Examination of Witnesses (Questions 528-539)
Mr Cephas Ralph
1 MAY 2008
Q528 Chairman: Good afternoon. Thanks
very much for coming along and helping us. This is a formal evidence
session so a note will be taken. The transcript will be sent to
you for you to look through and see if there are any slips that
have come in. The other thing is that I normally have to say at
this point is that it is being webcast and there might be somebody
listening, but as it is not being webcast there is no chance of
anybody listening. I wonder if we could fire straight in if that
is all right. I do have to say I have many happy memories of the
SFPA, particularly a certain ship that took me on a rather nice
trip on one occasion. Could you outline the role and objectives
of the organisation?
Mr Ralph: The Scottish Fisheries Protection
Agency's role is to monitor compliance with fisheries legislation
and regulations in the Scottish zone which extends out 200 miles
and in all the ports around Scotland like Peterhead. We are present
in 17 ports, all the main ports. We have nominally four ships
at sea and we have two aircraft. The Agency is unique. I have
quite a lot of experience of similar operations throughout the
world. The Agency is self-contained. We are totally civilian.
We do not rely on any military assets which would be the norm
in other countries, naval ships or military aircraft, and our
officers ashore are dedicated to the fisheries role. They are
not harbour employees or customs officers, which is often the
case in other places in the world, so it is essentially a one-stop
shop for fishery protection and as such unique.
Q529 Lord Cameron of Dillington:
I wanted to ask you a general question about your successes, what
you see as your successes and what you see as your obstacles in
working with the real-time closures system and illegal landings
but also in terms of the new buyers and sellers rules and whether
they have been helpful, and do you get support from the courts
and adequate support in terms of fines and sentences and so on?
Mr Ralph: Where would you like me to start?
Q530 Lord Cameron of Dillington:
We will leave it to you. Talk us through your successes and how
it works.
Mr Ralph: As most of you will probably know,
we have had a very significant historic problem with black fish,
which relatively recently we have been able to overcome. That
success has been due to quite a large number of factors coming
together all at the same time or at similar times. A decommissioning
scheme removed the over-capacity in the fleet, so that removed
the financial imperative on many of the operators to land illegal
fish. The registration of buyers and sellers scheme was vital
because trade, of course, is a supply and demand equation. One
cannot work without the other. For the first time the buyers and
sellers legislation put an onus and the responsibility on the
person buying fish to account for it in a way that we could come
in and audit, so people who had been in the trade of buying illegal
fish, essentially with impunity because once it was ashore there
was very little we could do about it, were no longer able to do
that.
Q531 Lord Cameron of Dillington:
It is your organisation that monitors that?
Mr Ralph: Indeed, yes. Those people suddenly
found themselves in the position of being unable to claim ignorance
of the source. They moved into a position where they became co-conspirators
if they were involved, so the vast majority of buyers did not
want to be in that situation and that pretty much removed the
demand side completely for black fish. That was a tremendous success.
As the level of illegal activity came down we were able to adopt
targeting techniques. Obviously, if the vast majority of a population
are breaking the law then targeting does not really work because
essentially everyone is at it, but when you come down to a more
normal situation where the majority of people are sticking to
the law then you can begin to introduce tried and tested police
targeting techniques—the use of intelligence, the use of
data analysis, to try and pinpoint those whose activities are
not within the normal range, and we focused our efforts on them
to further reduce the levels of illegal activity.
Q532 Lord Cameron of Dillington:
What is the level of normal activity going on at the moment?
Mr Ralph: In terms of illegal landings into
Scotland, our best intelligence would suggest that the levels
are minimal, I would suspect less than one per cent, probably
much less. We have detected minor pockets of resurgence. The good
thing from my point of view is that in many of the cases where
we have detected illegal activity it has been fishermen themselves
who have come to us and told us that they have suspicions about
some operators in particular, and that is an extremely healthy
sign.
Q533 Lord Cameron of Dillington:
What about the real-time closures?
Mr Ralph: The real-time closures scheme is obviously
aimed at protecting cod stocks and allowing the cod stocks to
regenerate. We are integral in real-time closures in that we do
inspections at sea to determine whether cod catches have reached
a trigger level. If they have we propose to the Marine Directorate
that a closure is put in place. If that is accepted we will then
play our part in publicising the closure and monitoring compliance
with it. It is not a legal requirement to comply with the closure
so we do not prosecute anybody for not complying with it, but
the theory is that if you comply with the closure you receive
certain benefits in terms of flexibilities in the rules that govern
your operation, but if you do not comply these flexibilities are
removed.
Q534 Lord Cameron of Dillington:
So in your view as overseer it is working, is it?
Mr Ralph: Yes.
Q535 Lord Cameron of Dillington:
Have you had anybody not obeying the rules?
Mr Ralph: Yes. We have had one who claimed that
he did not know. I think his claim was marginal but it was accepted.
