Examination of Witness (Questions 20-39)
Dr Joe Horwood
5 MARCH 2008
Q20 Baroness Sharp of Guildford:
In your evidence to us you talked about the closed areas and their
use in fisheries management. Could you tell us a little bit more
about how the concept of closure has been used within the European
Union and what advantages and disadvantages there have proved
to be? The Scottish Government has been trialling real-time closures.
Are these likely to work? What barriers are there to their application?
Could you tell us a little bit more about the way in which they
might work?
Dr Horwood: You might be interested to know
that we have recently calculated that in our own England and Wales
waters 30% of the area is under some form of Common Fisheries
Policy area-based control. If we consider other non-CFP ones then
40% of our sea areas are regulated to fishing in some way. For
many years now we have attempted to protect particularly the nursery
grounds of fish. The flatfish in particular live on shallow sandy
areas so are really more susceptible to being protected. It has
been quite natural to protect these areas. It is investing in
the future of the fishery. The fish themselves are of no value
and they are quite tightly constrained. The other fish, such as
the orange roughy, are very, very vulnerable deep water fish,
very late maturing, they tend to congregate against oceanic sea
mounds and the CFP has protected those from fishing. We have had
some closures to protect spawning fish. We protect the herring
spawning grounds because they lay their eggs sticking to the bottom
and if you have trawling through them you destroy their spawn.
For many years heron spawning grounds have been protected. In
terms of the cod or any largely mobile fish, it becomes much more
problematic that these areas are useful because if you protect
the cod in one area the chances are you will be catching that
same cod 50 miles away elsewhere. The cod has proved a problem.
Certainly in the Irish Sea many years ago there would be a massive
spawning fishery and the catch rates of cod on spawning ground
would be over ten times higher than they would be elsewhere. So
you can imagine if you stopped the fishermen fishing there and
they were made to fish elsewhere they would only be going to catch
a tenth of the fish. That would be a sensible conservation measure,
but now, unfortunately, the concentrations of cod and spawning
are so small that if you force them to go elsewhere you may be
pushing them on to juveniles which they may be catching in even
greater number. You cannot really consider these closed areas
as universally good. We have always said that they need to be
considered on a case-by-case basis. In relation to the real-time
closures for cod that have recently been introduced in Scotland
and are now being rolled out in England with some support at least
from Denmark, it has been following an initiative from the industry
who believe they can avoid cod and in fact need to demonstrate
that they can so do. As we have said, the measures so far off
the west of Scotland and the Irish Sea have not proved fruitful.
It is being rolled out this year now under a formal scheme that
we can operate through the CFP, through the cod recovery whereby
if we manage our effort scheme not as I previously described,
on a vessel by vessel basis, but as a UK pot of so many kilowatt
days we could be more efficient. Providing it has various conservation
elements then we can give to our fishermen additional days at
sea. So we are expecting a lot of fishermen to sign up to it.
On the spawning area closures, the scheme involved is that if
they are catching so many fish above a particular size they will
close an area of about seven nautical miles square. There would
be a maximum of nine of these at any one time. They would be closed
for three weeks. You are talking about 500 square miles, which
is about 0.5% of the North Sea. For juveniles it would be a slightly
larger area but again a maximum of 1% of the North Sea. We have
yet to see whether these real-time closures can actually provide
a significant mechanism. A key thing in this is the fishermen
wanting to take the initiative themselves and at the very least
it is not bad. If they feel this is positive, and we want to encourage
them to take more measures like this, then it is something which
should be supported.
Q21 Baroness Sharp of Guildford:
Is there sufficient co-operation between fleets? Is there a problem?
We may get the Scottish fishermen buying into this, but what about
the Spanish and the French fishermen?
Dr Horwood: This particular scheme is just a
UK scheme. We know that some other countries have expressed an
interest in either joining it or having a similar scheme of their
own. Even before it was embodied by the EU in the Council regulation
last year they were talking positively about wanting to do something
with us on this, but it is very much a UK scheme.
