Examination of Witnesses (Questions 260-279)
Dr Clare Eno, Professor Colin Galbraith, Mr Mark
Tasker and Dr Tom Tew
2 APRIL 2008
Q260 Lord Plumb: If I do not understand
it I will.
Dr Tew: I will try and make the point clearly.
The single point I wish to make is that in terms of comparing
output and input controls there is no single answer; if there
was a single answer we would surely have adopted it by now because
some of the best brains on the planet have been addressing the
problem, and the fishermen themselves indeed want to see the problem
solved, so our key message—which I am sure is not new to
you—is that there is no simple answer. It is a box of tools
that you need and you need to pull out those tools in appropriate
circumstances. I would like to compare and contrast the situation
of a single species, pelagic deep sea fishery such as mackerel
or herring with a mixed demersal species fishery such as cod,
haddock and plaice and I want to illustrate why no single solution
is going to work. For single species perhaps we have relatively
few, relatively large, relatively modern boats, modern equipment
able to target, the fish they are after and highly skilled at
doing so, and then we would agree with the economists that output
measures, TACs or total allowable landings can work efficiently.
Indeed, one struggles to come up with better alternatives in those
circumstances. Of course, when you transpose that to more complex
mixed demersal fisheries then those exact same tools are not going
to work; in fact they are going to be counterproductive because,
as you know, once fishermen have met the quota of one species
they will continue to fish after other species to fill those quotas,
or they will continue to pursue non-quota species, or even they
will continue to look for the most commercially valuable individuals
of the particular species of quotas; I am sure you are familiar
with all this. It leads to excess catch and discarding and we
feel strongly that such effects are going to be exacerbated when
you have over-capacity because where you have got ten boats all
doing that in a mixed demersal fishery, all after that most commercially
valuable one tonne, then they will be all discarding non-target
species. In short, in perhaps the majority of those circumstances,
output controls are not going to deal with over fishing and you
are going to get excess catch and discards, and the causal problem
of course is the financial incentive systems that encourage them
to go on fishing after they have caught the quota. We may come
back to this under discards. The question you asked then is how
should we manage demersal fisheries if you are saying that that
is not going to work, and the principles that we set out are fairly
clear: management based on science at all times, capacity and
effort matched to the resource and spatial and temporal flexibility
of management out at sea. The management measures that we think
therefore should be included in that toolbox would encompass real-time
closures, which again we might be coming to later, closures for
limited periods over limited areas—to protect spawning grounds
for instance—and essentially a range of other input controls
that complement output controls, the 18-day at sea rule out in
the North Sea for instance. As we may come on to perhaps in the
next question, and we note it in our written evidence, there is
a range of technical conservation measures which we believe can
work if properly applied. I will finish by giving you a good example
of where the toolbox can work well and it is the mussel and cockle
fisheries at The Wash. I know this is not an international pelagic
example but nevertheless it is a very good example that demonstrates
how measures can work well because, as you may know, on The Wash
there is limited entry, there is shared ownership of the rights
and responsibilities between those with rights of access. The
fishery is managed so that it is effectively matched to resource
availability, there are spatial and temporal controls to prevent
damage to certain parts of The Wash at certain times of the year,
there is not much by catch and discard; it is all based on science
and the fishermen are on board, the fishermen are part of the
solution. What we have seen there is moving from a situation in
the 1990s when the stocks and indeed the fishing industry was
on its knees with a zero total allowable catch to the situation
we had last year where we landed 5,000 tonnes, a third of the
standing stock of both mussels and cockles, we had a vibrant stock
and a vibrant fishing industry in that part of the world, so there
are examples where the toolbox can work well.
Chairman: What you have not mentioned
in all of this is whether licensing has a part to play.
Q261 Lord Plumb: Could we have the
quota too?
Mr Tasker: Thank you, My Lord Chairman, licensing
certainly does have a part to play and in the example just given
by Dr Tew they are licensed to fish in The Wash, so it is one
way of limiting capacity as you limit the licences.
Q262 Chairman: That was done by restricting
licences or increasing licences at the right time.
