Examination of Witnesses (Questions 460-479)
Mr Frank Strang, Mr Stephen Noon and Mr Paul McCarthy
1 MAY 2008
Q460 Earl of Dundee: So you would
mix the stick with the carrot?
Mr Strang: Yes, I think that is right.
Q461 Earl of Dundee: How would you
do so?
Mr Strang: The point is there are already plenty
of sticks there. You can only catch X stock with X size of mesh,
this kind of thing. Our point is that it has always been sticks
so far and you can use incentives in the form of EFF money to
incentivise people. I think MSC accreditation is a kind of incentive,
but in our case it is days at sea, the kilowatt day scheme and
so on, where we are saying to people that, following the trials
we are doing right now, we hope to be able to introduce a scheme
whereby, if a nephrops vessel includes a 120-millimetre square
mesh panel at a certain point, they will get more days. Because
they are involved in developing it, they were involved in the
trials, they are more receptive to it. In fact, even choosing
the trials is a very tricky thing—what horsepower, which
part of the sea. We are very particular about this. We have had
dialogue all round the country about that. We have got a limited
number of trials we can do but because they know they were involved
they believe these things will make a difference and so it is
all part of that. This is partly optimism about the sea. A really
important thing I am going to say is that we are going to be measuring
outcomes. We are not just doing wishful thinking but we actually
have a sense that this is a new start and we are doing things
differently and incentive is a part of that, I guess.
Mr Noon: It is getting people engaged in a joint
purpose which is making the fishery more profitable. I suppose
the biggest incentive is giving people a sense that they have
a real influence on decisions that affect their livelihood, and
that is certainly the approach that we are trying to come from
as a government.
Q462 Viscount Ullswater: Will you
control that through licensing the individual boats if they apply
the technical measures in order to get that extra?
Mr Strang: There are two aspects to it. At the
moment under the Conservation Credits Scheme the whole fleet is
receiving in 2008 the same days at sea it received in 2007 and
as a requirement of that the nephrops fleet will have to carry
a square mesh panel of 110 millimetres from 1 July and we will
be controlling it.
Q463 Viscount Ullswater: That is
the whole fleet?
Mr Strang: The whole nephrops fleet, and those
that do not comply will have a cut in their days at sea available.
It is as simple as that. That is the simplest way we can do it.
Chairman: Just as an aside on this, as you may
suspect, devolution is done in favour of getting decision-making
down as far as possible. This morning there was a remarkable conversation
a number of colleagues and I had with fishermen actually exploring
this route and there was almost a cry of, "There is a need
to save us from ourselves", which we were not expecting.
Lord Cameron of Dillington: Particularly the
nephrops fleet—"There are too many boats being built.
Give it a couple of years and it will be completely over-fished.
Why don't you do something?".
Q464 Chairman: "The Government
has to come in and tell people to stop this". It is not something
that I was expecting.
Mr Strang: As an aside, the development of the
Conservation Credits Scheme has been a very interesting point
in our relationship with the sector. It has changed our relationship
because we can no longer say it is the European Commission's fault.
We have to have a discussion with the sector and we are saying
to them, "This is a fantastic opportunity to design our own
scheme but we have to be responsible and responsibility is obviously
about the state of the stocks but if we want this model to work
in the future we have to use our powers responsibly now".
We have a steering group involving the main fisheries, involving
WWF, involving scientists, but there have been occasions where
we have had to say, "We, Government, assume our responsibility
and we think X". It means that we cannot cosy up together
and say it is all London or Brussels or somewhere else who is
at fault.
Mr Noon: It is a leadership role from both Government
and the industry ultimately. It cannot just come from us.
Q465 Earl of Arran: You mentioned
stewardship rights. What exactly are they and what would be the
benefits of them if they came about?
Mr Strang: On that I am afraid I am not going
to be terribly helpful to the Committee. In terms of our review
of the quota management system, Mr Lochhead will be issuing later
this month a consultation document on the arrangements which we
think should apply for managing quota in Scotland and I do not
particularly want to pre-empt that if you will forgive me. What
we are saying though is that access to fishing is one of the key
ingredients for a fishing community and we have to preserve that
for future generations. We have to take that seriously and so
we have arrangements which are not necessarily radically different
from the ones now but they suit Scottish circumstances, so there
will be consultation on that, and I guess it is about balancing
and combining and safeguarding what is a national asset for future
generations but it is also allowing individual businesses to grow
and thrive. I think probably the best thing I can do is undertake
to provide the Committee with the document later in the month
when it is out.
