Examination of Witnesses (Questions 380-396)
MRS LINDA
CROSS AND
MR DANNY
COUPER
18 JANUARY 2005
Q380 David Burnside: What role would
you wish the relatively new Scottish Parliament and Executive
to have? Should they be contributing finance so that it develops
into an executive making rather than consultative council?
Mrs Cross: I think in the initial
stages it would be very welcome for the Scottish Executive to
take that role of providing financing.
Q381 David Burnside: Has the Council
discussed that and have you asked for it?
Mrs Cross: I am not aware of that
issue, that is something I would have to look into.
David Burnside: We are having nods from
the back.
Q382 Chairman: Mr Park is telling us
it already does finance it to the tune of £23,000 over four
years.
Mrs Cross: As a body ourselves
we would find it very difficult to provide that level of funding
going forward from our members. The funds are not there at the
moment, we need to develop into being profit making businesses
to be able to fund that going forward.
Q383 Mr Drew: If we could go on to Individual
Transferable quotas. I think it is fair to say that we are getting
mixed messages on the keenness to which those who are faced with
these changes would welcome ITQs. Could you just give me your
own views and if you move away from the Fixed Quota Allocations,
who do you think would be the winners and losers?
Mrs Cross: I am going to ask Mr
Couper to comment on this because it is something that he has
dealt with a great deal in the past.
Mr Couper: Over the last 15 years
I have been a strong advocate of ITQs. The reason for this is
that at many different meetings we had, as far as management was
concerned, we seemed to get the same old horse but a new saddle
but what we needed in fisheries management was really a new horse.
We needed something. We were never going to get a perfect management
system. I, and many others, felt there was an inevitability about
ITQs going to be used as a management tool which would introduce
economics of the job into the fisheries' side. The other reason
is we were dealing with a wild resource, we were dealing with
a common ownership resource and, as has been said many times,
if no-one owns the common, the common goes to waste. Also, it
is a resource that has been hunted and anything that was hunted
in the past was wiped out. What I warned, and many of my colleagues
warned, was if the Government did not grasp the nettle and look
at ITQs seriously and introduce some type of ownership into management
but instead allowed it to come in through the back door, which
has happened, it would be a shambles, there would be chaos, and
this is what has happened. What we would say now, and what I would
say now, is some type of ownership must be introduced but
the responsibility of the ownership must be shared between the
Government and the catchers. If you are going to introduce ITQs
you must look to all the mistakes that have been made. Also, remember
that ITQ is a generic name. ITQs have been introduced in New Zealand
and Australia and Iceland, but all of these fisheries are different.
You must look at the merits of ITQs working in mixed fisheries.
The fishermen, the catchers and Government have got to sit round
the table and tailor some type of ownership, if need be through
the principle of ITQs, which will suit the catching sector which
will displace all the fears, and there are many fears. It is never
going to be a perfect system but we do need something done. These
fears are things like the quotas could finish up in the hands
of big companies, that quotas could finish up in the hands of
foreign companies. We have got to look at how the entitlement
is shared out. Can we ring-fence ITQs? Is it legally possible
to ring-fence ITQs around regional management or PO management?
There is a minefield to trip through. It is happening now, let
us structure it in such a fashion that is tailored to the needs
of the most important people in this, and that is the catchers.
Q384 Chairman: Presumably you also feel
that it will guarantee or help to provide better continuity of
supplies to the processing side.
Mr Couper: Absolutely. Ownership
will put the responsibility on to the fishermen. It will bring
the social and economic consequences of them having the asset
to look after the stock. It will become self-policing. Self-policing
means that we will always get the rotten apples but it will take
the idea of blackfish landings out because they will look after
it. It changes the perception of the fishermen from the hunter
to the harvester. This is what is required in our industry. We
are at the eleventh hour. The reason the stocks are so low now
is down to management. One of the other things, and it is aligned
to ITQs, is instead of controlling the catch you have introduced
a management system for controlling effort. Controlling the catch
was always going to be a disaster from day one. From the very
outset of the Bretherton Holt model that was used to look at it,
Professor Bretherton and Holt said it would not work because
there was no correspondence between the quota of what was being
caught and what was being landed. At the beginning the whole thing
was more to do with how you were going to share out the stocks
in the seas but we are passed that now, we have grown up.
Q385 Alan Simpson: In terms of this sharing
of ownership and responsibility, you were moving on at the end
to talking about effort-based systems. We had people saying to
us this morning that if you are going to go down that path we
need to draw a distinction between steaming time and fishing time.
