Fisheries

Lord Beith Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Andrew George]

The hon. Gentleman emphasises my point. We need to move from advice to management. We have a far too centralised common fisheries policy and, as we have been saying for decades, we need to decentralise it.

The fundamental problem, as many hon. Members have said, is the blunt instrument of the quota system. As the hon. Member for Southampton, Test implied, we do not want to replace that overnight with the blunt response of stopping all discards. That could have immediate catastrophic consequences. We need to move to a situation where there is no need for discards of dead fish from trawlers.

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

I want to reinforce my hon. Friend’s point. In the Northumberland coast fishery, where most of the boats are day boats that do not travel far out, an immediate ban on discards would prevent people from catching other species. At the moment, a lot of haddock are being caught because they are plentiful. We could not stop all the boats from fishing completely because of the number of haddock they are catching.

[Andrew George]

I thank my right hon. Friend, who is assiduous on this issue and helps to emphasise the particular problems for day boats and inshore fisheries.

There is also a problem with the illogicality of throwing back dead fish. No one quite understands the benefit of that. The only possible scientific benefit is that other fish might feed on those fish. As all those involved in fisheries management will understand, the problem is that to apply an effective fisheries management policy, one needs to be able to distinguish between intended and unintended by-catch. Of course, a lot of the by-catch is of a high marketable value. One has to query what would be the ultimate impact if one said, “We’ll stop all discards and you can land and market all the fish you catch, regardless, because we feel sorry for you and don’t like to think of you throwing back dead fish.” We cannot simply adopt, overnight, a ban on discards.