Q466 Earl of Arran: How do you expect
these proposals to be taken by the fishermen?
Mr Strang: I think they will on the whole welcome
the fact that we are taking seriously the future of the sector
in Scotland fishing communities and the fact that this is an important
national asset and we want to make sure it is available for future
generations. Individuals will look carefully at their own financial
situation and what it means, what the impact is for them, and
I think the majority will say what I have just said but it will
not be a unanimous reaction, as you would expect in any consultation.
Q467 Earl of Arran: It sounds to
me as though it could be quite controversial.
Mr Strang: We will see. I think you will have
heard that this is very important to people. I suppose what I
am really saying is that it is the kind of thing you have to see
as a package, not just to do one little bit and not the others
because that would mislead. You have to look at it in the round.
Q468 Chairman: Can you say anything
on geographical restrictions of trading rights?
Mr Strang: I do not think I should. I think
I will leave that.
Chairman: That is all right. Let us get straight
into discards.
Q469 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch:
Discards are one of the issues on which we can all unite and say
we find abhorrent. Fishermen say it, the consumers say it, the
politicians say it. We can all agree that we do not think discards
are a welcome side of the fishing industry. You have mentioned
the Conservation Credits Scheme and that you think that is a helpful
way of dealing with them. Can you tell us a little bit more about
that but also give us a practical analysis? Are discards always
going to be with us? Are they an inevitable by-product of the
fishing industry?
Mr Strang: I will tell you a bit about the Conservation
Credits Scheme. I have probably covered quite a lot of that already
but I am happy to add to it. The context of the conservation credits
is cod recovery and our overall position set out in a Scottish
Government document last October about cod recovery was that we
were about a reduction in mortality; that is what we are trying
to achieve, but doing it in ways other than blanket cuts at sea.
Doing it through innovative ways, doing it locally and doing it
with the sector were the big themes. The Council decision last
December ticked all those boxes, the kilowatt days provision,
for example, so that Member States can devise a scheme which is
about reducing mortality, local solutions, et cetera. We are excited
about it. The overall principle is rewarding people for doing
the right thing, credit for your conservation measures. We have
worked in very close collaboration with the sector and in practice
there will be a basic scheme from 1 February which rewards people.
It gives people their 2007 days back so they are not getting a
cut in return for real-time closures and selectivity measures.
In due course we hope to give more days to people which have more
selective gear. What impact will the scheme have? We want to give
a carrot for outcomes. This is partly what we are saying. We are
not just happily sailing away. It is difficult to measure the
impact on stock first thing because the Scottish industry is only
part of those who have an impact on the cod stocks because there
is a delay in the scientific advice—you will not know for
a year what the outcome is. Another important thing, and this
applies to discards too, is that there is a trend already. What
we know about the 2005 cod year class in the North Sea, for example,
and the TAC as set, as you alluded to, Chairman, is that discards
are going to increase before they get less, so the impact of this
scheme will be about what is the difference from the trend that
we were expecting? With all those caveats I guess we would
expect real-time closures, which are about avoiding aggregations,
to reduce discards because you will not catch such a by-catch
in getting your quota because there is not such an aggregation,
and obviously selectivity. Selectivity measures are particularly
good for discards of haddock and whiting which these measures
we are talking will have more of an impact on, so we are interested
in other white fish because the levels of discard are pretty unacceptable
in some places on those stocks. Incidentally, we will be increasing
our observer programme. We are employing some more observers to
increase by 500 days a year the amount of observing at sea we
are doing. That will give us a better sense of it. Probably the
biggest measure is going to be the discard rate because we can
observe that and the trick will be to see what the trend would
have been and what is the difference. We do not know that yet
so we will have to work that through. That is the conservation
credits side of it and what it might do for discards.
Q470 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch:
Do you think a discard ban would be practical?
Mr Strang: You could conceive of situations
where it might be just about feasible if there were a clean fishery
and a single jurisdiction, but in a mixed fishery with a multiple
jurisdiction it does throw up a lot of issues. I should say as
an aside that reducing discards is absolutely the right thing
to do but a discard ban has implications for quota allocations.
