Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100
- 119)
TUESDAY 29 OCTOBER 2002
MR SAM
LAMBOURN, MR
BARRIE DEAS
AND MR
HAMISH MORRISON
Mr Mitchell
100. Are those viable alternatives going
to be acceptable under the European basis? The problem here is
to get to an agreed policy whereas a lot of the selective measures,
closing areas and spawning season and increase in mesh size and
square mesh panels, have to be necessarily selective and therefore
give more power to British regulation or regional regulation down
to the Commission.
(Mr Deas) Any measure that applies throughout
the North Sea has to be adopted on a European basis and so that
question has yet to be tested. Not only that but just to remind
you that Norway is part of the frame as well and the recovery
measures that have been put in place today have had if not exactly
the same measures applied to the Norwegian fleet at least broadly
equivalent measures, so, yes, the political agreement is part
of the picture.
Mr Mitchell: Would you prefer to see permanent
decommissioning of more vessels?
Mr Drew
101. Can I add a rider to that. Who should
be asked to decommission and who should control decommissioning?
(Mr Deas) I think that decommissioning
has to remain part of a mix of measures. It has to be targeted
at those vessels that are causing most damage, if you like, although
that is a rather extreme way of putting it, that are involved
in those particular fisheries that are—
Mr Mitchell
102. Which are they?
(Mr Deas) Vessels with high catches of
cod.
103. Industrial fishing?
(Mr Deas) I think that industrial fishing
is a different question. We are talking about decommissioning
here and I will come back to industrial fishing, if I may. The
difficulty with decommissioning, certainly amongst the vessels
that I represent, is that we have had five or six rounds now of
decommissioning and there is not an awful lot left. If you look
at the North Sea and English ports, Lowestoft has recently ceased
fishing operations, there are only small boats left there; at
Grimsby there is a handful of vessels; Bridlington has turned
over to shellfish; at Scarborough there are three, four or five
fishing vessels and half-a-dozen would be vessels. Sea houses,
when I began working for this Federation in 1983, there were about
50 white fish vessels and there are not any now. So, against that
kind of background, it is difficult for us to see decommissioning
as an option. From the point of view of European fisheries, it
has to be part of the picture. The issue with industrial fishing
is an important one because whilst we are talking about rebuilding
cod stocks and increasing our mesh size to 120mm, at the same
time there are vessels, primarily Danish vessels, fishing in those
same areas using a mesh size of 16mm with an inevitable and legitimate
by-catch of white fish species including cod. So there is the
by-catch issue and then there is what effect taking one million
tonnes of biomass out of the North Sea ecosystem has and that
is certainly one that our members are deeply concerned about.
104. Should industrial fishing be banned?
(Mr Deas) Yes.
Chairman
105. Do either of you want to comment on
the same thing?
(Mr Lambourn) Yes, absolutely.
(Mr Morrison) We have already had a ban
on industrial fishing inside the 40 miles or something like that.
Anyway, there are a couple of areas in the Scottish shore that
have not had any sensible yield of white fish for 15 years and,
even after three years of the industrial fishing ban, there are
some quite good catches being seen in areas such as Wee Bankie
for the first time in umpteen years.
Mr Drew
106. I just want to check because you have
been very polite and very positive, but you have not mentioned
other nationalities. At a time when the British fleet has been
cut, cut and cut, other nations have either increased or at least
stayed the same. The fact is that you cannot go on logically the
way we are going, so what other nations are going to take some
pain?
(Mr Morrison) Denmark has had the same
degree of pain as we have had. It is a little more difficult to
work out what has happened in the Netherlands but, to be fair
to the Dutch, there is a much more free market approach to fishing
in the Netherlands, but really when you get to Spain and France,
you are amongst the funny money there.
Diana Organ
107. May we go back to some of the areas
upon which we have been touching before. Mr Lambourn made it clear
that there was a problem with the science that was being used
behind the Commission's current proposals. Is that shared by all
of you, that you have doubts that there is not a sound scientific
basis?
