Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-95)
MR JIM
PORTUS
7 DECEMBER 2004
Q80 Chairman: The NFFO though suggest
that if we are going to have community quotas that the POs would
be the best way of organising them.
Mr Portus: The membership of POs
that is represented by the inshore sector is relatively small.
There are thousands of vessels in the inshore sector that do not
belong to Producer Organisations at all and never have done, and
one could not, within European regulations, compel owners to join
Producer Organisations—it is not allowed under Community
law. Membership of Producer Organisations has to be voluntary.
So I believe that there is always going to be quite a large sector
of the fishing industry that is not going to be in Producer Organisations.
Many of them do not catch quotas anyway, shell fishermen and the
like, and they would not wish to be managed by Producer Organisations—they
do not particularly like being managed by Defra.
Q81 Chairman: Or anybody.
Mr Portus: Or anybody for that
matter.
Q82 Mr Lazarowicz: As you will know,
one of the issues is what is actually going on out at sea when
it comes to questions of compliance with the various schemes that
are in place. The Strategy Unit report, as I am sure you will
know, suggested what they described as a "high-transparency
system whereby all catches and landings are traced through markets
and processors, forensic accounting, on-board observers, risk
profiling and administrative points and penalties". Do you
feel that these kind of measures are adequate and sensible? And
if you have any feelings as to which might be more appropriate,
which would you regard as the most practical to implement that
kind of measure?
Mr Portus: The Department is trying
on the one hand to suggest that consumers should have traceability
of their fish and that this is a good reason for having overwhelming
powers of enforcement, so that we all know when and where the
fish is landed and from which vessel it comes. But I am sure that
all of us around this table realise that in the millions of individual
fish that are landed every year around the UK, and the European
Community, for that matter, it is an absolutely impossible task
to trace, when you have a fish in front of you on the plate, to
say with certainty where that fish came from in terms of back
to the cod end. So there is never going to be that traceability
from boat to throat, and nor should there be, I believe. What
consumers are interested in is the quality of the product and
the fact that it is wholesome and good for them. What the enforcers
are interested in, from the Commission down through the departments
in all Member States, is that the fishermen are compliant with
the regulations and, in my opinion, the best way to be compliant
with the regulations is first of all to have regulations that
the industry not only respects but has also had a hand in creating,
and that if you are going to have a quota system you have quotas
that reflect what the fishing fleets are actually catching. We
do not have that at the moment; after 20 years of quotas we have
seen those quotas declining almost in inverse proportion to the
growth of the regulations to see to it that the fishermen behave
themselves, and clearly there must be something wrong in that.
The cost of the regulations and enforcing them on the fishing
community is astronomical, and I think that we must do something
about reversing that.
Q83 Mr Lazarowicz: Is that not then a
good argument for moving towards a kind of effort- based management
system, which again was one of the SU recommendations? Apart from
the advantage of reducing discards it would, on the face of it,
be much more simple to enforce than the system based upon the
current arrangements.
Mr Portus: Absolutely, and on
the face of it an effort-based system has great attractions, provided
ultimately that the amount of time that is made available to the
fishermen is also in proportion to what they were doing on the
day that you switch from one system to another. When you switch
from one to another you tend to create victims, people who fall
by the wayside, and no changeover should do that. We must be at
great pains, if we are going to change from a system of quotas
to a system of effort limitation, to avoid collateral damage amongst
innocent bystanders in the fishing communities. So we have to
go to a lot of trouble to make sure that any effort-based system
is right for the resources and for the fishing industry, and that
if there are reductions to be made, for scientific reasons, and
those scientific reasons are fully justified, that there should
be adequate compensatory mechanisms in order to ensure that there
are no victims of such a changeover. But I am not fundamentally
opposed to effort limitation; I just want it to reflect truly
what the fishing community is doing at the time the changeover
takes place.
