Examination of Witness (Questions 1-19)
Dr Joe Horwood
5 MARCH 2008
Q1 Chairman: Thank you very much
indeed for finding the time to come and talk to us and to help
us with our inquiry. I have to say a few formal things first of
all: this is a formal session so there will be a record taken
and you will get a transcript as soon as we can get it to you.
Look through and make any changes that may be necessary. We are
also webcast, whatever that might be; I usually say at this stage
that there is a possibility that somebody may be listening to
us. We have never had any evidence that that is the case, but
given an error rate of plus or minus 40% there might be someone
somewhere. Would you prefer to start off by giving a general statement
or would you prefer to go straight into the questions and answers?
Dr Horwood: I am quite happy to go straight
into the questions and answers; any general statement is covered
by the CEFAS and the Defra submissions.
Q2 Chairman: Let me start off. It
seems to me that there is a desperate need and objective to make
fisheries policy science-led and more evidence-based and that
seems to be a sensible way forward. Could you outline to us briefly
what fisheries science is all about: how the data is collected,
how it is interpreted and how it feeds into the policy process
and then perhaps what the shortcomings may be and why we have
what seems to be a continuing conflict between the producers and
the scientists on interpreting the data and the results of the
data.
Dr Horwood: Fisheries science has been established
for quite a long while as a particular science in its own right.
It is now much more merged with marine science as a whole but
its initial inception really was because the fisheries had been
so important to so many countries and it has always been a very
quantitative science, you know, how much fish are taken and how
much can be taken. It has also had a strong international character
because we have all caught fish together, so the nature of fisheries
science is really, firstly, that it was established quite early,
secondly, it has always been fairly quantitative compared with
many of the other comparable sciences and, thirdly, that it is
essentially international. That is the broad context of it. When
we talk about fisheries science and its relationship to policy
and management, more often than not we come down to the stock
assessments: how many fish are there and what are the quotas;
that is only a small part of the work but it tends to be the most
political and the rawest part. To start off with we have a monitoring
system where at the ports the number of fish that are caught are
recorded. They are sampled, so that we know what the catches are
by species and length and we take their ages, so that we know
for instance that from the Irish Sea we caught so many thousand
tonnes of cod and so many one-year olds, two-year olds, three-year
olds, four-year olds. At sea our research vessels conduct surveys
in a consistent way and this produces two sorts of information.
The first is the number of young fish which are about to enter
the fishery, because we use nets that are smaller than the commercial
fleet so we pick them up often a year before the fishery will
see them, so that allows us to put them into our forecast. The
second is that we actually see through these surveys the trends
in abundance of the fish—are our catch rates going up or
are they going down for particular species. That is the basic
building blocks and all the different countries, say around the
North Sea, will be doing the same and we all get together and
pool that key information. The stock assessment process is then
to determine how many fish are there now. One of the ways we do
this is mathematically complicated, but the principle is fairly
simple. If we go back to fish born in 1990, say, they will have
been caught as one year-old in 1991, as two years-old in 1992,
three years-old in 1993 and we record all the numbers of fish
that were caught at these different ages, and so after ten years
we can add them all up again to say in 1991 we actually saw this
many one-year-old fish. We can add a little bit on for those that
died naturally and then we see what the catch rates of our research
vessels or the commercial fleets were and we can actually calibrate
it, so when our research vessel now is catching so many cod at
age one we can compare that with what we saw there as the catch
rate in 1990 and therefore infer the absolute number of one-year-old
cod. It is basically a calibration method; there are quite a lot
of statistics, but that is the key principle behind it. There
is a second method which is less frequently used because it is
much more expensive, but for instance for mackerel we will estimate
the number of fish in the sea by going out and measuring the number
of eggs in the plankton, so we tow plankton samplers behind the
research vessels, capture the eggs and count them. We do this
throughout the production cycle so over the entire area we will
be sampling the eggs and over the three months that they spawn
we will be sampling them to find out how many eggs have been put
in the sea. We know how many eggs a single mackerel will produce,
so you divide one by the other and that is another way in which
we end up getting an absolute measure. From the basic data we
can then do this mathematical exercise, and the output will be
what is the absolute number of fish that we have now in 2007 at
age one, two, three, four and five and what were the numbers in
the past, so we have the history and we can see: has the stock
declined significantly, has it increased or is it stable. Then
if you say what is the forecast, so what can the fishermen take
in the following year, we can project those numbers forward but
also bring in the number of youngsters that we have seen through
our surveys, the little fish, and add on to these estimates from
the stock assessments the estimates of recruiting fish to give
us a forecast of how many fish there are in the sea. That is the
basic data and underlying principle and it is all done internationally,
most of it at the International Council for the Exploration of
the Sea, which brings these parties together to do the assessments.