Mr Tasker: Yes, in other words working out approximately
how many fishing vessels would be needed to take the catch that
they thought could be taken and then only licensing that many.
Q263 Chairman: What happens to the
ones that previously were fishing but lose their licences; is
there a decommissioning system?
Mr Tasker: The licence includes very often the
number of days you can actually go and fish, so it is not the
absolute numbers of fishing vessels, it is the amount of fishing
you can exert. In terms of the quota, as asked by Lord Plumb,
in The Wash there is a quota per vessel. In wider fisheries, obviously,
total allowable catch is another means and the quota is a division
of that catch; that will always apply.
Q264 Lord Plumb: Can I just ask one
further extension of what you have been saying—and I did
understand what you were saying—how do you see technology
developing? One's impression, not as a fisherman but as a son
of the soil, the impression you get is that they are out there
hoovering the sea, that it is now simple to gather the fish compared
with how it used to be. This has to fit into the management tools
somewhere in order to try to control the fisheries; the Commissioner
responsible for fisheries once said to me in Brussels, "Henry,
if you can keep the fish still we will decide the problem"
and of course that is surely the difficulty, is it not, that the
shoals move around the seas?
Mr Tasker: Indeed. Most of what we are talking
about is an improvement in the ability to find and be able to
catch fish, which is an improvement in efficiency of fishing.
This is known by the rather fine jargon term as "technological
creep", in other words things get progressively more efficient
in catching fish. There was a study done in the 1990s which I
do not think has been repeated since, which indicated that technological
creep was working at the rate of about 4 to 8% cent a year, and
it does not take a great mathematician to work out that that means
that you get over-fishing quite rapidly because of those improvements
in efficiency and improvements in the way of finding fish. These
can be simple things, like when I first went to sea 25 years ago
we were not exactly shooting the sun but we were using a rather
antiquated electronic machine telling you where you were. Now
with GPS you can go precisely back to exactly where you want to
be, and that actually makes quite a big difference in some fisheries,
you are not searching around within 100 metres, you can go precisely
there. Little things, therefore, which do not actually initially
strike you as being important in terms of fishing—and it
is not just an increase in engine power or better nets or anything
else—are actually adding to efficiency the whole time. The
toolbox then essentially has to allow for that, when you choose
your tools you have to actually build in some method of decreasing
fishing capacity and there are a number of ways of doing that.
Dr Tew: I would agree fully with the point that
technology presents opportunities as well as challenges and, for
instance, if we who care about conservation of habitats on the
seabed can be clear about where they are and how vulnerable they
are, then we can give clear guidance to fishers on the areas that
they should avoid, or how frequently they should or should not
go there. If you have some ecosystems which recover relatively
rapidly, then you are going to have a different set of sensitivities
than those that are vulnerable to, for instance, the hoovering
of the seabed and take 100 years to recover. It is the technological
advancement of understanding what is happening on the seabed and
knowing exactly where it is, as Mark describes, which actually
provides opportunities for conservation and for conservationists
to work closer with fishermen.
Chairman: Would you like to move on to technical
measures, Henry?
Q265 Lord Plumb: It naturally follows,
does it not? You say you welcome the technical conservation measures
but you say they are not always successful, and that of course
we understand, but can you give us an example of why they are
not successful and how we could make them successful?
Professor Galbraith: We could certainly try
and I will ask Dr Eno to take us through the answer.
Dr Eno: We welcome technical conservation measures
because actually they should improve the sustainability of fisheries.
One example that may be drawn upon in relation to successes—and
really as long as fishing has been going on there have been measures
in relation to mesh size to select different fish—is that
more recently there has been the development of square mesh panels.