Q84 Mr Lazarowicz: You also said a few
minutes ago that you want to see regulations with which the industry
was involved in the development. Does that not also give strength
for another of the arguments in the SU report, that there needs
to be a move towards a recovery of management costs peripherally
from the industry? How would you react to that? Are there any
particular aspects of management costs that you feel might be
more appropriate than others?
Mr Portus: I find it interesting,
this business about recovery of management costs. The industry
certainly did not ask the Department to spend the millions that
it does spend every year on the imposition of the Common Fisheries
Policy and I have to say that the costs are out of all proportion
to the benefits that the industry gets from it. All we seem to
get is bigger and bigger sticks with which to beat the industry
and certainly no pats on the back or benefits from it. The industry
is also taxpayers, so we are contributing to our own costs of
enforcement because it is taxpayers' money that is being used.
Furthermore, as Producer Organisations we are the tool of the
Department which, in order to manage the fish quotas—for
which we get no payment whatsoever—we are paid by the industry
for their benefit, and yet we are asked year in year out to do
more and more of the tasks that the Department did before Sectoral
Quota Management came on the scene. So largely the costs of managing
the fish quotas are already borne by the industry and any additional
costs that are imposed by the State, in the creation of their
aerial surveillance for instance, their naval presence, et cetera,
et cetera, they are, I believe, Community requirements, for which
a great deal of money is also drawn down from the Community to
the Department in order to pay for those costs, and I think overall
the taxpayer has not got a great burden to shoulder. I certainly
do not think that it should be handed down to the industry.
Q85 Mr Lazarowicz: So the taxpayer should
pay for additional costs, as you put it?
Mr Portus: We are forever being
told that fish is a national resource and therefore the management
of that fish should be a national requirement.
Q86 Chairman: I notice you did not bring
in the argument of cannot afford to pay it anyway.
Mr Portus: Certainly not, Chairman!
Q87 Ms Atherton: Fishing is often the
lead item in the West Country, as you and I well know, but today
it is the national lead and there is a Royal Commission report,
which is very critical of commercial fishing. There have been
a number of criticisms of commercial fishing; do you think they
are justified?
Mr Portus: I attended the launch
of the Royal Commission this morning and I have looked at the
summary of their recommendations. Indeed, the fishing industry
comes in for quite a battering by that Commission, and indeed
the industry has been bashed quite heavily by a number of reports
that have been published in the last couple of years. I think
the industry does not deserve the battering it is getting, by
any means. Hundreds of fishing boats and, indeed, thousand of
jobs have already been laid waste to over the last 10 years,
through decommissioning schemes and other mechanisms, in the UK
and in other Member States for that matter, and there is a lot
less activity out there on the seas than there was. Activity grew
quite naturally in the 70s in particular because fishing is an
economic activity and there was money to be had, and that is why
people invested in fishing boats. There has been a trend, a reversal
of the support that the industry used to have. The whitefish authority
that became a sea fish industry authority used to pay out grants
for the replacement of fishing boats. They spent lots of money
on the development of fishing technology in order to make fishermen
more efficient at catching fish, and now we are supposed to take
the blame for all of that. I think it is a shame that the Royal
Commission has come up with some quite extraordinary suggestions
of 30% closures of all fishing grounds in UK and community waters,
especially when the industry has taken such a hammering in the
last 18 months and so many of the boats have already left.
Q88 Ms Atherton: But it is partly because
of the concerns expressed today and previous concerns that you
have discussed over the last two years that the Strategy Unit
came up with the Strategic Environmental Assessment and the Environmental
Impact Assessments. What are your judgments about those proposals?
Mr Portus: The Strategy Unit,
the Royal Commission, other groups are rehashing what the Community
Green Paper came up with in 2001-02, and it is the intention of
the CFP, as we are now in, to have ecosystem based management,
for environmental concerns to be uppermost in people's minds when
regulations are brought forward, and that also fishery science
is looked at in precautionary terms. All of that is old news and
the industry has moved on in these two years in response to those
changes, and I do not think it helps to keep on coming up with
the same messages in terms of the need to look after the environment,
because I do believe the fishing industry has responded and is
responding. For instance, in the southwest we have the Invest
in Fish southwest project. It is a very important project; it
has the industry at its core, it has all sorts of other stake
holding groups, not just the environmentalists—the restaurateurs,
the multiples, the scientists, the administrators are all there
at the table seeking ways to better manage the fish resources
in those West Country waters—and I think they will come
up with solutions that will go along in parallel with the demands
of the Royal Commission, of the Strategy Unit, of all these other
bodies.