If you do not do that, you are always going to encourage people
on an effort-based system to fish closest to home to minimise
the travelling time. Would that make sense, to incorporate that
distinction?
Mr Couper: Yes, I think it would.
There is a basic principle which I have always come from and that
is you cannot ask fishermen to catch less fish for the future
if they are not going to have a future. You have 200 boats out
there and each boat has got a managing director and a group of
directors and they are all making decisions, but the most important
decision to them is their communities back on shore, their families
and their boat and how they keep that boat viable. Their decisions
will be made on that basis first and foremost, then they will
look at conservation and then they will look at sustainability.
I always remember being at a meeting in Shetland and the Norwegian
Minister said, "Unless fishermen are viable, we will not
get sustainability". You do not want to detract from making
them viable, you have got to look at how you structure it to make
sure there is something in it for them to go out there. As Mike
Park said, it is the most difficult job in the world. It is tough.
If you look at the rate of accidents and the people who are killed,
it is the worst industry, it is terrible. You can understand their
mindset, that they are out there in force nine gales and stuff.
There have got to be rewards and if you do not give them rewards
they will circumvent the regulations. The regulation has got to
suit reality.
Q386 Alan Simpson: In terms of that regulatory
framework, coming back on to the quotas, we have heard arguments
that the Individual Transferable Quotas may or may not be compatible
with community quotas. From what you have said, does it make more
sense to begin from community or regional quotas and work out
a division of the catch entitlements from there or is it best
to start from the individual quotas and try and mesh that into
community quotas? Is that whole presumption a nonsense?
Mr Couper: No, I do not think
it is a nonsense. Mistakes have been made and you can learn from
mistakes and you have got to face that. One of the things that
was said, and was said by quite a few fishermen and management
people as well, was the place to ring-fence the quotas would have
been around the POs. The Government was passing the buck all the
time in the early days, putting the responsibility on to the POs,
but what they did not do, and it was an intolerable position,
was to give responsibility without authority. That was what happened.
We have got to change that. Authority has got to be with the POs,
or whoever it is, and I believe that is where it should start.
Q387 Alan Simpson: Can I bring you back
to what Linda Cross was saying. In terms of responsibility and
authority, you talked about the restructuring that is taking place
within the processor organisations and called for financial assistance
and support for that restructuring process. Would the industry
be viable if, as a condition of that support, there were labour
market conditions imposed on you in terms of the security of employment,
the rates of pay? I ask that because one of the comments this
morning was about the number of non-Scottish, non-UK workforces
that are being brought in that may or may not be working at the
minimum wage, or if they are above it is only by error. Would
the responsibilities of employment rights, rates of pay and security
of employment make the industry non-viable again if you were asked
to incorporate all of those responsibilities as well?
Mrs Cross: As a Federation, we
became very concerned with the situation regarding foreign labour
several years ago and from the outset we did not support what
was going on. We knew it was happening in the industry. We developed
a scheme that allowed us to access foreign workers to come into
this country legally and who are provided accommodation by their
employers and who are paid appropriately, meeting all the regulations.
That scheme was very successful and it was also very beneficial
to a lot of companies. There has been a shortage of labour for
food processing companies, particularly here in the North East
of Scotland. The North East of Scotland is very fortunate in that
it is a fairly rich and affluent area with the oil business. But
the fishing industry and the fish processing side is also a very
important constituent here in that it does provide employment
to a group of local people who generally find it difficult to
find employment in things like the oil business. They do not have
the skills, they do not have the education base that is required
for those alternative jobs and without something like the fishing
and the fish processing communities they would be in the unemployment
category. We provide a very significant resource. We still employ
thousands of people in this area, local people, but to make our
businesses competitive we have to have enough staff to be able
to work the kinds of volumes that we require that could be landed
on any day. We have topped up with foreign labour coming in here,
but most of our members work through the scheme, they work now
with the EU opening up within those regulations and employ people
at the correct rates. I understand that there have been issues
in the past, there is no denying that, but I believe that the
majority of our members are abiding by the Government regulations.
Q388 Diana Organ: Can we talk about the
other end of the chain, which is the consumer. Do the consumers
want traceability or are they just happy with quality and price
of the fish?