The trouble with cod-ends at the closed end of the trawl is that
when the trawl gets full it will pull tight and so it does not
allow the fish out as the mesh becomes more like a flattened diamond
that becomes of increasingly less and less diameter, so if you
have measures which allow square mesh panels at the top of the
trawl, where the fish automatically want to swim out, this allows
the escape of juvenile and undersize fish and therefore reduces
the need for discards et cetera. Another success is separator
grids and again there has been quite a lot of research recently,
particularly in relation to nephrops and shrimps, where the grids
would divert and allow the fish to escape. As I come from the
Countryside Council for Wales I should mention the Shrimp Fishing
Nets (Wales) Order 2003 which essentially stops British vessels
from carrying shrimp trawls unless they are fitted with grid and
escape routes for fish. Those are certainly some successes. We
have not seen many successes which apply to a lot of the species
that we are concerned about, of nature conservation interest,
but fortunately one example so far has been in relation to, the
harbour porpoise. There was a by-catch regulation 812, released
in 2004, and essentially that deals with the by-catch of harbour
porpoises in gillnet fisheries. What was suggested within the
regulation was the attachment of a noise-making device, a pinger,
which would deter the harbour porpoises and so they would be scared
away. There was a lot of pressure to move forward very quickly
on this, particularly coming from the NGOs, and it was accepted
that this should be going forward because the by-catch was really
not sustainable. The scientists said that the devices worked experimentally
and they advised that there should be fleet-wide tests of them;
it probably moved forward too fast and what happened was that
the pingers failed, partly for technical reasons, but a lot of
it was through a lack of acceptance by the industry—they
had some concerns about safety and there were difficulties in
enforcement. The thing that is important about this is that there
are real lessons to be learnt. The regulation was probably over-prescriptive
at the time it was produced. You need to ensure that there is
the necessary investment in research and development to really
ensure that the technology is right and, where possible, bring
the fishermen into the development of the technical conservation
measure. In Wales, we are working with fishermen in relation to
a couple of technical conservation measures that will hopefully
improve the sustainability of inshore crustacean fisheries and
that is the way to do it, to work with the fishermen. You asked
how to make them effective. We wondered about whether or not they
should be voluntary or compulsory and the trouble is that while
you get more buy-in if they are voluntary and if all the industry
agree to it, the trouble is that very often in industry there
might be sectors of the industry that do not agree for various
reasons and that is really where you have to bring in compulsory
measures in order to ensure a level playing field. Again, how
to make it effective, really it is horses for courses: if you
have an issue which is European-wide then you are going to have
to have a TCM brought in by the Commission but there might be
more specific local issues which, again, would be down to, for
instance, individual Sea Fisheries Committees or fisheries advisory
bodies. What is important to recognise in relation to ensuring
that these technical conservation measures are effective is that
they are technically reliable, preferably before they are put
out for wider use, they actually do the job intended. We certainly
promote any moves to environmentally-friendly fishing methods—we
think there should be a lot of encouragement in that respect—and
we think there should be consideration of the economic impacts
on stakeholders so that you get buy-in and address the potential
for poor compliance and poor acceptance by the stakeholders. Once
you bring them in you have to monitor how effective they are.
Overall the jury is still out as to whether or not they are effective
or on how many successes there have been compared to failures,
but we have not seen very many successes as yet in relation to
benefits to the environment and the ecosystem more widely. On
that basis we maybe prefer targets as opposed to micro-legislation
because if you give fishermen targets they are very resourceful,
they will help achieve that and they will gain ownership of that
TCM themselves. We feel there should be more emphasis on actually
carrying through the research to the implementation stage; for
instance, with regard to these pingers, the work needs to be continued
so that ultimately it will need to form an effective measure.
Nowadays there is far more environmental legislation and as we
are advisers to the Government on that, we do feel that we should
be brought in increasingly in terms of advising on the development
of TCMs. Certainly, there is some work going on at the moment
looking at extracting razor fish—which are the long razor
shells that you have probably seen on the beach. The fishermen
want to fish them in an environmentally-friendly way using electricity,
which is quite an interesting area. It is important that we are
there as advisers so that when they do finally come up with a
method and there is a technical conservation method brought in,
with derogations from various aspects of the European legislation,
it will go through and it will be acceptable.
Q266 Lord Plumb: You are really saying
that you would not press for compulsory measures at the moment
until you have more information on the voluntary action that is
being taken in different areas, but if it is workable you would
eventually make it European-wide.
Dr Eno: If everybody agrees that it is a good
idea there is no need to make it compulsory but the fishing industry
is a very large group of sectors and while you might get some
of the sectors agreeing and some of the fishermen's associations
agreeing, not all fishermen are members of associations so you
might find that some do not buy into it, in which case to ensure
there is a level playing field, you then have to have compulsory
measures.