Q89 Ms Atherton: I think the jury is
out on that one. I accept that it is very good what is going on
in the West Country, but I still think that the SEAs may well
be coming in. Say they are, how should they be done—by area,
by fishery and by whom?
Mr Portus: I do not think it really
matters what the area or region is, I think it is the fisheries
that are specific and I think the industry needs to be at the
core of any of those assessments. The industry is out there on
a day-to-day basis exploiting these fisheries and exploring new
ones, where they can, and they have a huge wealth of knowledge,
far more than the scientific community can ever gather within
the budgets available to them. So I think it is for these environmental
assessments to be done in collaboration with the fishing industry.
Q90 Ms Atherton: Another area that is
proposed is Marine Protected Areas, and of course we have the
Lundy Island experiment, which has been quite successful, but
do you think that in other areas it would be helpful? Will it
help stock regeneration?
Mr Portus: We heard a lot this
morning about Lundy Island and it seems to be a beacon of hope
and many people have latched on to it as being the way to go for
the future. I am not saying that I disagree with that; I believe
that MPAs or closed areas do have a place in the toolbox of fisheries'
management. Indeed, it has been proposed by the southwest fishing
industry that there should be closed areas in the Celtic Sea in
order to help in the regeneration of cod stocks in that area.
My organisation has assisted in the creation of two areas that,
and whilst they are not totally closed, they are nevertheless
restricted to static gear, off the South Devon Coast, in the Lyme
Bay reefs area—we have done that in association with the
Devon Wildlife Trust. Indeed, there are other examples. So, as
I say, in the toolbox they have their place, but they have to
be brought in with the collaboration of the fishing industry,
not just collaboration but also overwhelming support at the end
of the day, otherwise they will not work. If you are going to
close an area and you have done so without getting industry support
then you can expect the industry to start going back in there
and poaching, and obviously if you have established a closed area
you want it to be closed.
Q91 Ms Atherton: There are some fishery
dependent communities; do you think there is a threat to them
from MPAs?
Mr Portus: Very definitely. If
you have MPAs established in a local fishery on the doorstep of
a fishing community which has, up to that moment, relied upon
that area for their livelihood, and you suddenly close it, then
of course you are going to get the backlash from that fishing
community.
Q92 Ms Atherton: But it is an equation,
is it not, because long-term if they do not close it then they
will also suffer?
Mr Portus: The very first thing
you have to do when considering MPAs is to do a full scientific
evaluation of what is in that area that you wish either to protect
or regenerate, because certainly what we must not have in a commercial
and economic activity is areas simply being closed for the sake
of it, with no economic benefit on the other side of the equation.
The industry has to be persuaded that there are going to be long-term
benefits and they have to be analysed and assessed and presented
to the industry, and the industry has to accept the figures that
are presented to them. I think we are a long way away from establishing
a network of MPAs, either in the southwest or indeed in the North
Sea.
Ms Atherton: Chairman, can I ask one
question on a different subject?
Chairman: Yes.
Ms Atherton: This Committee has taken
evidence on Cetacean by-Catch, as I am sure you are aware.
Are you aware of the suggestions that the 12-mile exclusion is
being breached off Devon and Cornwall at the moment by pair trawlers?
I crave your indulgence.
Q93 Chairman: It is an indulgence; let
me have a brief answer.
