UK Sea Bass Stocks

George Hollingbery Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd December 2014 Westminster Hall

[George Hollingbery (Meon Valley) (Con)]

I am grateful to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Crausby. It is a pleasure to be here debating the important subject of the management of sea bass in the UK.

For many years, those involved in sea bass fishing in the UK have warned that the stock has been left increasingly vulnerable by weak management tools and practices. Now, almost too late and certainly with far too little, the European Union and others have woken up to the potential for a total collapse in the sea bass population in our domestic waters. Some may say that I am being overdramatic, and some may say that we have all been here before and that it will all get better in due course. I say they are wrong. This is happening now, it is happening to us and it needs to be dealt with.

In 2013, the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, which advises the European Union on the strategies needed to exploit our fishing resources safely, proposed a 36% reduction in the catch of sea bass. That proposal was not acted upon. Now, less than a year later, ICES advises an 80% reduction. We only have to look at the Irish experience of the early 1990s to know what comes next if we hesitate: a total failure of the stock and a total ban on all forms of bass fishing. The tragedy is that we do not need to go there. We need only grip the problem here and now, to a scale and design that will make a real difference.

The question is: how on earth did we end up here in the first place? By any reckoning, we now pursue bass much more actively and much more successfully than in the past. The exploitation of sea bass has increased hugely across all areas, and current landings run at a level roughly four times that of the early 1990s. In addition, fishing activity is now often targeted at spawning aggregations. Studies show that bass spawn offshore in the English channel and the eastern Celtic sea from February to May, and as they do so they become sitting ducks for pair trawlers, which ruthlessly exploit them. New spawning aggregations in the English channel are being discovered and targeted, including some inside the 12-mile limit off the Kent and Sussex coasts.

On top of all that, nothing like the number of fish that should be reaching breeding size actually do so because of a farcically low minimum landing size. Bass are a slow-growing species, and female bass do not become sexually mature, in UK waters at least, until they are at least 42 cm in length, and some estimates put the figure as high as 46 cm. The current minimum landing size is an absolutely ludicrous 36 cm. That was set back in 1989, when even the Department’s own estimate said that the maximum sustainable yield for sea bass would be reached if the minimum landing size was 50 cm, yet still we sit here with the level at 36 cm.

An increased minimum landing size for bass, coupled with a corresponding increase in mesh sizes, would be a huge positive for the UK bass fishery. Over the years much time has been spent on trying to convince those in charge to increase the UK MLS. The right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw), who is here today, nearly managed to implement the reforms when he was Fisheries Minister in 2007, but alas, just before he could pull the lever, he was replaced and the whole thing dropped through the floor before it could reach the statute book. Unfortunately, his successor did not carry on with the implementation, which is a tragedy. We are now living with the consequences of that change.

In 2012, the then Fisheries Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon), who is also with us today, initiated a further review. That the study is still in train was confirmed by the current Minister in 2013, although it has yet to be published; hopefully we will hear a little more about that later. Technical papers suggest that the main benefit, at least in terms of yield, of management aimed at protecting juvenile sea bass, which increasing the MLS would do, chiefly accrues to fisheries operating within the six-mile zone. The implication is that there is every reason to increase the MLS here in the UK unilaterally, whatever happens at EU level. We will benefit, whatever the rest of Europe decides to do.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I am pleased that my hon. Friend has secured this debate, because this is a big issue in my constituency. Does he agree that enormous damage is done to the feeding and spawning beds of sea bass by pair trawlers, which drag the bottom of the oceans and take away all the seaweed? Does he acknowledge that one solution might be to restrict sea bass to sea anglers? It has been calculated that in Sussex the value of sea angling is more than £31 million, including tackle, accommodation and boats. That is more than three times the value of commercially landed fish stocks. Such a measure would go a long way towards conservation, too.

[George Hollingbery]

I agree with my hon. Friend. I will allude to the study that he is referencing a little later in my remarks. On the ecological damage done by pair trawling and indeed by other sorts of trawling, including otter trawling, there is no doubt that it is very destructive to the environment. Although it is effective and useful for commercial fishermen, all of us interested in sea angling should look to do something about it more generally than just with specific reference to sea bass. That is an important issue.