Q267 Lord Cameron of Dillington:
In your written evidence you indicate that you think spatial management
can be successful. We have heard a whole lot of divergent views
on that, and particularly there are doubts looking at cod, as
a well-travelled species and the problems there. I am just wondering
whether you want to comment a bit further and also what your view
is of the voluntary system of real-time closure that has been
happening in Scotland recently.
Professor Galbraith: If I could answer the second
question that you asked there and perhaps come to Mark on the
issues around cod, in relation to the real-time closure we welcome
that, we think it is a novel and innovative measure and we are
actually very pleased that it has come forward and been put in
place by the industry—that shows a willingness on their
side to actually manage the stock in a new and different way,
so we do welcome that. We think it is very early days yet and
we need to learn from the experience as we go along, and part
of that has to be effective monitoring of the actions, where has
it taken place, how often, and how effective has it been, recognising
the difficulties in that monitoring programme. We welcome it,
and in principle it should be effective if you limit or close
a fishery where you are picking up areas of juvenile fish, that
is to me a commonsense thing to do, that you are protecting the
next generation of your own fishery, of your own industry. In
due course we will hopefully get the report on how effective the
industry feels it has been, but we would very much welcome further
dialogue with the industry on that particular point, we do see
it as a step forward. On the issue of cod, perhaps I could turn
to Mark.
Mr Tasker: There are some principles here, My
Lord Chairman, and you are quite right in referring to a wide-ranging
species and the difficulty of getting spatial closures on those
things. There are some principles underlying it in that the more
static your organism or whatever it is you want to protect, the
easier it is to have a spatial protection, and that is static
over longer timescales. There are closures already for coral,
for instance, that is not going to move very far, and therefore
is a good thing to have a closure on. There are some organisms
which we harvest—scallops for instance—which do not
move hugely, but move a bit, and closures are probably pretty
good measures, and then you have things which move a lot and move
on different spatial timescales too, so one year the cod may be
particularly good in one particular area and it might be a difficult
thing to close it then, but the next year it might be somewhere
completely different, so you then need some sort of way, if you
want to use spatial closures, of having a responsive spatial closure.
The principles basically are how much does the organism move,
how much can your fishery move too; in other words if you close
an area for cod and people still want to catch that cod, will
they just go and spend more effort catching it somewhere else,
in which case the end result on the cod stock will be effectively
the same. One way of dealing with that would be to make it a very,
very big closure, but what is the acceptability among the stakeholders,
be they fishers or anyone else, of closing a very big area, so
there is a spatial scale of how much you can close related to
what biologically and economically will work. It is a tool again,
going back to our earlier question, that you would apply in particular
ways to achieve a particular purpose, and you do need to do some
analysis on that, you would not just say we want a protected area
to do something, you need to do the analysis first and figure
out the best tools to use; if it is a protected area then fine.
Professor Galbraith: Quickly picking up the
real-time closure point finally, we could see that being more
widely applied around the United Kingdom if it works in the Scottish
situation, and in principle there would be no reason not to try
it elsewhere but it is a very helpful sign that the industry are
moving in that direction.
Q268 Chairman: What about enforcement?
Are you satisfied that GPS monitoring of where the boats are is
sufficient for you to recognise that that actual area is not being
fished?
Professor Galbraith: This is where technology
can help as the years roll by and the more specific we can be
about where the boats are then the better for everybody and, in
a sense, the better for the fishing stock and for the industry
itself. Technology, as Mark Tasker said, has moved hugely in the
past five to ten years and that is likely to continue, as the
more specific we can be the better it becomes for all.
Q269 Lord Cameron of Dillington:
The real problem of course will be getting multi-state fishermen
buy-in. Scotland has obviously been quite successful, but what
about others?
Professor Galbraith: Absolutely.