One of the problems that we had initially in the scheme was that
the trigger for the closure is a large abundance of cod in the
catch and cod are a fairly expensive fish. The scheme only applied
to Scottish boats so in the fishery in the central North Sea where
you have many nationalities one claim was that Scotland announcing
a cod closure was the equivalent of putting up a big flag to other
nations and saying, "It might be a bloody good idea to come
and fish here because there are lots of cod about". We had
specific problems in the first few weeks with some Danish vessels
but that kind of faded away. Denmark are very keen to go down
a similar route to us. I think they put some considerable pressure
on their fleet to try and co-operate. Norway co-operates quite
closely with us as well. Some of the closures that we have introduced
have been on the Norwegian side of the North Sea. We can only
monitor UK boats in the Norwegian zone. We rely on our Norwegian
colleagues to use their technology and assets to monitor other
nations and they co-operate really well with us.
Q536 Lord Plumb: Could I just ask
whether you have much contact with your counterparts in other
countries? Do you have regular meetings with them or do you compare
notes?
Mr Ralph: Yes. I cannot explain why, but the
bit of the North Sea between Scotland and England tends to be
very lightly fished so there is very little cross-border interaction
between the industries of Scotland and England. There is some,
of course, but it is not huge, so our main day-to-day contact
is not with our colleagues in London; it is with our colleagues
in Bergen and in the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, the
Faroe Islands and Denmark and we have regular meetings particularly
with Ireland and Norway. In fact, in two weeks' time we have an
annual bilateral meeting with our counterparts in Norway and that
will be hosted in Scotland. Next year it will be hosted in Norway
and we had a bilateral with Southern Ireland last week in Glasgow.
Q537 Lord Plumb: And are they as
strict as you?
Mr Ralph: Norwegian courts are extremely strict
on fishery offences. It is not for me to say why but if you look
at Norway it only has two major natural resources and one of them
is fish. The court penalties in Norway are legendary. If you ask
a fishermen in the street here if he would rather be prosecuted
in a Scottish court or a Norwegian court his answer would always
be a Scottish court. In Ireland they suffer a bit, like us, from
the courts perhaps sympathising with the industry rather than
viewing the impact of illegal activity. Ireland, however, have
set up an enforcement agency. I attended the official opening
of it last month. It was largely designed around the Scottish
model. In fact, they called it the SFPA. That was an accident.
The title of the organisation in Irish Gaelic is UCIM but nobody
could speak Irish Gaelic so they translated it and it came out
as SFPA. I would say that, certainly between ourselves and Ireland,
there is a growing level of enforcement that perhaps was not present
in the past. Certainly the new agency in Ireland is in my opinion
a very professional organisation.
Q538 Viscount Ullswater: Can we deal
with discards and discarding? You note in your 2006-2007 report
that, maybe because of the registration of buyers and sellers
or you may say that this is the right way forward, you have been
able to divert some of your attention from the point of landing
to the point of catch. I would like to hear what were the reasons
that gave you that sort of feeling. Also, would that put you in
a position to monitor more openly the discarding policy of the
various boats and how would you feel if you were given the task
of policing a discard ban?
Mr Ralph: They commented on that in our annual
report and, when I went back to read it, it could be read out
of context. The context in which it was written, I suppose, was
the historical one where, when the Agency was formed, it had five
of its own ships and two contract minesweepers from the Royal
Navy. Pretty soon we realised that we were spending the vast majority
of our money at sea whereas the vast majority of our problems
existed ashore essentially, and we shifted the balance. We dropped
the Royal Navy contract, we reduced the number of ships, we invested
in new and more efficient ships to reduce the running costs and
used that money to build up our resources ashore. Peterhead, for
instance, is the main landing port in the UK. It is our main presence
in Scotland and we have, I think, five or six officers on duty
24 hours a day seven days a week, so that is a significant number
of people. We have a similar type of presence at a few other places
as well and we cover the vast majority of landing opportunities
by vessels landing into Scotland. What we have found in the last
few years, given the high levels of compliance, is that we are
essentially standing by watching people obey the law and there
is a limit to how long you can do that when you have manned your
organisation to deter and detect illegal activity, so we have
just undergone an organisational review of our coastal officers
and we have reduced manning at quite a few places. We are not
reducing our overall coverage but we are, we hope, adjusting our
manning to more appropriate levels given the high level of compliance.
The amount of money that one extra ship would cost could never
be covered by a reduction in manning ashore so it seems highly
unlikely that we would be able to fund one more vessel. We might,
however, be able to put additional people on the vessels, perhaps
fisheries experts from shore stationed in the summer time, in
the busy times, on our vessels. That is the kind of shift in emphasis
that we are speaking about. It is not a wholesale move.
Q539 Viscount Ullswater: I am sorry;
I need to just clear this up: do you put your own people onto
fishing vessels or your own protection vessels?
Mr Ralph: Our own protection vessels. Obviously,
they go on to fishing vessels to inspect them.
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