Brexit: Fisheries (EUC Report)

Viscount Hanworth Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2017 Grand Committee

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

My Lords, the preservation of fish stocks in the face of unbridled consumption is one of the greatest challenges to human social organisation. It is a challenge on a global scale, and it has been met with widespread failure. The failure to preserve European fish stocks is one of many examples of this all too common tragedy.

As we have heard, in spite of highly efficient modern technology aimed at locating shoals of fish and capturing them, the quantity of fish landed in UK ports is less than a third of what it was in 1930, when it reached a maximum. The UK fisheries statistics to which I refer are readily accessible in a briefing paper from the Commons Library. The quantity of fish landed today is significantly less than it was in 1890, when much of the fishing fleet consisted of small vessels under sail. The decline of the catch in the face of the ever-improving technology of fishing points unequivocally to a decline of fish stocks.

The two world wars saw sharp reductions in the size of the catches, which was largely restored when the wars ended. Leaving aside the effect of the subsequent war, there has been a steady downwards trend since the 1930s, on the back of which there have been significant annual variations. However, after 1973, the decline accelerated. That happens to be the year when Britain joined the European Union. This was also the era when the confrontation between the United Kingdom and Iceland regarding fishing rights in the north Atlantic ended with Iceland’s victory. Iceland established an exclusion zone around its territories of 200 miles from the coastline, and British trawlers ceased to fish in Icelandic waters. The fishing fleets of Hull, Grimsby and Lowestoft, and elsewhere along the east coast of Britain, were decimated.

At the same time, Britain’s accession to the European Union ensured that all European waters should be accessible to the fishing fleets of the members of the Union. In the years that followed, there was a growing recognition of the radical depletion of the fish stocks, and in 1983 a version of the common fisheries policy—the CFP—of the European Union was enunciated that has prevailed until recently. By limiting the total allowable catch, the policy aimed to address the problems of depletion. The common fisheries policy has been strongly criticised by British fishermen. They attribute most of their distress to this EU policy. They have been virtually unanimous in declaring that its constraints and empowerment of fishermen of rival nationalities are responsible for the threat to their livelihoods. They feel that others have robbed them of what is rightfully theirs.

In 1992, the European Commission proposed a policy whereby fishermen would be encouraged to scrap vessels that were surplus to their requirements. This was intended as a means of alleviating the pressure on fish stocks. The Commission proposed that money should be provided from the European Union budget for the purpose of purchasing the vessels for scrap. In the case of the UK, that money would have been deducted from the rebate to their contribution to the budget that Margaret Thatcher’s Government had won. Instead of participating in this policy, Britain proposed to allow our fishermen to dispose of their surplus vessels by selling them on the open market.

Foreign owners were keen to buy British boats because, under British regulations, if you own a boat you also have a guaranteed share of the British national quota. It was a policy of the British Government to break down the national quota boat by boat and to allow the sale of quotas in this manner. The result is that numerous Spanish and Dutch boats fly British flags and catch part of the European Union stocks allocated to Britain. Their catches are counted against the British quota. This arrangement, known as quota-hopping, exacerbated the opinion of British fishermen that they have been robbed. In fact, the ineptitude of the British Government, rather than the policies of the European Union, is to blame.

By general consent, the EU common fisheries policy enacted in 1983 has been, until recently, an unmitigated failure. It was based on a concept of allowable catches, intended to limit the amount that each nation may extract from the seas. Those quantities have been guided by scientific advice but almost invariably that advice has been ignored in the process of the competitive bidding of the nations for their quotas. Much of the blame for this can be attributed to Britain. We approached the negotiations in an aggressive manner in the belief that we were denied our rightful share of the resources. There have also been suspicions of widespread disregard of the quotas. It has been incumbent on the European Union nations to enforce the quotas but most have been lax in doing so.

The Scottish black fish scandal of 2012 was notable for uncovering illegal landings designed to evade the European Union quotas. Fraud of almost £63 million was revealed. The common fisheries policy has also been vitiated by allowing fish that have been caught in excess of the quotas for their species to be cast overboard. It has also allowed undersized fish to be discarded as well as fish of lesser commercial value. Invariably, discarded fish are dead when they hit the water.

