The North Sea under Pressure (EUC Report)

Viscount Hanworth Excerpts

Monday 30th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

My Lords, I emphasise the need for enhanced co-operation amongst the nations of the European Union in respect of the governance of the North Sea, which is suffering increasingly from environmental degradation. If one stands on the shores of Britain at any point other than at a busy sea port, one is likely to see an undifferentiated expanse of water stretching to the horizon that seems to be unaffected by human activity. Perhaps, if one is standing on the esplanade of a coastal town, one might see a cast-iron pipe of significant girth running out to sea, but one can easily imagine that whatever it is conveying will be widely dispersed in the vastness of the ocean.

There is no doubt that such impressions are highly misleading. The seas around the British Isles and throughout the entire region of the North Sea have been greatly affected by human activity. A map has been reproduced in the introduction to the report on the North Sea from the European Union Committee that shows the competition for space in the seas surrounding the British Isles. The area is criss-crossed by power cables, communications cables and pipes for transporting oil and gas. Large areas are dotted by oil rigs, gas rigs and wind farms. Some areas are designated as waste disposal sites, and some are licensed for the dredging of seabed sands and gravels. Other areas are set aside exclusively for fishing. The region also contains some of the busiest shipping routes in the world.

The seas can be likened to the common lands that were available to the peasants of mediaeval Europe. In the absence of property rights, the lands were available to all comers. The incentive of those who had access to the commons was to take as much as they could in the knowledge that others were bound to do likewise. The inevitable overexploitation of the common lands depleted their fertility and rendered them barren and useless. The outcome has been described as the “tragedy of the commons”.

The open access to the North Sea has resulted in widespread fly tipping and waste disposal, and in the virtually unrestrained exploitation of its resources. As a result, the sea has been subject to oil pollution, to pollution by hazardous chemicals and radioactive substances and to eutrophication, which is the damaging introduction to the ecosystem of chemical nutrients, including nitrates and phosphates. These disturbances have posed a major threat to the various species and to their habitats. Fish stocks have been severely depleted by overfishing in a manner that continues to threaten their extinction. Some species have all but vanished from the North Sea.

These deleterious effects have been widely acknowledged for 50 years or more, but the efforts to protect the marine environment and to preserve its fauna have been remarkably ineffective. It has long been recognised that the North Sea requires an international system of governance comprising policy-making, political bargaining, legislation, administration and enforcement. The committee’s report bears witness to the inadequacy of the present system of governance and makes numerous recommendations for its improvement.

There is now a patchwork of European policies, national policies, private initiatives and regulations on different levels that often conflict with each other. The European Union has produced more than 200 pieces of legislation that have direct repercussions on marine environmental policy and management. It is fair to say that this plethora of legislation is a consequence of the fact that the European agencies have insufficient power to effect meaningful policies for the protection of the marine environment. Instead, effective power remains at national and local levels. The EU legislation often amounts to no more than plaintive injunctions that are widely ignored. Notwithstanding the formal governance of the European Union, the tragedy of the commons is being enacted throughout the marine environment.

There is no better illustration of the conflict between national interests and those of the community as a whole than the disastrous common fisheries policy. Fish are a mobile resource. They do not remain for long in one place and they have no respect for political or national boundaries. It is difficult to establish rights of ownership over fish. Therefore, the issue of conserving fish stocks needs to be addressed not at a regional or a national level but at the level of the Community.

The common fisheries policy had its inception in the 1970s. The rules were drawn up in advance of the accession of the UK, Denmark and Ireland to the European Economic Community at the beginning of 1973. The new members had controlled what had been the richest fishing grounds in the world, and the new regulations gave all members of the community equal access to all the fishing waters. In effect, Britain ceded control of an estimated four-fifths of all the fish off western Europe.

The common fisheries policy, or CFP, establishes quotas for each of the member states, specifying the amount of each type of fish that they are allowed to catch. These quotas are determined, ostensibly, by the Ministers of the Council of the European Union on the advice of a scientific secretariat, and they make some reference to the traditional fishing rights of the nations. After the quotas have been fixed, each EU member state is responsible for policing its own, which some may be disinclined to do. Different countries distribute their quotas among their fishermen in different ways.

In practice, the advice of the scientists has been ignored frequently. The bargaining process over the allocation of quotas has invariably resulted in a total allowable catch that exceeds the scientific recommendation. The non-compliance with the rules and the quotas has been a significant problem. In several of the EU fisheries, illegal fishing accounts for one-third to one-half of all catches. Fishermen have been landing quantities far in excess of their quota, falsifying their records and conniving with the fish processing industries to conceal their malfeasance. The Spanish and the French have often been blamed for this, but the Scottish black fish scandal revealed that during the first decade of this century Scottish fishermen had been flouting the rules on a massive scale.

One of the fundamental flaws of the common fisheries policy has been the allowance for fishermen to discard those fish in their catch that exceed the quota for their species, while continuing to pursue fish for which the quotas are unfulfilled. The discarded fish are dead when they are returned to the water. Undersized juvenile fish are commonly discarded in order to fulfil the quotas with larger and more profitable fish. The reforms of 2013 of the common fisheries policy are intended, eventually, to constrain fishermen to land everything that they catch, but it is doubted by many that this policy, which admits of many exceptions, will be enforced effectively.

The common fisheries policy has attracted vociferous criticism, both from environmentalists and from local fishing industries that have resented the constraints of the quota system while blaming their competitors for despoiling the fish stocks. The Commission has responded to these criticisms by a partial devolution of its authority to member states by establishing regional advisory councils. Some critics regard this as a retrograde step that implies a derogation of the essential central control. It may serve only to exacerbate the conflicts over rival claims to fishing rights.

The common fisheries policy has come to embody some specious injunctions that threaten further to imperil the fish stocks while seemingly being aimed at their preservation. A declared objective of the policy is to harvest the fish at the maximum sustainable rate. The maximum sustainable yield, or MSY, denotes the maximum rate at which the fish can regenerate themselves while being harvested. If the rate of harvesting exceeds the MSY, more will be taken from the sea than can be resupplied by the fish stock. The inevitable result of exceeding the MSY, even for a short while, will be an increasingly rapid diminution of the stock. To avoid this hazard, one must fish in a manner that will ensure that the MSY is never exceeded. Fishing at a lower rate will also result in a more abundant and resilient stock.

To the layman, the MSY might seem to be a felicitous concept. The term suggests a strategy that is both sustainable and that achieves a maximum economic return. In fact, it denotes a strategy that is more than likely to lead to species extinction. What is most disturbing is an allowance granted to protesting parties to permit them to take their time in meeting the target of the maximum sustainable yield if to do so more rapidly might jeopardise the social and economic sustainability of their fishing fleets. This is nonsensical. Such a recourse would guarantee the extinction of the fish stocks unless the fishing were to be severely curtailed or suspended in a timely manner.

Some would regard the contradictions and the failures of such policies as a justification for disengaging from the European Union. However, the interdependence of the member states is an inescapable fact. They occupy a common ecosystem. To advocate any kind of national independence in this domain is to deny a reality that must be confronted. There is an urgent need for active marine co-operation throughout the European Union. The report of the European Union Committee has clearly highlighted this need.