How good is it? There are, I guess, two elements of it. In terms
of supporting a TAC system as a whole it is actually quite difficult
to count the number of fish in the sea and we reckon that if circumstances
are reasonably good, if we have a good assessment and there are
not any major problems, then we will end up with what we call
a co-efficient of variation of about 20%. What that means is that
one year in every 20 we could be out by 40% more or 40% less,
which is still quite difficult for the fishery to handle. It could
mean that we actually close the fishery in the middle of September
in error, when in actual fact they could safely have fished until
December, but I personally think that getting the number of fish
in the sea to plus or minus 20% is quite good, but even that as
a good answer is still quite a strain for the TAC-based system
in the best of circumstances. The shortcomings and support from
the industry are really quite patchy. The question of the cod
has really dominated the thinking now for the last ten years and
it has been a major issue for us, but the Regional Advisory Councils
held a major meeting last year on cod recovery and they concluded
that there had been a decline in the cod caused by heavy fishing
over a period when the recruitment of a number of youngsters had
been reduced, so in some major instances we are seeing and saying
the same thing as the fishermen. There was an article for Fishing
News which I bought, produced as a letter in response to a
fisherman saying last year our views are out of line with the
scientists, but no, actually we are essentially seeing and saying
more or less the same as you about North Sea cod last year. In
some areas we are very much seeing issues the same; there are
some problems which are difficult and seem to be intractable,
which we have not conquered, and an example is the North Sea whiting
where the quality of our assessment has been very poor for a decade.
At present in our advice we are saying that the whiting is in
quite a poor state and the North Sea coast fishermen are saying
that they cannot avoid whiting, and I have to say that I can see
both sides of the argument. It is truly not clear in these instances
what is going on. I am afraid that is a rather complicated answer
to your question as to how good or how flawed it is, but it is
quite a rich tapestry.
Q3 Chairman: Let us go one stage
further. The industry is heavily regulated and there is clearly
a need to manage the industry and catches. Really, at the end
of the day, the only way that will be successful is if there is
buy-in by the fishermen, if they take ownership of the whole regime.
Essential to that is for there to be confidence between the producers
and the scientists and the fishermen and the scientists; what
could be done to improve that confidence, what could be done to
have a better dialogue?
Dr Horwood: I do absolutely and wholeheartedly
agree with what you say and it was a key theme underpinning the
Net Benefits report and the Government response Securing the Benefits
that there was a virtual spin-off of better trust, better compliance,
better management as a whole. The first thing is for everybody
to believe in that view and, certainly beforehand, the fishermen
were hugely excluded from a system where the advice from ICES,
which is commissioned by the EU, went straight to the EU and was
turned into TAC and quota advice, which did not get altered an
awful lot, and the fishermen just felt that they were nowhere
in the system at all. There is an absolute issue of confidence
and buy-in and involvement and we have recognised that. In terms
of what we are doing about it, it is a great deal, because it
is so important and so fundamental. First of all, the stock assessment
process which I mentioned, the business of calibration and the
calibration of the research vessels, we have only started to do
that fairly recently because our research vessels were used in
the past to only collect the pre-recruit, the young fish, information,
which they did very well, but because there had been major corruption
in the quality of the catch data and that would also mean the
catch rate data, how many fish per hour the commercial fleet were
catching, those data are no longer used in the assessments, this
being the trend worldwide. There are thousands of hours more fishing
that the commercial fleet do compared with the research fleet,
so one key thing would be a restoration of confidence in the accuracy
of the catch and the catch rate data. A key feature underpinning
the stock assessment would be the fishermen's own commercial data.
