Examination of Witnesses (Questions 528-539)
Mr Mark Dougal
1 MAY 2008
Q528 Chairman: Good afternoon. Thank
you for coming to help us with our inquiry. This is a formal evidence
session so a note will be taken. You will get a copy of the transcript
when it is available so you can go through it and correct anything
that has not come out right. The other thing is that I usually
have to say at this stage that it is being webcast so there is
a possibility that someone might hear it, but as we are not being
webcast there is no possibility that anybody will hear it, so
do not worry. You are Chief Executive of the North East Scotland
Fishermen's Organisation and you are on the Board of Seafood Scotland.
Mr Dougal: Yes.
Q529 Chairman: What do those two
organisations do? What is their role?
Mr Dougal: If I can start by giving you a little
bit of background, my knowledge of the industry, I was brought
up in a fishing family on the Scottish borders in the town of
Eyemouth. My father was a fishermen. Both grandfathers were fishermen.
I left school at 16/17 and I went fishing with my father for a
couple of years. He asked me to leave politely. He felt as though
the future was not great, it was inshore fisheries that we were
working on, so I ended up coming up to Peterhead in 1989, and
that is nearly 20 years I have been in Peterhead. I started off
in the Fishery Office and I have noticed that one of the relevant
questions is with regard to enforcement. I was a fishery officer
for 12 years, solely based in Peterhead, so you can imagine the
changes I have seen there. I left the Fishery Office, not under
a cloud or anything. My wife was pregnant so the thought of working
a shift system and young children in the house kind of forced
me out, so I worked for the Sea Fish Industry Authority for a
couple of years and I have now been in my present position for
five years as the Chief Executive of the North East Scotland Fishermen's
Organisation. That is my background, so I have kind of been gamekeeper
turned poacher because I have been involved with all sectors of
the industry. My current position is Chief Executive of NESFO,
as it is abbreviated. As you are aware, we are a producer organisation.
We are approved by the Government and the EU. Annually we submit
an operational plan and an activity report through the Scottish
Government to the EU Commission and it is approved. At the moment
we are in the region of 45 fishing vessels. When I started five
years ago there were 60 but it was just at the first stage of
the decommissioning in 2003, I think it was, so just as I started
we lost in the region of 15 vessels, maybe 12, but through natural
wastage we now operate 45 vessels. The vessels range in size from
a ten-metre vessel working in the Firth of Forth catching only
prawns, just working six or seven hours in a day, to a 35-metre
trawler working mainly Scottish waters into the Norwegian sector
and occasionally Faroese waters, so it is a variety. We have no
pelagic vessels. It is mainly white fish and nephrops vessels
that we have. The 45 vessels grossed in the region of £35
million last year, so that makes us probably the second biggest
producer organisation for white fish within the UK. That is a
bit of background about what we are in NESFO. You are aware that
we are approved by the EU, so my main role within NESFO is the
administration of quotas. I do not want to go into all the intricacies
of how the quotas were set up and everything like that but my
main aim at the beginning of the year is to try and maintain a
12-month fishery for all my vessels. Whether that means finding
additional quotas, swapping in quota, or vessels going to different
methods to utilise all their quota, my main aim is that come Christmastime
this year we are still fishing up to the last fish market in Peterhead.
As you correctly say, I am on the Board of Seafood Scotland. I
do not have that much dealing with Seafood Scotland. We only meet
quarterly as a board but I think it is a unique position that
Seafood Scotland has, that all the sectors of the industry are
there, from the catching sector represented by the POs, occasionally
there are fishermen there, you have all the processing sectors,
you have the councils, you have the Government. It is unique because
I do not know any other organisation within the UK that has that
broad spectrum of the industry. We sit on the board. My main aim
on the board is to listen to what the Chief Executive, Libby Woodhatch,
is saying, but from my point of view my day-to-day dealings with
the fishermen involve looking at different markets which Seafood
Scotland is doing to try and improve the quality, which they have
certainly done over the last three or four years. There are massive
differences in the market with regard to the presentation of fish,
and just looking at all this issue now that we have, with even
Marks and Spencer, in that they are going green and sustainability
and so on, this is where Seafood Scotland I think are going to
be in the future. That is just a quick rundown of where I am with
NESFO and where I am with Seafood Scotland.
Q530 Chairman: Can you very briefly
talk about quota management for a little while because the quotas
that individual boats have are aggregated and you manage the whole
lot, do you?
Mr Dougal: Yes, that is correct.
Q531 Chairman: And if you saw, say,
that you did not have a haddock quota there you would go out and
look elsewhere for a haddock quota and buy it in, would you?
Mr Dougal: Yes, that is correct. One of the
questions that I got from the Committee is pertinent to ITQs but
in this we work a solely ITQ system. It is an internal ITQ system.