Finally in the sorry tale that I was outlining, the average recruitment—the number of sub-one-year-old fish being added to the fishery—between 2008 to 2012 was less than a quarter of the long-term average. We are fishing more, we are increasingly targeting sea bass, we are specifically fishing out breeding shoals and we are not allowing the young stock to reach spawning age. How much more is there to say other than that, in an ecosystem that is supposed to be carefully managed, such practices are, to use an American phrase, as dumb as dirt? I do not know how else to describe the situation. There could not be a worse way of managing a fishery that we apparently want to keep for the longer term.

Before looking more closely at the current policy proposals for managing the problem, it is worth spending a bit longer talking about the economics, to which my hon. Friend just referred. There is a crucial difference between the returns in the commercial and recreational sectors. If we are to reach a sustainable, long-term solution, it is critical that we understand that well. The best data we have on the catches of the commercial and recreational bass fishing sectors in the UK are in the “Sea Angling 2012” report published by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. That study modelled the recreational share of the total as being somewhere between 20% and 33% of the retained catch landed in the UK, but it is clear about the lack of statistical certainty in the data on recreational catches and angling activity:

“Respondents were self-selecting and unlikely to be representative of all sea anglers. On average they were more avid and successful anglers than those interviewed in the other more statistically designed Sea Angling 2012 surveys, reporting higher catch rates, more days fished, and higher membership of clubs and national angling bodies.”

In short, there are good reasons to believe that the likely level of recreational landings is much lower than the report suggests, or is, at the very least, at the bottom end of the report’s estimate.

It is also clear that the economic activity generated by recreational angling dwarfs that of the commercial sector. “Sea Angling 2012” shows that there are 884,000 sea anglers in England. They directly pump £1.23 billion into the economy, and 10,500 full-time jobs depend on that spending. Indirect spend is equivalent to £2.1 billion and 23,600 jobs. Those figures are direct from the Department.

[Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. On a day when we are celebrating our long-term economic plan, does he agree that we need to support individual anglers and the economic activity he describes? If we need evidence of the difference he proposes, we can look to our hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon), whose actions in government have directly caused an increase in economic output off the north-east coast by reason of the salmon that is now seen in the Tyne.

[George Hollingbery]

I agree completely. It is always difficult to quantify exactly the economic benefit of fishing done for fun, but all the evidence points inescapably towards it being an extremely important stream of revenue, in particular for less economically advantaged areas, of which there are a great many in the south-west and the part of the world that my hon. Friend represents.

It is also worth noting that the VAT alone that is collected from sea anglers dwarfs the entire first sale value of all commercial fish landings in the UK. That demonstrates the scale of the economic benefit of recreational angling. That was further reaffirmed by a detailed study released last Friday, to which my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) referred, by the highly respected Marine Resources Assessment Group on behalf of the Blue Marine Foundation. The study took a detailed look at sea bass fishing in the Sussex Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authority—a control area for fishing—and its conclusions are nothing short of startling. Its low-end estimate was that the economic and employment benefit per tonne of fish removed by recreational bass angling was more than 40 times that of commercial fishing—a pretty extraordinary statistic in anybody’s book. Despite the much smaller weight of fish removed by recreational anglers in the Sussex IFCA, the total benefit to the local economy of recreational angling was still, as my hon. Friend said, more than three times that of commercial fishing.

We know for a fact that recreational bass fishing is worth far more to the economy than commercial fishing, and is a great deal more sustainable. That is one of many reasons why the current EU proposals are puzzling to the point of bewilderment. As the Minister knows only too well, they propose limiting recreational anglers to only one fish per day, despite the fact that, as far as I understand it, the EU has no competence over people who go fishing for recreation, and, indeed, the pretty skimpy evidence that recreational anglers are the problem. For one spawning area, area IVc—I will happily share the map of the areas with colleagues who wish to see it—the EU makes an as yet incomplete proposal to limit the daily amount of fish taken during the spawning period by a certain number of vessels. We genuinely know no more than that. How that is supposed to make a meaningful difference to the current situation is, frankly, anybody’s guess. In my view, it is the political equivalent of trying to stop your house falling down by painting it a different colour.