That is one example, and there are more moves in the right direction.
The Fisheries Science Partnership is a Defra-funded programme
of £1 million a year which specifically puts fishermen and
scientists together and two-thirds of that money is spent in developing
their own time series, so instead of using our research vessels
we are using their vessels and working with them to inform views
on the state of the stocks. Those data are now just beginning
to be sent into the ICES system and used in the stock assessment.
The ICES is opening itself up to observers at a range of levels
and through the Regional Advisory Councils and the NFFO representatives
they are having greater access to that. There are, therefore,
a variety of fronts that we are proceeding on for that, but the
key thing is that we do actually recognise that it is fundamental
to the management of this industry that they have confidence in
the basic information.
Q4 Viscount Ullswater: Could I just
put in one other factor? It seems that your research vessels measure
the juvenile fish but the landings you can assess and measure
and age the fish.
Dr Horwood: Yes.
Q5 Viscount Ullswater: What we have
read in evidence is that in the North Sea maybe up to 50% of fish
caught are not landed; therefore, how much could that affect the
science on the total population in the sea if actually you are
not having a scientific evaluation of the by-catches, of the discards.
I would have thought that if there are a whole lot of fish being
caught and then being put back into the sea without any form of
calibration or appreciation, whatever you like to call it, of
what has been taken, it then becomes slightly anecdotal, does
it not?
Dr Horwood: You are quite right, that is an
additional element. Again, unfortunately, there are several parts
to an answer to that. First of all, if you had a situation where
there was a traditional fishery that was discarding regularly
10% of catch and we did not know about it, for technical reasons
that would not matter, we would still end up advising quite appropriately
on the size of the catch. What is significant is if you have significant
amounts of discards and they are very variable from year to year
or there is a trend, that can then confound the assessments. For
the key stocks we do have programmes to monitor the discards and
certainly for North Sea cod and haddock they are counted through
an observer programme and included in the assessments, but for
many of our stock assessments the quality of the discard data
is just too poor, there are too few to actually include in the
regular stock assessments.
Q6 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch:
I understand why you have said there is a big emphasis on quantitative
measurement and the counting that goes on; you said that there
is a mathematical formula which is always slightly above when
it comes down to that. Really what would be much more useful for
policymakers is an overall assessment of what is going on in a
particular area. Take the North Sea, really for policymakers to
be able to make sensible judgments it is not just about counting
what is caught, which may just be that commercial fish at that
particular time, we need to know which fish are unpopular at the
moment but we maybe could encourage people to start eating, for
example, or all the different trends of fish—some are coming
up, others are declining, the impact of climate change. All those
things mean that it is a moveable feast and we need to be able
to make projections, so how do the scientists go about helping
to make some of those projections because just counting what is
there now is only a very, very small part of the science.
Dr Horwood: It is only a small part of the science
and I did say at the beginning that we do have quite a wide job
and a wide remit, but politically the real problems and the hassles
were always associated with the annual stock assessment. As you
say, there are a lot more issues involved. We catch, I believe,
getting on for 200 different species of fish on our surveys and
we have had surveys that go back to the turn of the century, so
we can actually monitor the major changes that are seen in our
system. There is a recent report where people have brought together
all the international North Sea surveys and have shown that over
the last 20 years the diversity of North Sea fish has actually
increased quite significantly. There are a range of things that
we do as well though it is a bit difficult to deliver to you in
this instance the entire package. The marine ecosystems are changing
and the key surveys that we are doing provide the basic information
to say that things are changing and provide a basis for speculating
on the future.