Q22 Baroness Sharp of Guildford:
Does that mean it is within the 12-mile limit that we have control
over?
Dr Horwood: No. This will be in UK territorial
waters and I think it might only be the North Sea that we are
operating this in. I am not certain about this. I do know it is
at least the North Sea, but it is our UK scheme.
Q23 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch:
You have already talked a little bit about mesh sizes and so on,
but are there any other innovations, technical or scientific,
that are going on out there that are helping conservation? Is
there anything that you would like to share with us that you think
might help in this whole process?
Dr Horwood: There are major things now happening
in Europe with the Marine Strategy Directive which is going to
encourage us to develop the good ecological status of our seas
or good environmental status. The marine environment side has
really been a sleeping giant and is quite clearly waking up. I
see the fisheries as eventually fitting in to a much more holistic
management of the marine environment and marine ecosystems as
a whole.
Q24 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch:
That could be a horrible bureaucracy, could it not? It could be
one bigger bureaucracy. What makes you so keen on it?
Dr Horwood: At present OSPAR, the Oslo and Paris
Convention, have a particular remit to look after the environment.
They increased their remit a few years ago to include the ecology
of the seas, but there are no powers for them to do anything with
fishing at all, fishing is quite independent. I can see, taking
your point that this will not be without its bureaucracy, that
there will have to be a more coherent link between fisheries and
environmental management. We got the Darwin Mounds protected under
the CFP. I believe it was a requirement through the Habitats Directive
that protection was given, but the mechanisms to actually protect
it from international fishing just are not there, so there are
some big loopholes. The TACs and quota regulation this year protected
some Irish areas from fishing, but it really is a bit ad hoc.
There will clearly have to be a better integration of these two
branches, the fisheries and the environmental protection.
Q25 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch:
And the timetable for that merger, if it is going to be a merger?
Dr Horwood: I do not believe there is one explicitly.
Q26 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch:
You mentioned in your evidence that we need more outcome orientated
regulation. Do you think that this new regime you are talking
about will be more outcome orientated?
Dr Horwood: I doubt it. There does not seem
to be a culture to go along this particular line. The system that
we have at present, particularly through technical regulation,
knows that it wants to achieve particular objectives such as low
discards, that they do not want you to use small mesh if you are
targeting the large fish and so they have constructed a massive
rule book of things that fishermen must not do in order to achieve
this outcome. You really believe it would be better if there was
some way that you could say what is it you want to achieve and
let us see if fishermen can do that and you can monitor it and
leave it much more up to them to decide how they are going to
achieve such measures.
Q27 Lord Palmer: I think everybody
seems to agree that the policy of discards is really an absolute
international scandal and indeed perhaps it was what made us embark
on yet another inquiry into the Common Fisheries Policy. To what
extent do you consider a discard ban would help to address the
problem of discards and how might such a ban function in reality?
Dr Horwood: I think the proposal for a discard
ban is extremely helpful in that it will scare people into deciding
they really must do something about the issue. There are some
negative issues associated with the discard ban. I really do not
feel to date that it has been taken particularly seriously and
I rather suspect this is where the Commission is coming from as
well. The response by the Regional Advisory Councils also suggested
this was the Commission putting a shot across the bows of the
industry. One of the disadvantages is a safety issue in that you
will be forcing vessels to carry back to shore large amounts of
unwanted material. Having got the material to shore, then instead
of having what is effectively a contaminant of some sort spread
across the sea floor, you are bringing it back and presumably
it will be disposed of at a point source and so it is likely to
prove more of a problem. I personally would not want to see markets
developed for small fish. So if people are bringing back small
fish and sales develop for them, do we want to encourage people
to market fish like that? There are some negative elements associated
with a discard ban, but I am hoping that this will be a prompt
to take a much more significant step to get fishermen cutting
down on their discards in the future.
Q28 Lord Palmer: Could you see a
discard ban in reality actually coming into force in the next
five years in your opinion?