Mr Portus: I read the Western
Morning News every morning on which it is published and I see
the pictures that are published in it, and I have heard from fishermen
who are in my organisation who have told me that fishing vessels
are going inside the 12-mile limit. As I understand it, the law
in terms of the bass pair trawling has not actually been brought
into force yet and so anybody fishing within the 12-mile limit
at the moment is doing so perfectly legally. I am on record as
saying that at the time this law was brought in, or the Bill was
brought in, that the Minister was really clutching at the only
straws that he could because he was knocked back in Brussels from
bringing forward an international cross-community regulation.
Clearly the French have their opinions about pair trawling for
bass and the economic wealth that it brings to them, and I do
not think that that is arguable. If it were the case that pair
trawling for bass was bad for bass then I think the Minister would
have a much stronger case to argue in the Community to have it
banned, but it seems that the bass population is standing up to
this level of activity, so I am told, and in that respect dealing
with cetaceans, regrettably, is something that the Minister is
unable to do.
Chairman: Just satisfy my indulgence
as well. These vessels are presumably French that Candy is complaining
about?
Ms Atherton: Scottish!
Chairman: I will have to find a whole
new area of prejudice now!
Q94 Alan Simpson: Mr Portus, can you
clarify one thing for me? There is an issue about the compatibility
of what the industry is likely to say and what the Royal Commission
has been saying. At the start of your evidence you talked about
reservations about moving into Transferable Quotas and saying
that that results in the industry being dominated by the big operators.
But you used the phrase "the industry", and I do not
know whether you are talking about an industry view that is now
itself just dominated by the big operators. Is that how the industry
is?
Mr Portus: It certainly has been
moving that way under FQAs because they have, de facto,
become tradable and the industry has certainly also taken steps
to aggregate and accumulate quotas in order for the individuals
who have made those investments, for them to be legal when it
comes to the landing of the fish that they are catching. That
is what they have been forced into doing in order to comply with
the regulations. So what we have is a much smaller industry—there
is a mixture of decommissioning and consolidation of opportunities—and
with a smaller industry you are bound to have fewer but larger
corporations or individual owners in some instances around the
entire UK. But it is one thing to talk about the owners of the
vessels, whom I represent through a Producer Organisation and
the fishermen themselves, who one might call "the industry",
when those men are seldom actually consulted about anything because
it is the owners who are represented by all the organisations.
There are, obviously, Port Associations of fishermen who try to
get their voice heard through sea fisheries' committees and that
sort of thing, but it is very difficult to know when one is, as
it were, listening to a voice at that level of the grass roots.
Q95 Alan Simpson: I am just wondering
whether, when the Royal Commission talk about sustainability,
we are really pursuing a nonsense. If a middle ground was about
smaller boats, more restricted types of tackle and restricted
size of netting, whether already the character of the industry
has said, "Push off" to that, they are now an industry
dominated by industrial scale fishing interests that do not in
any way offer the grounds that would be compatible with sustainability.
Mr Portus: Interesting you say
that because the Strategy Unit document has highlighted the pelagic
sector; they have already made the transition to ITQs effectively.
There are very few of them and they are responsible for very large
quotas individually, and an enormous value, and it is as if they
are being praised for doing that, and that therefore this is the
way for the rest of the industry to go. I am not sure that white
fisheries lend themselves to the same kind of management as the
pelagic sector; in pelagics we are talking about hundreds of thousands
of tons of quota of herrings and mackerels and horse mackerels
and things like that, whereas with whitefish you are only talking
in hundreds and handfuls of thousands of tons of quota, and also
a lot more vessels involved. It is the relative values of the
fish as well, with mackerel being a few hundred pounds a ton compared
to Dover sole being £6,000, £7,000, £8,000 a ton.
So the relative values are also important to recognise. This is
why I do not think that we will ever gravitate to just a handful
of whitefish boats in the entire UK sector, we are always going
to have the size of boat that is suited to the fishing grounds
of be it the English Channel, the Irish Sea, the East Coast, and
they will be restricted in their numbers according to how much
the quotas support.
Chairman: Thank you very much, Jim. We
have dealt with each other over fishing matters for more years
than I can remember, and at least you have managed to stay more
cheerful than most over that period. Thank you very much indeed.
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