Q7 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch:
Would you say that those assessments are any more accurate than
the quantitative surveys you are doing?
Dr Horwood: Our surveys which indicate trends
are very much more robust than the need to say "and for this
particular stock you have got 110,000 tonnes". The indices
themselves are really quite robust and they are independent of
any changes in the fisheries, they are just what we are seeing
out there on the ground.
Q8 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch:
Amongst that 200 species are there some that you think that, with
a bit of encouragement, the European population could be persuaded
to learn to eat instead of cod, for example?
Dr Horwood: Yes. One of the points that we mentioned
in the submission was that new markets are being found and also
one species that is particularly heavily discarded in the South
West at the moment is the gurnard, which is a lovely fish. It
is a solid fish to eat, though not very big, they only tend to
grow about that big (about twelve inches) but most of it is solid
fish. They are now just beginning to find markets for it down
in the South West and beam trawlers from Plymouth are beginning
to land a lot more of their catch than just sole. Sole has totally
dominated the beam trawler fleet, that is where all the value
is and they have not particularly bothered with the other species,
but they are now finding that in actual fact there is quite a
lot of value with these other species and, of course, the more
they land them the more the markets will develop. The haddock
in the South West—there was never a market in Newlyn for
the amount of haddock that could be landed there, they just were
not getting any decent prices, and it costs a lot to handle the
fish on board the ship, so they were discarded. Now they have
found that the Plymouth market will take the haddock, so they
are no longer discarding they are actually landing the haddock.
There are, therefore, quite a lot of natural market forces driving
the fishermen to land fish if there are markets for them.
Q9 Lord Plumb: Cynics might say that
we can take reports that have been produced previously and most
of them show that there is no change. The recovery and management
plans were produced in 2002; presumably they are working but how
satisfactorily are they working and what should happen. Secondly,
from that, should they be improved and if so how should they be
improved?
Dr Horwood: There are the two different sorts
of plans, the recovery plans and the management plans, and the
new basic regulation, the Common Fisheries Policy, actually stipulates
that the fisheries should be managed as either a recovery plan
or as a management plan, and you will already have found that
we are not quite there yet. Dealing with the recovery plans first
of all, it took quite a while to actually get to the stage of
the 2002 plans. We had problems in the early/middle 1990s before
we actually got round to these formal plans and a great deal of
work was done to actually look at the simulated nature of what
these plans would deliver. Targets were basically set and were
agreed, which seemed to be a sensible thing for any plan, and
a means of achieving those targets. For cod this was that a quota
should be set to allow the parent stock to increase by 30% each
year. You must bear in mind that the alternative that people were
talking about was the complete closure of the fisheries on cod
which in itself would be virtually a complete closure of the fisheries,
as you will know from Scotland. The recovery plan itself was,
therefore, a very severe compromise between no fishing and a plan
that would allow some fishing and some quotas but at the same
time recovery. If you look at what has been achieved, there seems
to have been very little evidence of progress in the Irish Sea
and to the west of Scotland. In the North Sea last year we saw
for the first time that we do seem eventually to have reduced
the fishing rate very considerably and hopefully this is a robust
result which we will find out through this year's stock assessments,
but the fishing mortality has been reduced to its lowest level
for 40 years, which is a massive thing to have done. It has been
at a huge cost, we have cut back our northern white fish fisheries
by 60 to 70% which has been a massive problem for the people involved,
but before last year we were only seeing cutbacks in the amount
of fishing effort at sea by about 20%. However, it looks like
the cuts that have been made have actually focused on the cod-type
fisheries to achieve this big reduction in fishing. Having achieved
that reduction in fishing we seem to have got a lot of cod in
the North Sea, which is now a problem for fishing; it is a problem
because it does look like in the North Sea at least that the recovery
plan is working. One of the elements of the plan that was not
clear was how the element of fishing effort was to be managed.