Each vessel has different quotas from the gentleman sitting next
to him at the table. This is all derived from FQA units that were
split up from the Government in 1998 and it was all done on historical
performance from 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997; I cannot remember. With
regard to quota management, each vessel obviously has different
quotas of cod, haddock, whiting, saithe, nephrops and monkfish
as the main species that we catch. Generally, if a vessel was
running short he would contact me and ideally I would swap this
within the UK but, as you are well aware, there is a leasing process.
Masters of the vessels lease quota to go to sea so that they can
catch the extra fish that they have leased. This is in addition
to the original quota that they have been allocated through myself,
but as it is a producer organisation we manage it on behalf of
the 45 vessels and if we do not need quota then we will hopefully
swap it for something that we do need. We tend to work with about
20 POs within the UK, but where we are unique on this is that
generally we do a lot of the trade outwith the UK with other Member
States. This is all something that I started about five years
ago just as I came into the position as the quotas were tight
but then when you looked at other Member States there were huge
opportunities to access additional quota. I do quite a lot of
travelling abroad with contacts in different Member States to
supplement the quota that we have.
Q532 Chairman: We had a conversation
with fishermen this morning and it went something like this, "I
will go out and I have quota for stock X but from next month I
have not got quota for stocks A, B, C and D, so if I catch any
of those I am going to have to discard them". What you are
saying is that the system you operate should prevent that from
occurring?
Mr Dougal: If you can get access to the fish
internationally, yes, or within the UK. We are in a unique situation
this year in that we are only four months into the year and there
are some producer organisations already shut for the main stocks,
one of which is whiting. It only closed last night so about 20
vessels that operate out of Peterhead will not be allowed to catch
any more whiting for the rest of the year, and so if those 20
vessels catch any they will have to discard them. The main reason
for that is that I have probably taken on a role that was not
really meant to be with regard to quota management when I took
over the position, but I have expanded the position a wee bit
because it is not really in my remit to go out there and access
quota just to give to the boats. I have done this off my own back
and we are a wee bit unique within the UK in that we are the one
that started it and there are quite a few other producer organisations
following on, but because I have built up contacts internationally,
mainly Denmark and Holland, the Low Countries, we can access fish
from there. If they have no fish then obviously we cannot do anything
about it.
Q533 Viscount Brookeborough: Just
to clarify, the quota that you go after in another country has
to be quota that is applicable to the area that these boats wish
to fish in?
Mr Dougal: Yes, that is correct.
Q534 Viscount Brookeborough: And
that is a difficult thing in finding the quota for the North Sea
if it is a Peterhead boat?
Mr Dougal: Yes, that is right. I just did a
swap with the Netherlands last week and I brought in North Sea
cod and I brought in North Sea whiting, but unfortunately we are
not allowed to pay for that to other countries, so what I have
to find is the swap currency. The Netherlands wanted plaice. I
did not have the plaice, so I went and leased the plaice within
the UK and then did the swap with the Netherlands to access the
cod and the whiting that we need.
Q535 Chairman: You are a broker,
are you not?
Mr Dougal: Basically.
Q536 Viscount Brookeborough: And
you cannot pay across international boundaries?
Mr Dougal: No. I believe if you really pushed
it with the Government there is a facility there to pay it, but
most of the time it is just done with swapping. There is not much
point in me paying money when they know that I can access plaice
and they need the plaice. The way that I look at it is if it is
not within my PO I will try and access it somewhere else but we
are fully utilising every quota species that we have.
Q537 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch:
In that example you gave of this organisation that closed last
night or whatever, why are all those people not part of your producer
organisation?
Mr Dougal: I do not know. You should ask them
yourself.
Q538 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch:
Do they have a choice?
Mr Dougal: Yes. There are 20 different POs.
Who is to say that I may or may not have quota problems next year?
I do not know.
Q539 Chairman: Let us move on. When
our previous committee looked at the fishing industry five years
ago they said economic returns were low, employment was going
to go low. What is your view of the economic health of the industry
at the moment?
Mr Dougal: As you say, five years ago when it
was done that was when the last stage of the decommissioning came
in which made a great big difference in my opinion. Do not forget
I have only got five years' experience of this. In my view for
the past four years it has steadily increased. This is the profitability
of the vessels, the mood of the fishermen. Obviously, there are
lots of fish in the sea, so they are seeing the benefits of long
term recovery plans or management plans. Personally, I think it
is nature. I am a great believer in nature taking its course,
but of course if you take out 160-odd great big vessels that were
catching cod and haddock and whiting and saithe out of the equation
and they are not fishing now because there has been decommissioning,
it is bound to make a difference to the stocks. You do not have
to be a scientific genius to work that out. I do not have access
to the vessels' accounts or anything like that. I have no idea
what their profits are. I just speak to them on a regular basis,
whether it is fishermen coming into my office or at my board table,
because out of the 45 members 12 are board members, so that is
about a quarter of them that we meet every month. They are quite
optimistic about the future. This year it is totally different
because of escalating fuel costs, but that is the same for everybody,
not just the fishing industry.
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