Mr Tasker: In the case of the voluntary real-time
closure in Scotland that actually some other Member States' fishers
have started agreeing they will do that too—Denmark has
done that. That maybe another function—and we will come
to it a bit later on—of the Regional Advisory Councils where
you have different States' fishing communities talking to each
other and gaining trust with each other and you may find the voluntary
works better internationally because of that sort of mechanism.
Q270 Earl of Dundee: Could you tell
us a little bit about your experience with the emergency measures
provisions?
Professor Galbraith: Yes, and again I will ask
Mark to lead on this.
Mr Tasker: There are two experiences, but I
am a little unsure as to how much detail you would like me to
go into because I could not give you all the dates and so on,
but it might actually be easier to give you it in writing.
Q271 Chairman: Certainly that would
be helpful.
Mr Tasker: If you would like that sort of data
in writing I can then talk more generally about the principles.
The first emergency measure that was bid for related to the Darwin
Mounds, an area of coral in about 1000 metres water depth, about
150 miles north-west of Scotland where there is a coldwater coral
reef. Not many people know that you can get corals in cold waters,
but they are there and in that area they are growing on the top
of some several metres high mounds of sand. These were discovered
during a survey in 1998 and when we went back to have another
look at them the following year and in 2000 we found that they
were being trawled quite heavily, such that one could see where
a coral was before and now there was just a smear of seabed and
no coral. That became a cause celebre and various questions were
asked through ICES—I should perhaps declare an interest
here in that I am a quarter employed by the International Council
for the Exploration of the Sea—which are the main advisers
on scientific fishery management issues inside the CFP. They came
back with the answers, yes, this appears to be long-lasting damage
to biodiversity and then after a while they closed the area. When
I say "after a while" that glosses over about three
years, so an emergency was noticed but the response was a little
bit slow. Nevertheless, the closure is there, that has been accepted
by the fishermen, it went through various fishermen and stakeholder
consultations and everything else and it went from emergency to
permanent, and there is a general presumption that if there is
an emergency, the mechanism under the CFP in fact only lasts for
three months, extendable to six months, and then you have to go
to the more permanent measure. As I said, it worked but it was
slow. The other experience we had related to by-catch of common
dolphins off the south-west of England where increasing numbers
of dolphins were turning up dead on the beach, that had evidently
been in contact with a net of some sort—sometimes they had
a net wrapped around them which made it quite easy, but other
times you would just see the mark. That was creating understandable
public concern and although there was evidence that that was going
on from the 1980s it was not until 2000, the early part of this
decade, that there were really very large numbers coming in, and
again one might expect that you would get these changes over time
in the way that things are distributed. At almost the same time
a fishery that was not going on before had grown up, and this
was a pair trawl fishery for bass. Quite a lot of people will
put two and two together and say obviously it is the pair trawl
fishery causing these dead dolphins on our beach, and the Government
reacted by saying we would like a closure of that fishery, and
they took the evidence they had to the European Commission and
asked for an emergency measure to do that. The Commission, again,
asked ICES "Can you give us all the scientific background
to this?" and the scientific background revealed that, yes,
that was occurring but probably the by-catch was sustainable in
population terms. That is not to say it is a good thing for any
individual dolphin but it is not doing dramatic and unsustainable
damage to the dolphin population, so the Commission did not allow
an emergency measure in that case. To an extent that was quite
a good example in that one should take a step back and say, is
this really affecting something in a non-sustainable way for the
long term or not, so in that case we did not get the emergency
measure but it was an experience of trying to use the mechanism.
As I said before, I can give you all of that as a potted history
in writing which may help.
Q272 Earl of Dundee: Thinking of
emergency measures in a more general way or as part of the strategy
of dealing with things, do you believe that emergency measures
in themselves constitute a very necessary management tool? Obviously
in one sense by definition it is that, but in another way do you
anticipate an increase of emergency measures and do you think
that the deployment of them is right?
Professor Galbraith: The one thing we can learn
from history, not just in fisheries but generally, is that things
happen in a very unexpected way and you can have a very healthy
state in a fishery and suddenly a collapse. To have some provision
built in for emergency measures and to react timeously or really
quite quickly is eminently sensible as a principle. Mark may know
more in terms of the detail of the marine fisheries, but as a
principle, absolutely, yes.