Dr Horwood: I would have hoped that the consequence
of the Commission's proposal for a discard ban will have some
end point in less than five years. We have had lots of things
which seem to have stuck in the Commission. Five years is not
an outrageously long time for the Commission to act, but certainly
Commissioner Borg has expressed his disgust with the level of
discarding that is going on. You can see that there is a personal
commitment to do something. It would not have to end up as a discard
ban; there are other things that can be done. In Iceland and New
Zealand if they catch marketable fish they are not allowed to
discard those—
Q29 Chairman: That is the key issue.
It is not just a discard ban; it is a discard ban of market or
marketable fish.
Dr Horwood: That would be a different issue.
At present it is a discard ban of all biogenic material. There
are lots of loose ends which would have to be sorted out. One
assumes you do not want to bring back loads of shellfish. Equally,
you do not want to be bringing back 100,000 tonnes of baby haddock
in Peterhead. If it is marketable fish then that becomes a rather
different matter. It is possible as well to set targets of some
sort for discarding and leaving it to the fishermen. They might
use different nets, fish at different times and different places.
It would be very difficult to monitor and observe them, but this
is the sort of outcome orientated process or legislation that
I was suggesting might be more fruitful.
Q30 Chairman: You could reasonably
tell that they are discarding. You cannot tell what they are discarding,
can you?
Dr Horwood: If it is at night you do not know
what they are doing.
Q31 Chairman: In Scotland it is night
quite a lot of the time during winter!
Dr Horwood: Monitoring this itself will be quite
difficult. You do feel an awful lot of these issues would go away
if there was a commitment by the fishermen to do something and
the trust by others that the fishermen would actually do it. If
you have not got that you end up having a massive rule book that
you ask people to follow.
Q32 Viscount Ullswater: When we are
talking about bycatches and discards and when measuring the amount
of discards, are we talking about bycatches of controlled fish
that are subject to the CFP or are we talking about just fish
biomass as a bycatch?
Dr Horwood: Most of the fish discards in the
south-west for instance, where we have done a big study, are of
low value, non-commercial fish, gurnards, pout whiting -- Somewhere
in this pile I have a list of the species. The component which
is discarded through being out-of-kilter with the quota is a relatively
modest part of that. It is currently a bit of a concern because
the cod quota in the North Sea has been set out of line with the
size of the stock and there will be a significant discard of marketable
cod in the North Sea, but in general it is of small, under-sized
fish and of unmarketable fish or fish for which there are not
currently markets.
Q33 Viscount Ullswater: When they
talk about this figure of anything between half a million and
800,000 tonnes of discards, is that basically a lot of unmarketable
fish or is that only the marketable fish which is being discarded
that you would want to measure for some reason?
Dr Horwood: I know the figure that you are talking
about but I do not know precisely where it comes from. Our figures
that would add up to what you are talking about would be mainly
under-sized fish; they would be the 100,000 tonne of under-sized
haddock for instance in one year.
Q34 Viscount Ullswater: But it is
not the sort of gurnards and things that you were talking about,
is it?
Dr Horwood: Yes.
Q35 Viscount Ullswater: That would
be discarded on top of that, would it?
Dr Horwood: No, that would be included. The
large percentage of that figure would not be marketable cod, haddock
and whiting.
Q36 Viscount Ullswater: How does
anybody come to measure the size of that particular thing? I know
it is a big range that I have given you. How do we even have an
idea of the tonnage?
Dr Horwood: We have observers on the vessels.
I think we have about six guys or we spend about six man-years
on the boats of the vessels. So we actually record all that is
caught and landed and discarded. Over the years we have a very
good record of what is being caught and discarded. Scotland has
had a major programme for their whitefish fishery for a very long
time. The EU has something called the Data Collection Regulation
and it obliges countries to collect such information. As for our
sampling levels, probably only about 0.5% of the trips are sampled.
It is just too expensive to contemplate otherwise. Over the years
you end up with a very robust database which can tell you what
is going on.
