Fisheries Bill (Third sitting)

Mike Hill Excerpts

Thursday 6th December 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)]

Q My apologies for arriving late. In my experience, fisheries management is currently incredibly adversarial. We in this place, parliamentarians, and non-governmental organisations very much promote a more collaborative approach, with the fishermen being the solution. Do you think that that will be achievable in practice, and how do we make it achievable? We talk about collaboration the whole time, but in the real world it can be very difficult.

Helen McLachlan: Again, it comes down to the processes, the implementation and how we are going to take it forward. There are some good models of collaboration and effective delivery. For example, the Scottish Administration have taken a very strong approach to that, really bringing the catching sector, the processors and the NGOs around the table to have very frank discussions about what needs to happen if we are to meet certain objectives. That is a good model, and one that could be replicated by the different Administrations. We will not deliver sustainable fisheries management by having conflict and not having the catching sector working alongside administrators and the NGOs, because we all represent important constituents.

Rebecca Newsom: Adopting a more fair, equitable and sustainable approach to the distribution of fishing opportunities in the future is of fundamental importance to securing the buy-in of fishers across our coastlines. We just have to look at the current unequal distribution, which can also contribute to unsustainable outcomes, to recognise that we need to see urgent change.

In practice, all we are saying is required to deliver on that is a couple of small tweaks to clause 20, which essentially removes historical catch levels as the prevailing criterion for determining the distribution of fishing opportunities in the future and requires that environmental, social and local economic criteria are prioritised instead. We need to think about the political buy-in that can be achieved by that and, in turn, how that helps us to deliver on the higher-scale MSY objectives that we have been talking about.

Debbie Crockard: The advisory councils are also an example of collaboration between the other interest groups—OIGs—rather than the NGOs, on the advisory councils, and the industry. While we do not always agree, and it can take a lot of time to come to any agreement, there is a lot of really useful discussion and collaboration in those groups.

[Mike Hill (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

Q This is a bit of a repeat, but are you in favour of redistributing quotas more fairly to under-10s?

Rebecca Newsom: Yes we are, but we want to stress that the way to achieve that is through introducing transparent and objective environmental and social criteria that all fleets need to abide by. It is not necessarily a black-and-white dichotomy between small scale and large scale, although of course the new approach would stand to benefit the smaller-scale fleets significantly, given their current fishing practices where, for example, about 90% of the under-10s use passive gears.

[Mike Hill]

Q Do you think that would have a positive economic impact on localities such as Hartlepool, where we hardly have a fleet but where the fleet could grow given a fairer distribution of quotas?

Rebecca Newsom: Absolutely. I refer the Committee back to the evidence from Jerry Percy on Tuesday. To add to that, the social criteria that we would suggest were used would need to be developed through public consultation and advice from experts. They should include, but not be limited to, things such as local employment and port and processing opportunities. That is a way to bed in local economic benefits.

[Mike Hill]

Q I have one last question on climate change, which is hardly mentioned in the Bill. Are the provisions adequate to abide by international climate change obligations? What are the implications of climate change for fish stocks and marine ecosystems?

Andrew Clayton: I can say something about the level of precaution and the importance of building resilience. As managers of fish stocks, as I said earlier, we cannot put fish in the sea and we cannot control biomass directly. All we can do, when we are managing exploitation and managing the fishing fleet, is operate with a suitable level of precaution and make sure that stocks can be resilient if they face other pressures.

Fishing pressure obviously has a huge impact on fish stocks, but so do climate change, habitat degradation and acidification—there are all kinds of other threats that fish stocks face. It is about leaving them enough space to be resilient to those other pressures as well.

On the economics, I wanted to say that the concept of maximum sustainable yield is primarily an economic concept that gained ground after the second world war. It is about providing as much protein for hungry people’s plates as possible. It is not a green benchmark; it is not something that you would start from if you were looking only at the environment—you might want to be more cautious with some other measure.

It is a happy coincidence that we, as green organisations, find that we are advocating a high-yield, highly profitable, highly economically successful approach. That is what other countries around the world have seen when they have delivered MSY. It is win-win for the environment and for the bottom line of fishing businesses.