Mr Tasker: The difficulty is that the CFP at
the moment has only got a number of timescales that one can take
measures over: there is either the annual scale or the emergency
scale. There is a good argument to be had for saying we should
have something else as well. An example I might come up with is
if we have a new Natura site, a new offshore protected area for
nature conservation, it would be very good to have some sort of
mechanism by which measures can be brought in automatically. At
the moment we either choose emergency—which is effectively
what happened with the Darwin Mounds—or you choose something
that is much longer term, in which case quite a lot of damage
could happen before that long term one comes in. Another version
would be coming back to the point I made a little bit earlier
about if you have had a bad winter and you know that the sole
stock is going to be in a bad shape, again, another measure that
came in automatically would be useful, so tuning the tools or
finding another tool that does those things and is not called
an emergency would be helpful, and one would rather hope that
actually you could get away from emergencies. You should not have
emergencies, you should be able to look forward, recognising of
course that some unexpected things always happen and the sea is
quite good at generating unexpected things.
Q273 Chairman: From the simplicity
point of view would it be sensible to call those emergency measures—you
were talking about the sole fishery and if the temperature drops
you can bring in an emergency measure. I am just trying not to
complicate things with a lot of different measures all running
maybe in parallel or maybe not in parallel.
Mr Tasker: I do not think it should be called
emergency; I would rather see that built into a long term management
plan as part of the ecosystem approach. There are quite a lot
of things out there that are more predictable now and management
plans should allow for anything that is more predictable.
Q274 Chairman: And to be able to
react.
Mr Tasker: To bring those in automatically,
so that there are automatic measures or something like that. The
word "emergency" tends to bring in some other connotations.
Dr Tew: My Lord Chairman, I agree with Professor
Galbraith's point that things happen at sea faster than the legislative
timetable can allow so you do need the tool in the box to be able
to introduce things rapidly. The proposals under the Marine Bill
will allow Sea Fisheries Committees to bring in emergency by-laws
which we are very much in favour of as another tool in the box.
Chairman: Lord Palmer, perhaps we can turn to
discards.
Q275 Lord Palmer: As we all know
this is a very controversial subject and I cannot remember which
one of you mentioned public disquiet about dolphins, but there
is obviously a great deal of public unease about the principle
of discards. You have actually mentioned that they are difficult
to enforce and ecologically unsound, whereas the other day the
RSPB said that discards do indeed go back into the ecosystem but
they fundamentally distorted it. I would be most interested if
you could all quickly chip in on the subject and tell us what
your views really are.
Professor Galbraith: Peehaps I could ask Dr
Tew to lead us through that.
Dr Tew: Thank you. I am going to answer your
question directly in a minute, My Lord Chairman, but indirectly
to start with if you will forgive me, I would like to make the
point that actually dealing with the symptom is not really the
main issue, the main issue is the cause and it is the amount of
extra and unwanted fish that are killed. That ranges across vulnerable
commercial species, young cod that are caught by prawn fishers,
vulnerable non-commercial species like deep sea fish which are
caught, brought up and killed and the huge amount of non-fish
biodiversity that is dredged up from the sea and discarded, so
the issue really is to find ways to reduce that unwanted catch,
but the question is on the discard themselves. Certainly we recognise
that discards do distort the ecosystem and the evidence that is
now increasingly persuasive about things like fulmars where we
are seeing whole populations of rising numbers because fulmars
are starting to follow the ships at sea, and indeed scavenging
species on the seabed: the crabs, the invertebrates and the small
fish. I think there is good evidence that ecosystems are being
disrupted so we would not disagree with RSPB on those points.
However, it is not clear to us, it is not categorically one way
or the other as to whether the bad effects, the disruption to
the ecosystems, are so much markedly worse than some of the good
effects of returning that biomass, returning those nutrients,
back to the marine ecosystem rather than taking them on shore
and disposing of them there. For us, therefore, there is a balance
in that argument. Further, we know that some of the species which
are caught and are discarded actually survive that process—skates
in particular—so by allowing discard at sea you are actually
promoting the survival or at least mitigating the damage done
to some of the species.