Q37 Baroness Sharp of Guildford:
You state that climate change is likely to affect both the abundance
of fish and the mix of species and this seems to be borne out
also by other long-term surveys of plankton. What implications
is this likely to have upon the procedures for the management
of stocks? How are we monitoring the developments as a result
of climate change and how should we be monitoring it?
Dr Horwood: We have been monitoring our fisheries
now for a very long time, the commercial and the non-commercial
species and it has been a wonderful database to follow and to
note the changes that we have been seeing. We have certainly seen
some changes and they are being attributed to climate change.
We have a natural oscillation in the North Atlantic which causes
ten to 20-year oscillations which are likely to be much greater
than a slow trend of climate change. So probably what we are seeing
is a climate change signal and the effects of the North Atlantic
oscillation affecting our fisheries as well. They are all indicating
that we should expect changes to occur. The predictability of
those changes does seem to be quite low. You can make some general
statements such as maybe the warmer water species will increase
and the cold water species decrease, but it is really the entire
ecology that will determine whether the fish larvae survive. We
really do not know how the ecology of the seas is going to change.
Also, if the seas get a bit warmer, with the North Sea sole, you
might think that they would expand their range further north,
but they do need these particular nursery grounds. Even if the
larvae food is there and the temperature is right, if they have
not got coastal sandy nursery ground, which you do not see around
Norway, then there would not be an expansion of the sole stock.
We have got to expect change, but we cannot rely on a lot of predictability.
Future management measures and tools need to be climate change
proofed against such unpredictability.
Q38 Chairman: I would like to turn
to Regional Advisory Councils. Your evidence is pretty positive
toward RACs. Is there anything that we can point to and say that
has really been delivered, an advance has been made in that area
because of Regional Advisory Councils? If their importance grows
what sort of help could basically the science give them? What
could you feed in to enhance their competence?
Dr Horwood: The RACs publish the advice they
provide to the Commission on their website and they really are
worth reading. They are extremely considered pieces of advice.
I think they are very polished works and quite clearly should
be taken seriously by the Commission. At the Commission level,
you can see from discussions that the views that the Regional
Advisory Councils are a part of the natural language of the Commissioner.
He does listen to them. That does not mean that their advice is
taken, but it is quite clear that they are taken quite seriously.
It is difficult to point to very particular successes because
it is quite a grey process in Brussels sometimes to see how exactly
any one decision is made. The North Sea RAC were really very scathing
about the Commission's approach to the introduction of protected
areas and quite rightly. I think to some degree that had a significant
part in the Commission stopping their own initiatives to impose
closed areas on the system. They have also been developing their
own views on management plans. In many ways they are part of a
group of different players that are feeding into this system.
In many ways you can see they are a partner round the table in
the development of plans as opposed to just responding to it.
It is a bit difficult to say yes, this is a real success, but
there are lots of bits of evidence which say this is clearly going
the right way and their views are being sought. In terms of the
scientific and technical base to help them, we would very much
like to feel that there is a common science and technical base
that supports the Government, the RACs and any stakeholder that
actually has a part in making a decision. The EU DG FISH has said
it will help the RACs feed particular questions through to ICES
if ICES is the appropriate source of information for it. This
is because the DG FISH provides ICES with some monies to answer
some questions, but it is also aware that there is a very small
finite fisheries science community which has demands on it from
the EU and then, via ICES and the EU, other technical committees,
the governments and if the RACs come in as well and say we want
this, there does need to be a prioritisation of some sort. That
is one of the things that is happening institutionally. The Government
has given a high priority to empowering the RACs as a significant
voice and both ourselves as scientists and our policy colleagues
are really giving them as much help as we possibly can. We support
their meetings. Defra funds a series of specific projects which
the RACs feel they need to help them do their business. We are
doing quite a lot to make them as successful as possible. This
is a major new bit of work and business that is put on a relatively
small group of people. They have done an excellent job with quite
meager support.
Q39 Baroness Sharp of Guildford:
How many RACs are there?
Dr Horwood: I should know the answer to that
but I do not because some of them are Mediterranean RACs—
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