Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 73-79)

MR JIM PORTUS

7 DECEMBER 2004

  Q73 Chairman: Welcome, Jim Portus. Thank you very much for the interesting evidence because it is good to know how a Producer Organisation like yours works—what the number of vessels are and how it enforces discipline and allocates quota and generally organises fishing for the area. I do not want, as we start, to get involved in an argument about in or out of the Common Fisheries Policy, so I have asked the Committee to steer clear of that. But we do want to take up some of the points that are in the Strategy Unit Report and get the views of the fishing producers. So I would like to start with the vexed issue of Individual Transferable Quotas. You do not appear to be all that happy with Individual Transferable Quotas; would you care to give us your views, the views of the PO?

  Mr Portus: Yes. The view of the organisation in terms of Individual Transferable Quotas is that whilst they may have a use in the management of fisheries' quotas nevertheless we have some very deep concerns about the impact of Individual Transferable Quotas on fishing communities. We have, within our management system, a large number of different ways of managing the quotas. We have a pool of quotas derived from the track record of the fishing vessel owners; we have Individual Transferable Quotas amongst our members; we have quotas that are traded into and out of the organisation by rental, which are utilised by members who wish to go over the monthly pool limit. So it would be wrong of me to say that we are opposed fundamentally to Individual Transferable Quotas because clearly we are not, otherwise we would simply oppose them totally. But we are aware of what can happen with an ITQ system if it is adopted nationally, and it has been observed in other countries around the world where ITQs polarise fishing communities and the quota opportunities gravitate into the hands of a few corporate owners that this has had a severe knock-on effect on fishing communities where you have a significantly reduced number of fishermen going after the opportunities and the wealth of those opportunities goes into the pockets of just a few, rather than being of use to the wider community. So those are our concerns.

  Q74 Chairman: I will ask David Burnside to follow that up in a minute. The other issue that is made much of by the Strategy Unit is Regional Advisory Units, which I think were really an attempt to say that we want regional management as a substitute to management from Brussels. What is the position of your PO on that?

  Mr Portus: We want to be involved in the management of fisheries and the only way that we are going to be involved in the management of fisheries is if that management is devolved down to the regions and to the local communities, and we have to have fishermen and their representatives sitting on the groups that consider how best to manage the fisheries and the marine resources generally. So we wish to be involved at the ground floor in the establishment of these Regional Advisory Councils; they are the name of the game in terms of fisheries management in the near term. As you said, you wish to steer clear of the broader issue of the ins and outs of the Common Fisheries Policy so we recognise that as well; we know what the rules are at the moment in fisheries' management, in fisheries terms, and we have to go along with that. So I have been involved in attending meetings of the embryonic Southwest Regional Advisory Council—the Northwest Waters RAC actually is its correct terminology—and it is our hope that Northwest RAC will be established in the early part of 2005 and I sincerely hope that the organisation I represent will be at the table of the executive structure for that organisation, and indeed represented on any of the working groups that have to be established because we recognise that the Northwest RAC area is enormous in terms of the Commission proposals. So we believe that it has to be broken down into lower denominators such as the English Channel, the Celtic Sea, the Irish Sea and other regions, where the fisheries are readily identifiable as having unique characteristics, and the people to look after those fisheries can be selected from within those regions. So for the English Channel, for instance, we would hope that it would be an English, French and Belgian sub-committee to look after the interests of the fish stocks in that area.

  Q75 Chairman: And you do not see any conflict between the POs and the RACs as long as the POs are involved in the running of the RACs?

  Mr Portus: That is right. One has to remember that the POs are organisations of fishing vessel owners for the benefit of those owners. There are Producer Organisations in every Member State; they have different functions within those Member States. The UK is, I believe, unique in devolving the management of the quotas to the Producer Organisations in the UK. It is a function that is increasing in use in other Member States, but it is by far from being an absolutely established fact in those other Member States. So it is the mechanism used in the United Kingdom for managing fisheries and therefore the POs should be the bodies that sit on RACs.

  Q76 David Burnside: Just staying on the subject of quotas, is the Fixed Quota Allocation the favoured, the best and sensible method?

  Mr Portus: I certainly believe it is. I have good reasons for saying so because I believe that it was a paper that I put together ten years ago that actually resulted in the FQA system being adopted nationally, using the reference period that was used to fix the quotas in time; and industry personnel that I have spoken to within my organisation and within the UK association of POs have all said that FQA system is pretty much a fully functioning system of transferable quotas, whilst not being ITQs as such.

  Q77 David Burnside: So it does not need any change in the flexibility?

  Mr Portus: No. The only change that I would bring about, if I could, would be to establish once and for all property rights, rights of tenure, if you like, so that the quotas would become a properly tax deductible and tax benefiting asset of an organisation or corporation.

  Q78 David Burnside: What are your views on the ring-fenced community quota scheme that has been discussed?

  Mr Portus: This is one of the areas where the organisation has concerns about ITQs, the need to protect communities and particularly the inshore sector. But I think we are losing sight of the ball; the problem is that the quotas themselves have been diminished so far over the 20 years of their existence that there is not enough to go around by any stretch of the imagination, and certain sectors of the fishing industry have grown without control, in particular the under ten metre sector. There have been significant controls in all over ten metre sectors since the mid-80s and indeed there has been a downward pressure on those sectors. But the inshore fishing community, which relies on the under ten metre sector, has been growing in number and efficiency—some vessels have been cut down from over 10 metres in length to under 10 metres in length in order to avoid the quotas, and so that sector is trying to cope more and more, catching more and more fish with less and less quota to go between them. And so it is that the Department, Defra, is seeking ways of dealing with that problem, by hiving off one part of the quota, which they are going to call a community quota, I suppose, and to say, "Right, we are going to earmark that for this particular sector and the rest will be divvied up amongst the over ten metres."

  Q79 David Burnside: The Producer Organisations would be responsible for promoting this concept and what financial input would they have in the ring-fenced community quota?

  Mr Portus: I do not think they would have any, and indeed it seems to me that the intention would be to take away from the POs and their members—the over ten metre members—some of their quotas to dish out to what the government is calling the community, but it is only short of quota because the Department policy has enabled that sector to grow in such an uncontrolled way.


 
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