Mrs Cross: A lot of work has been
done in this area to investigate how much consumers actually care
when they go into the supermarket to buy their fish off the shelf,
which is typically where they buy their fish these days. Generally
it has been found that there is not a lot of thought as to where
the fish is sourced from, it is very much about the quality and
the price that is available out there. To most people traceability
issues do not appear to be very high on their priority list when
they are going out to buy a product. As processors, we are asked
by our customers, which are the supermarkets, the food service
companies, for traceability of product and at the moment our traceability
works from the point of sale forward generally. It is only in
certain circumstances where you can go even further back to the
catch to know exactly where fish was caught, in which sector of
the North Sea. I think that is something that will increase. More
and more we are seeing that customers want to have the full traceability
chain brought forward but at this point in time it is not an option
for everybody to be able to supply that information.
Q389 Diana Organ: Do you think that full
traceability is possible in a product like fish?
Mrs Cross: No.
Q390 Diana Organ: It is easy with a beef
steer in a field because it does not move around that much. Do
you think it is possible? Are Government measures necessary? Are
we just putting a burden too many on the industry when the real
end customer is not that bothered about it?
Mrs Cross: There is a lot of debate
on this topic even within our side of the industry at this point
in time. We have to be very clear as to what is the point of traceability.
From the processing sector's side, our interest in traceability
is very much from food health safety concerns. We want to be able
to say that if there is a problem with fish we can trace it back
and say where that problem originated from so that we can ensure
it does not happen again.
Q391 Diana Organ: When you say there
is a problem with fish, do you mean that the customer has gut
ache after eating it?
Mrs Cross: It could be that, or
even finding bones in fish or—
Q392 Diana Organ: Do we not expect fish
to have bones in?
Mrs Cross: A lot of people do
not expect fish to have bones in, believe it or not, it is the
most common complaint that we have. We have not seen it in the
whitefish side but there are other examples in shellfish, et cetera,
where they want to know information on toxins. Because we are
all sea fish, seafood, they expect it to apply to the whitefish
side as well. The indications are that we do not have the same
kind of potential scare capacity in the whitefish sector for having
to trace fish back to source but there are some examples where
potentially it would be useful from time to time to have that
information.
Q393 Diana Organ: Do they care about
it at all in the pelagic sector?
Mrs Cross: Yes, they do actually.
Q394 Diana Organ: Do they?
Mrs Cross: Yes. There are potential
issues. I am not a pelagic person, I have to hold my hands up
there.
Mr Couper: We have an organisation
in Scotland called Seafood Scotland and it works very closely
with the three organisations which represent our sector and got
to do with quality, safety and controls starting at source on
board boats. They have got a Seafood Scotland mark which boats
can obtain.
Q395 Diana Organ: Like a quality mark?
Mr Couper: Yes.
Q396 Mr Lazarowicz: You will be aware
that over the last few months there have been a number of proposals
emanating from different sources and different motivations but
all of which have a common feature that if implemented they would
result in the closure of certain fisheries on a geographical basis.
We have had the proposals for Marine Protected Areas, the Royal
Commission on Environmental Pollution which recently suggested
a 30% no-take zone, and there were also the proposals from the
Commission as well. What is your reaction as an Association to
those types of proposals insofar as you have had a chance to consider
them?
Mr Couper: There are certain aspects
of fisheries management that we do not get involved in, but we
do get involved when it directly affects what happens to us. Area
closures can have quite serious effects on landings. As my colleague
said, we would like better communication between the buyers and
sellers on when fish is coming in so we can pre-empt and have
our businesses become more efficient. One of the things that happened
last year when there were closed areas was the catching sector,
because of the regulations, fishermen were forced to target one
area because the other area was closed, and this one area was
predominantly where they got small fish, it was like one of the
breeding areas, and we finished up with in excess of 1,000 boxes
that had to be withdrawn because there were something like 2,000
or 3,000 boxes of small fish landed because the whole fleet was
targeting one area. It was bad for conservation and it was bad
for business. The environmental lobby, which I support because
the objectives are for the future, has got to consult the fishermen,
it is not a one-way street. They are looking after marine mammals
but fishermen are marine mammals, they have got to keep in business
as well, so you have got to look at their side as well. You do
not just close areas for the wellbeing of the fish and sustainability,
it is a joint thing. It has got to be thought through very, very
carefully before you go down that road and there has to be consultation.
Chairman: Thank you very much. That was
very interesting evidence. Can I just say, as somebody who comes
from the Humber where the processing side takes no interest at
all in the catching side it is good to see processors taking such
a close interest and being so closely involved with the catching
side, so my congratulations on that. I envy it from a Humber point
of view. Thank you.
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