business. You would need to think about what you will do, but I think you can do that under the current legislation.

What has happened here is that it has been beefed up. We have put some more suggestions forward. There are two things that you could do. You could vest the fishery so that it actually becomes public property. We have done a heck a lot of research at UWE on who owns it, and we reckon it was set up by some sort of implied Crown trust that goes back to the middle ages. One of my PhD students is working on this at the moment.

It would be easier just to state in the Bill that it is a public asset and put it in some sort of trust, and then you would get the kind of things that you would normally expect when disposing of a public asset to the commercial sector. That is the way I would approach it. I appreciate that we did not start there; we started with an open-access resource, which we have tried to deal with through legislation. We are in a transition.

[Luke Pollard]

Q You mention fisheries management and how that is missing from the Bill. In particular, fisheries management and how that fits with marine plans in the Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009 seems to be omitted. Can you just expand on what you think the Bill is missing in fisheries management?

Dr Appleby: I am not sure. In common with previous speakers, I liked the idea of a scientific adviser, which would be a lovely thing to have. Its constitution is probably the same size as the Act, so you can imagine the bunfight about who sits on the advisory panel, whether it is peer reviewed and whether it is devolved. That is a huge conversation to have, and it needs to be had in public. That is something I would like to see. If we had more time, I would like to see that go in the Bill.

There is a mirror piece of legislation, which is the Environmental Principles and Governance Bill. Does that apply to fishing or not? When we leave the EU, we will lose the right to infraction proceedings against recalcitrant UK—all parts of the UK. Should Scotland do something, it is the UK that gets infracted. We will lose that, and we have not quite been able to replace that kind of thing.

Those are just two examples: a good, robust, scientific, forward-looking body that looks at how to make the most of our resources, and some sort of regulatory regime to punish the hindmost, if you want to be quite so curt.

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[Owen Smith]

Q I have one separate question. Do you take an environmental view of what the potential benefits might be of preserving certain fisheries or stocks for recreational fishing, as has happened elsewhere?

Dr Appleby: You are looking at a public resource, so how do we make the best of that public resource? Some of that is going to be to the commercial sector and some of it is undoubtedly going to be to the recreational sector. The whole thing is so political because we are trying to carve up this public resource through regulation. Undoubtedly, the recreational sector is an important part of this conversation, too. Historically, although it has recently been included in the common fisheries policy, it has come to the table late.

[George Eustice]

Q I want to come back to this point about some of the environmental criteria and potentially having a hard nib point for MSY, for instance, as a statutory target.

One unique thing about fisheries is that, in or out of the EU, they are subject to annual international fisheries negotiations. Norway, for instance, follows MSY but also follows lots of other scientific metrics that it thinks are superior to those that we use. In such a situation, do you think it is important to keep that flexibility, so that you can actually land an agreement with Norway, the Faroes, Iceland and the EU, or is it preferable to make it unlawful for the UK to reach such an agreement and just have everyone go off on their own and unilaterally set a tax?

Dr Appleby: That is an interesting question; theoretically, we cannot fish beyond MSY, because that is all we have. Under the United Nations convention on the law of the sea, our rights extend to MSY and that is it. You cannot have an agreement on what you do not have.

However, the question is: what is MSY? It comes down to the definition. The Norwegians would probably argue that, by taking a basket of different theories, we achieve MSY, because one stock can be plotted on a graph and another cannot. I am not a fisheries scientist—you would have to ask them—but it seems that you are essentially looking at something like a repairing obligation on a lease. How far can you go with this and do it in a sensible way?

The difficulty with going into, say, MSY or BMSY or all those things, which I have never completely got my head around, is that you define a particular scientific methodology in your Bill. I think that could come back to haunt the draftsman if stock does not behave in a certain way or if you want some sort of flexibility. Again, it is interesting that, coming from a conservation point of view with my Blue hat on, I am not uncomfortable with just leaving it at MSY.

[The Chair]

I have Alistair Carmichael and then Mike Hill, unless anybody else wishes to contribute.

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[The Chair]

We now move to our final session of the day, which I remind colleagues must finish at 4 pm. The final witness is Aaron Brown of Fishing for Leave. Could you please introduce yourself as the witness?

Aaron Brown: I am Aaron Brown of Fishing for Leave; thank you to hon. Members for having me along today.

[George Eustice]

Q Thank you very much for joining us. I know you have long been an advocate of an effort-based regime, rather than a quota-based regime or potentially a hybrid model. You will be aware that the White Paper sets out a commitment to pilot that, particularly with the inshore mixed fisheries. Could you just set out what your thoughts are in that respect and why you think an effort-based regime would be better than a quota-based regime?

Aaron Brown: To start with, overall we were very happy with the White Paper. The Bill is somewhat disappointing, because a lot of what was good and gave a lot of hope to people has disappeared, and an effort pilot was one such thing. We have been staunch advocates of that, because over 30 years with increasing regulatory burden we have tried to go up a cul-de-sac and it has not worked. We have had black fish and discards, and now we are on to choke species.