The most recent revision of the common fisheries policy took effect in January 2014 and promised to address some of the principal defects of the former policy. The most significant revision is the intention of gradually introducing a landing obligation whereby all catches of regulated species must be landed and counted against quotas. This would ban the practice of discarding unwanted or surplus fish. Further features of the revised policy concern rules on access to waters, controls of fishing effort, and technical measures to regulate gear usage and to determine where and when fishing is allowed. There are signs that the CFP is making progress towards the objective of preserving fish stocks. Nevertheless, the policy is bedevilled by its failure to take proper account of the biological, ecological and economic principles of fish stock management.

The policy makes frequent reference to the objective of catching the fish at the rate of their so-called maximum sustainable yield or MSY. This term seems to suggest both sustainability and economic efficiency, but the pursuit of the MSY achieves neither. The MSY is the maximum rate at which the fish are capable of replacing themselves in the face of the depredations of fishing. If such a rate of fishing is exceeded for any length of time then, inevitably, the fish will be driven to extinction. To pursue the fish with such intensity is also uneconomic. It would be more profitable to derive a smaller harvest from the more abundant population that would result from lesser depredations.

I have already noted that, in 1890, more fish were caught by sailing boats from abundant stocks of fish than are caught today from depleted stocks, using technology that was unimaginable in the 19th century. A communication from the European Commission of June 2015 not only declared the objective of fishing at the MSY, but made allowances for the difficulties of achieving that objective immediately. Thus, it stated that if the policy of fishing at the MSY,

“would imply very large annual reductions of fishing opportunities that seriously jeopardise the social and economic sustainability of the fleets involved”,

then,

“a delay in reaching the objective beyond 2016”,

would,

“be acceptable, through a more gradual reduction of fishing opportunities to achieve MSY”.

This defies logic. If the harvest were allowed to exceed the MSY, then the only way the population could recover is if the harvest were to be reduced subsequently to a level substantially below that of the MSY. Otherwise, the extinction of the fish stocks would be guaranteed. To allow the harvest to be reduced gradually from a higher level towards the MSY would be to guarantee extinction.

The deficiencies of the CFP suggest that it should be replaced by something more rational and more effective. I have little faith that this could be achieved, as many have proposed, by our taking full possession of the fish that lie within our so-called exclusive economic zone. That would be an unprecedented assertion of our fishing rights at the expense of other European nations, and it would be met, inevitably, by counterclaims. This could have a disastrous impact on the fish stocks. The impact on our negotiations to leave the European Union would also be severely affected by an attempt to exclude the fishermen of other European nations from our EEZ.

An exclusive economic zone is a concept adopted at the third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea in 1982. We call this conference UNCLOS. This was some time after Britain’s accession to the European Union, when the basic features of the common fisheries policy were determined. An EEZ stretches out from the coastline of a maritime nation for up to 200 miles. In the case of two adjacent maritime nations, the common perimeter of their zones is equidistant from their shores. By virtue of its geography, Britain has by far the largest zone among the European nations, both in absolute terms and in proportion to the area of its landmass. Other maritime nations, such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, have highly constrained zones that are of negligible area in comparison to that of the UK. Therefore, it is wholly inappropriate to propose that their rights to fish in European waters should be in proportion to the size of their zones. This would imply a significant reduction in their existing rights. Nevertheless, that is what appears to be proposed by our fishermen, seemingly with the support of at least one government Minister.

I propose that the only sensible way forward, in view of Britain’s intention to leave the European Union, is to build on the existing common fisheries policy. This is notwithstanding its history of failure. The present objective of conserving the fish stocks should be supported and reaffirmed by the adoption of more appropriate regulations and directives, which the UK should help to formulate. The prevailing spirit should be one of mutual trust and co-operation.

I end by mentioning proposals to resolve the problem of quota hopping. This was attempted in 1988 when a Labour Government passed a law requiring three-quarters of the shareholders of British-registered trawler companies to be British. Three years later, the law was quashed by the European court as contrary to EU rules on freedom of movement of people and capital. If a similar attempt were to be made, after our leaving the European Union, to disbar foreign owners, then I fear there would be damaging political consequences.