Scientists, for a very long while, have said that managing by
quotas alone will be ineffective: you can still go to sea, you
can still catch and kill fish, it is just that you are only allowed
to land a bit, so fishing effort had to be a key element of it.
From day one we did not see anything explicit from the Commission
as to what the proposed effort levels were in relation to the
target fishing mortality and the TAC, so they were two processes
that went on in a quasi-independent way. We have not been able
to reduce the fishing effort to the level which the targets implied,
even though the quotas are consistent with the plans. Of course,
what then appears is increased discards and it is a question of
how you resolve those two. There have been and there continue
to be, therefore, problems with the 2000 plan. For the individual
fishermen as well this has been done on a vessel-based system
so when they have so many days to go to sea, which could be half
their normal days, they cannot just sell up one boat and put two
half days on one vessel to increase their own efficiency because
then they will lose their days entitlement, so there is an element
of economic efficiency that is not addressed by the current plan.
We have learned a lot about recovery plans and if we have to do
more then hopefully some of these things will be addressed. The
management plans are for stocks that are not in such a severe
position and they are meant to give a framework for making decisions.
We have one agreed for the North Sea flatfish, basically the North
Sea sole and the North Sea plaice. The main people who catch those
two species together are the beam trawler fleets, mainly in the
southern North Sea, so they are linked, but one of the things
that we have not done is to have plans that are developed for
fisheries. It is not a lot of good having a management plan for
haddock if it is not really well aligned with the management plan
for whiting and for cod, so there is a lot more work to be done
in understanding how to develop management plans for fisheries
as opposed to a nice simple management plan for a fish.
Q10 Chairman: Do you think it is
the way forward though?
Dr Horwood: There certainly needs to be something
like that to give a framework so that the industry understands
what the medium term future is, because they are investing in
boats and capital that will last for 20 years and the more that
you can help the fishermen see the future, the more they will
be prepared to defer taking their revenue now to avoid the risk
of what goes on in the future, effectively applying a high discount
rate, so I think a management plan framework of some sort is important,
but underlying this as well we have a commitment to move to maximum
sustainable yield levels by 2015 through the World Summit on Sustainable
Development; what that means is fishing levels probably quite
a lot lower than we have got at present, so again if we are developing
plans one needs to keep in mind some of the things that we have
already signed up to.
Q11 Lord Plumb: What about the stock
management plans outside the EU? The Norwegian plan for fishing
apparently is supposed to fit in with the EU policy; what effect
is this having and can we work together?
Dr Horwood: I do not think there is anything
at all contradictory between the plans that have been agreed for
the EU/Norway shared stocks; they are consistent and they set
management targets for cod and haddock, for the cod when it is
fully recovered and the haddock for now. They are very simple
plans, that we will fish at a particular rate and if the stock
begins to fall we will reduce fishing. It is a framework which
imposes some discipline on those setting the quotas.
Q12 Chairman: Can I just do a general
one on the emergency conservation measures. I will give you the
opportunity of really saying what you want to say on emergency
measures and their effectiveness or ineffectiveness and scope
for improvement.
Dr Horwood: One has to say things are an awful
lot better than they were before they introduced in the new basic
regulations a power to introduce measures on an emergency basis
but it does seem that the system is still particularly sluggish.
If you imagine the difference between how we handle some of the
animal diseases where, if you have a trigger event then things
across Europe immediately go into a form of action, you would
expect any business to manage itself with appropriate risk plans
and risk management plans, and this just does not seem to be a
culture in the management of fisheries where it would seem that
there are predictable types of emergencies, shall we say, which
could be a very big year class of haddock that arises. The last
time we had a very big year class of haddock we actually discarded
over 100,000 tonnes of North Sea haddock in one year; these things
can be avoided but you would need to plan for them because they
just take months and months to go through the EU. I would have
thought that there needs to be a slightly different way of handling,
shall we say, fishermen's business in the same way as any other
business would handle itself in terms of risk management.
