UK Sea Bass Stocks

Tim Loughton 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.