We all know what needs to be done. The French know it, the Dutch know it, we know it—everybody knows it, so for goodness’ sake, let us get on and actually do it, finally, for once. We have to drastically reduce the amount of fish taken. We have to allow fish to reach sexual maturity. We have to stop most, if not all, fishing in the spawning season. We have to do a better job of protecting and enhancing nursery areas. Finally, we have to grasp the undeniable reality that converting the fishery to one dominated by recreational fishing is the only long-term solution that will protect our economic interests and give the fish a future. Any solution that markets itself as long-term but does not deal with all those issues will fail; of that there can be little or no doubt.

[Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend not only on securing the debate but on making such a powerful case. Does he agree that the Government must also ensure that the IFCAs properly engage with recreational anglers? When I go to IFCA meetings, I see that the commercial fishermen have a far greater influence in the workings of the IFCA than the recreational anglers. That problem must be addressed if we are to get the changes that my hon. Friend rightly identified.

[George Hollingbery]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, but that will only happen when the IFCAs and others understand and accept the importance of recreational angling and see the Government outline a direction of travel. Only then will the recreational anglers get a proper bite of the cherry, and only then will the IFCAs and others follow that course. The Government must lead from the front.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on the quality of his opening speech and on raising this subject. In Essex, we have a lot of recreational anglers who provide a great deal of employment and generate a lot of tourism, but we also have very small-scale inshore fishermen who catch sea bass. Do they have a future in my hon. Friend’s scheme, or will they be squeezed out by the ban on commercial fishing?

[George Hollingbery]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. It is a vexed issue. There are people who make a very small-scale living out of bass fishing. My belief is that it is likely that in the near term, as has happened in Ireland, the north-east coast of the United States and a great many fisheries where proper regulation has been put in place, people who run sub- 10-metre boats will find that they make a much better living from taking out and guiding recreational fishing than from trawling for a few vulnerable sea bass out in the ocean. Although I would not condone any policy that forced people who fish at that scale from one to the other, particularly in inshore waters, I think that reality will dawn and that most of them will end up in the recreational sector.

In concluding my remarks, I hope you will excuse me, Mr Crausby, for asking the Minister a series of detailed questions. I have given him notice of some of them because they are quite complex, but I would appreciate answers to as many of them as possible.

To protect breeding fish, will the Minister follow the proposals made by the Angling Trust and others and seek a ban on targeted fishing based on catch composition or sufficiently restrictive vessel catch limits to make the fishery unviable from January to May inclusive, to apply to areas VIId, e, f and h and IVc in offshore fisheries beyond member states’ six-mile zones? For the benefit of other hon. Members present, I am simply asking for proper fishing restrictions to be put in place in pretty much all the coastal waters where we find sea bass, and certainly where they breed.

Will the Minister take on board another of the Angling Trust’s proposals and pursue catch limits for all registered EU vessels fishing for bass in areas VII and IV to cap effort, with limits set at a level that reduces fishing mortality by at least 40% across all member state fleets? I have apologised to the Minister for not giving him notice of that question.

To allow fish to reach breeding age, will the Minister work to ensure that a minimum landing size of 46 cm or over is adopted for sea bass at European level? Will he undertake to impose such a limit unilaterally on UK landings in any event? At the very least, will he confirm that the review of the minimum landing size for bass started by his Department in 2012 is still progressing, and will he undertake to publish the results as soon as possible? To help protect the recruitment stocks, will he undertake to look again at the extension of bass nursery areas?

Finally, does the Minister agree that the development of sea bass fishing as a recreational activity is the best long-term solution to both the ecological and the economic sustainability of the fishery, as proved by the Irish sea bass experience, the striped bass fishery of the north-east coast of the US and many other examples?

With the right measures in the right place at the right time and in the necessary proportion, we can make our fisheries policy work for us and for future generations. I hope the Minister will offer us all hope that such a prospect can be realised.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[George Hollingbery]

May I just confirm that the Minister is talking not about the sea angling report, but about the report into the study of minimum landing size?

[George Eustice]

It was the CEFAS report of 2012, which was commissioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury, which we will put in the Library. That report concluded that a minimum landing size increase applied at European level could have quite a big impact, but pointed out that, because a lot of fishing mortality is caused by foreign vessels in UK waters, a unilateral, UK-only minimum landing size would not necessarily have the desired effect.