Q13 Chairman: Could you say a little
bit more? What would it look like?
Dr Horwood: You would have to agree that there
are various events that would arise which would have a negative
effect in some sense. We could say that when we get a very big
year class of haddock we are really not happy that we are going
to lose 100,000 tonnes of it, so you would actually trigger if
you like an emergency response plan in this instance by the scientists
having identified early on that there is a very big year class
of haddock.
Q14 Chairman: That would be an in-year
assessment, would it not?
Dr Horwood: The scientists will tend to see
the little haddock a year before the industry start to capture
them in their net. When they are too small and they go through
it is not a problem, and when they are big and above marketable
size then they can land them, but they will also capture very
large numbers of small fish which are not marketable and those
are the ones that we want to avoid capturing. You probably have
actually got six months or maybe a year's notice of this event
coming through. If you have already got a plan on the shelf which
says in the event of this, these are the actions that we will
take and there is some way of triggering this plan so it does
not come as a huge surprise to everybody, even though it has occurred
every ten years for the last 100 years, it would be a lot easier
to implement, so you could actually develop a plan. Experience
has shown that these plans are very difficult because in the case
of haddock it would affect a particular locality a lot more than
others—the chances are that the Netherlands would be totally
disinterested. The people around Scotland would want a huge amount
of discussion on the fine detail of that and it might take two
or three years to actually develop a plan where there is a significant
buy-in and it is useful, but then having got it on the shelf you
could actually implement it quite quickly.
Q15 Viscount Ullswater: In your evidence
that you have given us this morning I think you are indicating
that you are critical of the effectiveness of TACs. TACs may be
useful in some fisheries, in the pelagic fisheries, but in the
mixed fisheries, which is most of the fisheries round our shores,
they seem to be rather a blunt instrument and increase the number
of discards. In evidence you have been saying that fishing effort
is probably a more effective way of coping with mixed fisheries.
Perhaps you would like to comment on the effectiveness of TACs.
Is there a way of overcoming the discards which TACs impose on
these mixed fisheries?
Dr Horwood: Certainly there is an issue about
getting the TAC right for the mixed fisheries. If we have an accuracy
of a plus or minus 20% for each one of these species, it is really
very difficult to get a package where at least one of them is
not significantly off and is not causing quite a lot of discarding.
It is certainly an imperfect conservation tool. Its ability to
get countries to agree to a quota, however, is extremely strong
through this relative stability concept. Everybody knows what
a tonne of fish is. For a long while scientists have looked to
the effort system and said surely this is a better way of going
about it, but they have never had the responsibility of implementing
it. We have seen under the current system that implementing effort
control is really hugely complicated. You have a whole range of
different sorts of vessels and gear which are exerting different
sorts of fishing pressures. You have actually to manage that mix.
Whereas everybody understands what a tonne of fish is, do we all
understand what a day of sea time is for a beam trawler, a netter
and a potter? All these things that the scientists are not paying
a lot of attention to become hugely important and the fishermen
will focus in on them and will be able to spot where their ability
to increase their effort within the current rules is extremely
quickly. Conceptually effort control has an awful lot of good
going for it because you can regulate the amount of effort going
into a fishery and then hopefully they can land it all, but our
experience with the cod recovery shows that in truth this is not
a simple process. It may well be that a more reasonable answer
is one where our fishing capacity, ie the basic size of the fleet
is much more in line with the size of the resource, so even if
they are working flat out they cannot cause a significant amount
of damage to the stock over one or two years. That would allow
a lot more flexibility with the TAC-based system. So if it was
overshot by 10 or 20% one year maybe you would not have to discard,
you could land and you could work out some system where you would
pay it back over a while. I think what I am suggesting is that
there needs to be probably a combination of the two but underpinned
by the basic fishing effort and capacity being much more commensurate
with a size that the stocks can sustain.