What do you do about quota for individuals? What about relative
stability? There are implications for minimum landing sizes and
I think a very important implication for enforcement in that fishermen
have no incentive to obey this discard ban. It will have to be
policed and enforced. That means boarding boats. It happens on
the sea, and the one thing, and you may have heard this from the
market this morning, is that the big change in enforcement has
been moving to on land. There is a big investment in the registration
of buyers and sellers, et cetera, and you would have to reverse
all that, so there is a big enforcement issue there. I guess we
would say that the Commission's communication on discards is a
good thing because it talks about an outcome we are trying to
achieve. It talks about reductions in discards rather than all
the detail but going to a discards ban without dealing with all
these other issues is problematic.
Mr Noon: It is also important to reflect in
the context in which these decisions are being taken that the
Council of Ministers itself has had the pleasure of being the
first one in December, and, to be frank, it is shambolic. It is
a sort of lowest common denominator approach when you have a 24-hour
period where you are negotiating the commercial interest of a
fishery and so my concern is that these important bigger picture
issues do not get dealt with in the structures which exist around
the Council of Ministers, which is a challenge.
Q471 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch:
If you have never had a discard ban, the way the current quota
system works it would have to be something radically beyond that,
would it not, which would allow people to bring back mixed catches
and so on? In the longer term does it not make sense to have something
flexible in terms of what you allow people to catch and therefore
saying it is illegal, for example, just because you do not think
it has much value so you chuck it over the side rather than land
it?
Mr Strang: That must be right, to try and find
ways of doing that. This illustrates a problem with the CFP which
is the accumulation of layer upon layer of different policies
without standing back and saying how these inter-relate. There
is a lack of credibility and coherence. We have quotas, we have
technical conservation measures, we have days at sea, we have
capacity measures, and to come along and say, "On top of
all that we have got a discards ban", no-one is standing
back and saying, "How does that all fit together?".
Regardless of the discussion we had earlier about the politics
of the CFP, we want an expert to look with a blank sheet of paper
at what would be standing back and taking elements from other
places and saying what would be the right kind of fisheries management
regime for these waters? We need to do that rather than CFP reform
being about the margins of more stakeholder involvement.
Mr Noon: We have done it on the basis of two
agreed national outcomes, one of which is increasing the number
of sustainable fish stocks and the other is biodiversity, or buying
into those outcomes rather than arguing about specific details.
Lord Cameron of Dillington: Can you explain
the logic in your cod recovery paper of October last year about
increasing the cod quota in order to reduce discarding? My impression
from fishermen is that they will go up to the limit and you will
still have the same amount of discarding.
Q472 Chairman: The TAC was wrong.
The science produced the wrong TAC.
Mr Strang: The abundance was such that, even
with a reduction in effort, people were still going to be taking
a bigger TAC, and so it was not serving any purpose to have a
restrictive TAC that would just be discarded.
Q473 Viscount Brookeborough: I was
speaking to one fisherman this morning and he said, "I avoid
these areas where I would run into the cod because I would have
to discard them. However, there are others around here who do
not know as much as I do and they go into those areas by misadventure
and they then have to discard". I said, "Why do you
not tell them about those areas?". "Oh, no. There are
people here who do that and that is not my affair to stop them".
He said, "This is doing the damage to the stocks in the long
term", so I said, "What would you do?", and he
said, "I would increase the quota", but, of course discarding
is the wrong thing and we all agree with that. However, it actually
has the same result whether you discard them or whether you eat
them, so it makes no difference in the end result.
Mr McCarthy: That example illustrates that there
is a difference between discarding and catching. The main thing
for us, as the first fishermen said, would be to avoid catching
them, the fish, in the first place and if there are ways we can
incentivise fishermen to avoid catching the fish, which will be
discarded, in the first place then there may be ways that we could
deal with discards which might not be quite as complex.
Q474 Viscount Brookeborough: But
if fishermen are against discarding but they will not talk to
each other is it worth going down that route?
Mr McCarthy: They are in competition with each
other to land as well.
Q475 Chairman: That is the fundamental
problem.