(Mr Morrison) I think it is also shared
by the scientists! Every time you go and have briefings with them,
they say, "We cannot be absolutely certain about this."
108. It is an imprecise science before we
even start?
(Mr Morrison) Hugely imprecise. For instance,
on population assessment, they work routinely plus or minus 40
per cent. It is hardly worthy of the name "science".
That is the acceptable parameter that they work to. I think they
tend to have the difficulties that they do because the marine
ecosystem is a big place, it is deep and it is dark, it is not
like counting birds. You have to make the most amazing assumptions
about what is going on down there. I have a lot of sympathy for
them and I have talked to them. The difficulty comes really and
we had an example of this at our annual dinner where the Minister
came along and started talking, appropriately enough, about scientific
advice and, five minutes into his speech, he was calling it scientific
evidence. That is where the problem is. It is actually the interpretation
that Government put on scientific advice—
109. Is it given greater credibility than
it really should have?
(Mr Morrison) Yes and again one can understand
why because they are making regulations, the enforcement of which
can remove a man's liberty, so they have to say it is real.
110. One of the other problems is that the
things that are imposed from the Commission seem to be not taking
into account the knowledge that fishermen have and the experience
they have. As Mr Lambourn said, the last three years have been
radically different from the ones before that and to be told then,
"You have to cut down on fishing effort, you have to decommission
vessels and you have to change fishing practices". . . They
then say, "But we do not see this as a problem." So,
how are we going to actually draw the partnership together so
that we are using that? We have touched upon the support of the
Regional Advisory Councils, I believe, but are there other ways
that we can do that in addition and are you supportive that they
should be brought in?
(Mr Deas) I think that no one has a monopoly
on useful information and knowledge about fish stocks and that
includes the scientists, so it is very important to complement
the more formal methods of fish stock assessments with fishermen's
direct experience, not least of all because it is up to date.
It is the nature of assessments that they are always a year out
of date. That is why I think it is extremely important that we
move as quickly as possible to an entirely new type of fishery
science where fishermen are involved in the assessments themselves
and commercial fishing vessels are involved. That is not necessarily
to say that everything that is done now should be binned, that
is not what we are saying. It needs to be complemented by the
incorporation and use of fishermen's direct experience and I have
given examples previously from the United States and Australia
where this is exactly what is done. So, one can arrive at a consensus
of what the state of an individual stock is and I think that that
removes a great deal of the tension and difficulties that we have
as has been experienced this year with the very extreme way that
ICES has chosen to express its advice. That should not be happening.
There should be a consensus at a stage before this stage is reached
on the state of the stock. Not only that but on the long-term
objectives for that fishery and the instruments to be used in
getting to those objectives and that is, I think, where the Regional
Advisory Councils will come in because there would be a place
for the scientists and the fishermen on those Councils.
111. Is that view shared by all of you?
(Mr Lambourn) Yes. I think there is a
glimmer of a way out of the mess we are in if we were to capitalise
on this and use the industry for the science instead of spending
£10 million or whatever on a new survey ship, to use that
money to fund the industry and, if necessary, train them to sort
out the information that is required. It seems to me that one
can draw the different strands and difficulties that we are all
in together, solve the immediate problem and, more importantly
in the longer term, get better science into it. They cut the stock
assessments and the one thing that I always find most unsatisfactory
with every scientific background is that you never see a degree
of confidence on their final conclusions and I think that is because
it would be embarrassingly high, plus or minus 100 per cent. In
the real world of science proper, no one would take any notice
of that conclusion or the answer at all. It is meaningless. "Go
away and get better data" would be the answer. "Do some
more." That is the way out of this, but they will argue that
we cannot because of financial constraints. We have to get out
of this loop and it seems to me that that is one way, that we
really ought to take a different look and be prepared to do something
a bit visionary.
112. Moving on, we have touched on the desire
to have sustainability, long-term stability means good sustainability
in fishing, but we have fluctuations that you know about. Do you
think it is possible to ever actually reconcile the two of stability
and sustainability because they do seem to be at odds, do they
not?