We sat back and said, to use a phrase the Minister likes to coin himself, “What are the first principles of management?”, and that is the ecosystem. You have to work with mother nature. Currently, all the problems, many of which Members have discussed today—whether that is enforcement, science or shares of resources—all stem from the current quota system. What we said is that the only way to manage a dynamic mixed fishery, where you catch a mix of species that fluctuate up and down and it is difficult to determine exact, quantitative, arbitrary figures such as quotas, is to say to vessels, “What is a sustainable level of time that vessels need to catch a sustainable amount of fish from an ecosystem? If in the North sea you can take 200,000 tonnes of biomass, combined, from that ecosystem, how long does it take your fleet collectively to do that?”

That allows vessels to land all catches. It means you see exactly what the fluctuations and dynamism in the marine environment are, which generates accurate science, and you are flowing along with the environment rather than what we are trying to do just now, which is to impose arbitrary theoretical targets and then try to hit them. That has been proved not to work.

Just to finish, before Mr Aldous asks a question, we quickly concluded that effort control alone does not work, and that is what we brought to the Department as a solution that answers most questions. Blunt time at sea, especially in a blunt measurement such as days at sea, does not work. What we have developed is a system where you adopt FQAs, so there is no contention about people losing their investment in that, and turn them into percentages that people should be aiming to catch. It is not an arbitrary weight that you are aiming for; what you are aiming for is a percentage-based mix of what is deemed to be sustainable. If you catch outside that percentage, what happens is that you lose time in compensation.

Therefore, as a vessel is losing time for catching the wrong fish that he is able to land for that time penalty, his effort burden on the environment is coming back. Since the fish that has been landed has almost been time for the crime, scientists know that is a true representation of what is going on. I have worked on this for over two years; we have not asked for it to be dropped out of the sky, as some of the amendments to the Bill seem to be—for an enabling Bill, there are some clauses that seem to be a shopping list for DEFRA. What we are asking for is a trial, because we truly believe that for a unique system anywhere in the world, we have a system here that could get us away from poor science, solve the problem of FQAs and who owns them, and get us towards a far more sustainable fisheries management system.

We implore hon. Members to put in a legislative requirement that a trial across the fleet, not just inshore, is enacted to give us an alternate solution. If it fails, it fails, and if it is proved right, we have lost nothing but gained a lot.

[George Eustice]

Q Just to clarify, there is a different purpose behind a White Paper, which sets out your policy and what you seek to do with the powers, and a Bill that establishes the legal powers you need to deliver your policy. We would not need a specific clause to say, “You must run a trial,” in order to be able to run a trial; the legal powers to run a trial are in the existing clauses of the Bill.

Coming back to the principle, the difficulty with fisheries is that, while you have said effort does not work, nothing quite works on fisheries. That is why it becomes a circular argument. You seem to be arguing for a return to catch composition rules, which themselves became slightly discredited so that people tried to move away from them. The challenge is that an effort regime works best in a mixed fishery where it is harder to segregate out the fish, but a tonnage system works best in, say, the pelagic.

Aaron Brown: Absolutely. We would say for pelagic species, where you are catching an individual bulk species and vessels can reasonably accurately target that, although at times you do get it wrong, a quota system is fine. The problem is that dynamic mixed fishery—the white fish; we include nephrops in that mixed fishery. What we are saying is catch compositions but not arbitrary limits, which, again, is a problem. It has flexibility.

To avoid a race to fish, to avoid giving people a blunt dollop of time and their going off and targeting the highest value species because the economic incentive is there, what you are effectively doing under this system is a buffer scheme, if you like. It is a trading scheme. “Okay, I’ve caught the wrong fish. It’s worth money”. Then, rather than discard it into the sea unrecorded and keep on fishing and killing more of that species while trying to find one you can keep, what you are moving towards is trading overall ceiling of effort for that wrong fish. So it is a compensation scheme, effectively, in which you get the financial benefit of that fish and your men get their pay—we will come on to that with the system that DEFRA proposes for discards—but, overall, your ceiling in the year comes down to meet you.

That would solve the bass problem. You could put in a zero catch composition for bass. Any catches would have a time penalty. Boats could be tied up on the Monday but they would have that bass landed, and the financial benefit of it. It would work for spurdogs. We really believe there is a system here that merits a good look, and proper scrutiny and trial. As we say, we lose nothing if it fails and we gain everything if it succeeds.

[Luke Pollard]

Q Do you think that fish should be a public asset and that that should be defined in the Bill?

Aaron Brown: I think that absolutely, yes. I think there has always been that case. I was very pleased to hear Dr Tom Appleby state that, and many of the other non-governmental organisations have said it, about the idea of privatisation. Even with the FQA system, it says in the paperwork that people get through, that it should not be bartered, sold or bought. It just happens to be that the industry has gone and done it.

Fish always has been a public resource. Various judicial hearings have defined that as well. Indeed, it probably stretches all the way back into Magna Carta, right back through our constitution. At the end of the day, we as fishermen, as the members of the public who catch, are only custodians of what is the nation’s; we look after it and husband it well for current generations and future ones. We would very much like to see a clause put in towards that.