Q276 Lord Palmer: But the percentage
of survival must be very small in reality.
Dr Tew: The evidence is not clear on that but
actually we think there is increasing evidence that there is quite
a high survival for some species. If it only works for some species
but they are vulnerable, such as the largest skates, longest-lived
then that might be important. A final point I would like to make
is if you had a discard ban—and we do believe anecdotal
evidence from elsewhere shows that it is terribly difficult to
enforce—you have a discard ban but people ignore it, they
discard then they leave it at sea and effectively you are losing
that information, that data on catch is lost to the system. That
makes it very hard, in what is already a difficult system to analyse
scientifically, because you are losing that information. We are
not against a discard ban but we are probably going to sit on
the fence a wee bit over this—we do not completely disagree
with the RSPB, we think that discard bans could work in the right
place at the right time and again we go back to our punch line
which is a toolbox—but neither are we in unanimous support
of a complete discard ban across the piece. I conclude by going
back to my main point which is that it is not dealing with the
symptom of the problem that is the important thing, it is dealing
with the causal issue, which is the huge number of unwanted fish
which are caught.
Chairman: Lady Sharp, could we go on to access
restrictions.
Q277 Baroness Sharp of Guildford:
Under the Common Fisheries Policy decision-making on territorial
matters is devolved to Member States. One of your objectives to
be achieved in the fisheries policy and management is to maintain
or make permanent the six and the twelve mile limits. Could you
tell us a little bit more about what you want to do here and what
your aims and objectives are?
Professor Galbraith: We can indeed and I will
ask Dr Eno to lead our response.
Dr Eno: Thank you, Lady Sharp. Initially the
six and twelve mile limits were set up as a derogation to the
Treaty of Rome in relation to the principle of access and indeed
the last Common Fisheries Policy review maintained that derogation.
We would like to really push for that derogation to be made permanent
as opposed to being reviewed every time the fisheries policy is
assessed. A lot of the rationale for making it permanent is that
it would allow the Member States to manage their inshore resources
and their inshore activities in really a more integrated way,
which is the basis for marine spatial planning. You will be aware
that on the whole the number and complexities of activities that
are going on get less as you go further away from the coast, so
it makes it particularly important that you have this derogation,
particularly in the nought to six miles and then the six to twelve
because at the moment in that nought to six only the Member State
vessels have access and they are managed primarily by inshore
fisheries managers. If you opened it up and allowed open access
it would make the job of inshore fisheries managers much harder
and it would threaten the fish stocks, the biodiversity in terms
of the habitats and species and the management itself. Currently
you will be aware that the Marine Bill is going through and my
colleague Dr Tew referred to the potential for emergency bylaw-making
powers which are included; certainly, the management ability of
inshore fisheries regulators will be improved by those powers
coming through the Marine Bill and it would be unfortunate if
that was thrown away by allowing open access. It is very difficult
already in relation to inshore management of Natura 2000 sites
to legislate for the activity of roaming UK vessels and this might
make it even harder. You will be aware that currently the UK,
in common with other Member States, is about to embark upon the
implementation of marine spatial planning and to just come back
to that point it would really be helpful if there was stability
in the question of fisheries management jurisdiction in that respect.
We do not see why you cannot do it; there is no political impediment
to keeping the six and twelve mile limits and none of the other
Member States have objected to it and certainly in the last CFP
review they did not object.
Q278 Baroness Sharp of Guildford:
Forgive my ignorance; you have talked about the six mile limit
but what is the precise relationship between the six mile and
the twelve mile limits?
Dr Eno: As I said, nought to six miles is the
exclusive access to the host Member State, between the six and
twelve mile limits there is access dependent upon historic rights,
which were set up when the Common Fisheries Policy was initially
introduced, and so you have quite a complicated system allowing
certain countries access to fish certain stocks in certain areas.
Those arrangements have continued but they add complexity and
make it difficult for inshore fishing managers to cope or to establish
stable management regimes.
Q279 Baroness Sharp of Guildford:
In relation to emergency measures, these can be introduced within
the six mile limits at the discretion of Member States, is that
correct?
Dr Eno: Yes, they have the powers to do that.
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