Q16 Viscount Ullswater: If there
is this large amount of discard, what happens to the dead fish?
Do they just float to the bottom and get wasted or are they eaten
by crabs or lobsters?
Dr Horwood: They turn into lots of fulmars.
Fulmars have increased enormously over the last 100 years. That
being said, I know the RSPB do not think that discarding should
be maintained to maintain fulmars. There are a few instances where
discarding has had a really bad effect, particularly when you
talk about high grading from the big pelagic vessels because they
can dump a huge net full of dead fish down in one spot and other
vessels have trawled through it and it is a mess and is not doing
anyone any good. Most of the other discards really are just assimilated
back into the ecosystem.
Q17 Earl of Arran: Is it not possible
with technology to be able eventually to throw more fish alive
back into the sea than is currently happening?
Dr Horwood: We are working all the while on
different gears to help that. Let me give two examples. We have
been working on some panels to put in beam trawlers and we have
been trialling them down in the south-west. There are two different
panels, one on the bottom and one on the top. The one on the bottom
gets rid of a lot of the shellfish and the one at the top gets
rid of a lot of the fish. What we have found is that they virtually
lose none of their catch but the quality is improved because the
fish are not abraded by a whole load of mess in cod end, so you
are getting more for it at the markets. The entire south-west
is now switching over to these panels. It has really been quite
remarkable. When it is shown to be in the fishermen's interests
they are not slow to take these things up. The other example,
which is still being trialled, is something called the eliminator
trawl which we found out about through one of our environmentally
friendly fishing competitions. It is a net with lots of holes
around the first part of it and it catches virtually no cod. We
have been trialling that off the north-east coast of Scotland.
There is a Scottish interest in it. One of the things we are particularly
concerned about is can we fish in a way that avoids catching cod.
There is something called a separator trawl, which is a normal
trawl but with a horizontal mesh panel because fish behave in
a different way when they enter the net. The haddock will swim
upwards and in this instance would go in the top half of the net
whereas cod and plaice tend to head downwards. Years ago we developed
this net where the bottom panels had holes which were a lot larger,
but it is such a delicate gear. The fishing industry could use
it but it is very open to abuse. A key element is the desire of
the fishermen to want to reduce discards. There are quite a few
gears about which can help them do it. It is always a lot easier
if your target fish is not a small fish and unfortunately for
the sole fisheries, sole tend to be quite small and can get through
quite small holes. Most of the sole fishermen are very reluctant
to move to anything more than a 90 millimetre mesh for the sole
fishery, which means a lot of other fish do tend to get caught
in it.
Q18 Viscount Ullswater: This could
make a huge difference to stocks, could it not, if more of the
throwback is alive than dead?
Dr Horwood: Absolutely. If we reduced the fishing
effort down to the size consistent with the World Summit targets,
which could be significantly lower, then the fishing mortality
rate may halve. Your discard would immediately halve. Not only
that, the size of the fish would be larger and the size of the
stock itself would be a lot larger, so your discard rate will
plummet. Lower fishing rates are probably more important than
small changes to the mesh size.
Q19 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch:
Could you just explain the panel to me? That is something that
is attached to the net, is it? It is not something that happens
when they are landed; it is actually attached to the net, is it?
Dr Horwood: Yes, it is part of the net. As they
trawl along, the benthos, the whelks and the starfish fall through
the bottom panel as opposed to going to the cod end. If they are
in the cod end they are really quite rough, so the fish go to
market and they have got bits of blood and grazes on them and
they will not attract such a high price as a fish that really
looks quite good. There are top panels that we have that are used
in the haddock fishery because the haddock do move up. Most of
our mesh is a diamond shape mesh and as it contracts under pressure
it will squeeze shut whereas these panels tend to be square mesh
the other way so they actually stay open. Even though the diamond
mesh is tightening these panels remain open more.
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