Mr Strang: That is a very interesting point
and I am sure anything I say here will be secret and the fishing
industry will not hear about it. There is an issue for us about
information provision and the way we have approached conservation
credits is getting the whole fleet involved. In order to target
our real-time closures we would love to know where the cod aggregations
are right now so we can board, and some of that is okay because
we have got the spawning areas that they have already told us
about and they are turning out to be reasonably accurate on that,
but we do have a provision in the Conservation Credits Scheme
which is that fishermen will make reasonable efforts to inform
us of cod aggregations, and what we are learning is that they
do not want to do that personally but they might anonymously through
their fishing associations give us the information, so there is
a cultural behavioural change that we are working on. We give
them as simple templates as we can for the information so that
we can use that information. I suppose it is all about a collective
effort. Where we want to get to is that the whole sector is up
for this and therefore there is peer control going on here, that
the consensus, as has been the case with black fish and compliance,
is, "We have changed that behaviour and if people are out
of line we will let other people know". We cannot police
everybody.
Q476 Chairman: Just on discards,
my old friend and opponent, John McKay, used to have an approach
which was, "Look: go back to that December Fisheries Council
and there you get quota swapping on the basis of extra cod equivalence",
so why not require fishermen to land all their marketable fish
and have an overall cod equivalent quota, one cod equals three
whiting, that sort of approach? You have to land everything that
is of marketable value and you work out a formula.
Mr Strang: I have not heard that before. I do
not know whether there would be relative stability issues because
there would be a big issue about whether the cod equivalence was
still up to date and all that, because it is all very well if
it is traded. That is different from the impact on relative stability,
and I guess the important issue would still be there. We do not
think a discard ban has been thought through to a model that works
but we are not saying it could not be thought through and find
a model that works. One important thing to say is that we are
very chummy with our Norwegian partners across the water and we
work closely with them; they are very important to us, but a discard
ban, if you go and look at the Norwegian discards ban, is not
quite a discard ban. The whole system, including real-time closures,
is based on the premise that there will not be discards, so they
can structure it around there not being discards. That is a slightly
different thing from saying that whenever we find someone who
is discarding they are breaking the law. They would have to answer
for themselves exactly how it works but we should not assume that
because people use the language we are talking about the same
thing.
Q477 Chairman: But you might want
to look at something like a cod equivalent quota.
Mr Strang: Yes.
Q478 Viscount Ullswater: Another
comment that was made to me in the market when I was going round
with a fishermen was, "Look: you see all these relatively
small cod but none is below the minimum size. If you see all these
it usually means that they have been high graded because here
is marketable fish but a lot of them are small fish and therefore
probably a lot of smaller fish have been discarded". Do you
have any solution to that?
Mr Strang: I do not have a solution. It is a
feature of the fishery, particularly last year. That was people's
reaction to the fact that the TAC was out of line with what they
were seeing in reality and I guess that is about the responsiveness
of the TAC. It is also about if we have a common cause to recover
cod then we are requiring of fishermen a behavioural change to
move away from places where this is more likely. We are saying
to them, "You cannot help catching your cod quota this year,
no matter where you go, so with these real-time closures and other
things please avoid places which will mean that in taking your
quota you take an awful lot more of other stuff".
Q479 Baroness Sharp of Guildford:
Can I pick up on this discard issue and put one further point
to you, which again arose from our discussions this morning? This
is the idea that the quotas might run from April to April rather
than from January to January, the essence of this being that you
run out of quota at the end of the year, and if you ran out in
the January through to March period, which is the time when the
fish are spawning, it would be advantageous because the fish could
then spawn and so forth, whereas you would be picking up the larger
fish in the November/December period when frequently they would
run out of quota now. Do you feel this might be a feasible way
forward?
Mr Strang: I think that and the previous idea
are interesting ideas to look at. It is, I guess, similar to an
answer to Lord Cameron, that different stocks have different characteristics
biologically. My immediate reaction is that what you would find
in an April-to-April quota year is that fishermen would be telling
us that the science, which is delivered in June, is awfully out
of date by April. This brings us to the December bunfight, or
whatever the right noun is, that the problem is that in December
the Commission are creating a package that everybody can physically
accept so they have to decide all the stocks together, so even
if some are biologically such that you could decide on an April
start, dealing with them in isolation you are much more unlikely
to get a deal. However, I still think it is worth looking at.
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