(Mr Morrison) I think that is a very
perceptive question, if I may say so. I did ask at a recent seminar
of the assembled might of Europe's fishery scientists whether
it was possible for all species to be inside safe biological limits
simultaneously. There was a great deal of shuffling about and
passing of notes. The truth is that they did not know. Take, for
example, a big event which some of you will know about in the
late 1960s/early 1970s called the Gadoid outburst when all the
commercial fish populations exploded, cod, haddock, whiting, huge
year classes. People look back to those halcyon times forgetting
completely that the herring collapsed during that period and we
have at the moment the concerns that we do about cod in the North
Sea overlooking completely the fact that we are about to double
the herring quota, to double it, and there is certainly evidence
from our surveys and elsewhere that the nephrops population is
at least 100 per cent more than the allowable catch, probably
more. It is not that strange because cod eats those species and,
if there are not many cod, then those other species will do rather
well! I think it is this sort of formulaic fiction that says,
"We can rebuild this or that stock," but we really cannot
because if one thing goes down, something else comes up. All ecosystems
are like that. Given those limitations, it ought to be possible
that we all get involved in the management of the stock to do
an awful lot better than we have done up to now because it is
possible: Canada does it, they do it in the States and they have
done it in Iceland. There is no reason why we should not be as
good as them.
113. You just mentioned the doubling of
the quota of one fish and whatever. How might the quota system
have been reformed then to actually try and get this desired stability,
sustainability model that we would like to have? What would you
like to see so that it could be workable?
(Mr Deas) Accepting the points that Hamish
has made of increasing the portion of adult fish within the stock
is the way to a greater degree of stability, accepting that these
ecosystem changes will also have an impact. I think it is a big
mistake to think that the quota system has anything to do with
conservation. The quota system and TAC system is a convenient
way to distribute—
Mr Mitchell
114. It is a political thing.
(Mr Lambourn) It is a share system.
(Mr Deas) It is a shared resource between
different Member States and different groups of fishermen within
those Member States and, for that reason alone, I do not see it
disappearing very quickly. What has to be put in place is effective
conservation measures, an effective conservation regime, that
underpins that distributional system. So, I think that the two
things are conceptually different and have to be treated in different
ways.
Diana Organ
115. How would you implement that? When
you say a "regime", what would it be?
(Mr Deas) It would be something based
on multi-annual management plans that are developed by the industry
in conjunction with the scientists.
Mr Mitchell
116. Through regional councils?
(Mr Deas) Through regional advisory councils,
that would set objectives, would agree the instruments that would
take us to those objectives. The mix of measures would depend
very much on the fishery, the specific fisheries that we are talking
about; what is appropriate for the Irish Sea would not necessarily
be appropriate for the North Sea.
Diana Organ
117. So it would take into account, possibly
for the first time, very localised differences of the fisheries?
(Mr Deas) Certainly more localised differences
than is the current case, where blanket measures are imposed.
118. It is a bit of a sledgehammer, is it
not?
(Mr Deas) Very much so, and the involvement
of the industry, I think, is a very important element in securing
compliance with the rules. It is one thing to have a rule, but
a greater degree of compliance with the rule is assisted greatly
if the industry is involved in shaping those rules.
Mr Mitchell
119. There is a difficulty for us, in the
sense that so much of fishing is mixed fishing, therefore it is
difficult to set general rules. You have given the example of
Australia and the west, which have two advantages of their own:
one, they control their own waters, and what they say goes in
those waters, and two—and for conservation purposes equally
important—they are not mixed fisheries in the same way as
our mixed fisheries are. It is difficult to propose a mesh size
that is going to be effective. There will always be the problems
of discards and all that, which complicates management in the
areas most important to the British fisherman. Can we get round
that?
(Mr Deas) If one were to use a slogan,
one would say there is not a solution but there are solutions.
That is the approach, and that is why the regional advisory councils
potentially have a very important role, if the composition is
correct and the industry have the main say on them. The question
of national jurisdiction should be taken into account by the fact
that every Member State with a stake in the fishery would be involved,
but I think it is not possible to say "This is the solution"
because I do not think there is a solution.
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