Examination of Witnesses (Questions 560-579)
Mr Mark Dougal
1 MAY 2008
Q560 Viscount Brookeborough: Something
you said I may have misunderstood. At one stage when you talked
about two boats and one having a small quota and another having
a larger quota but being restricted by days, I think you said
that it would be easier not to restrict them by days but merely
let them go on until they caught their quota, and then I think
a few minutes ago when talking about cod in particular you said
that they should be effort restricted by days. Did I misunderstand
you?
Mr Dougal: No. I said that the best way to conserve
the stocks is effort control.
Q561 Chairman: But then you did say
earlier that in order to fulfil the quota—
Mr Dougal: Yes, that is correct. That is what
I am saying. With fishermen you have got one fisherman saying
one thing with regard to the fact that he has a large quota and
he should be allowed the days to catch it, and then another fisherman
sitting next to him will say, "No. The best way to conserve
the stocks—". I am not here to make judgments. As I
said to you, if you have ten different fishermen in the room there
are 11 different responses to a question.
Q562 Viscount Brookeborough: Now
we will get on to enforcement. To what extent do disparities in
the control and enforcement of the CAP by different national authorities
across the EU continue to undermine confidence in and compliance
with CFP rules? Has the adoption of a common catalogue of sanctions
for serious infringements, and the establishment of the Community
Fisheries Control Agency helped to mitigate the problem?
Mr Dougal: I read this question and my note
that I wrote down was that I feel as though I am not really in
a position to respond to that because it is more from the fishermen's
side with regard to the penalties. We are just in the process
of introducing admin penalties for the industry. Years ago there
were a lot of misdemeanours within the industry but now there
are in my opinion no deliberate misdemeanours. If a fisherman
makes a mistake through paperwork it is a genuine mistake because,
as I have said to you, the guys that are left in the industry
want a future. They are not blatantly going out to break the law.
Years ago, yes, there was a lot of illegal activity and you have
to look at the Scottish Fisheries Protection Agency, the amount
of prosecutions they took in a year, but they still set targets.
In my opinion they are now nit-picking with tiny little things,
for instance, that a boarding ladder for boarding a vessel is
inadequate. It is a lot of things like that.
Q563 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch:
But that is deliberate though, is it not, not having a boarding
ladder? That is not an accident.
Mr Dougal: We have just had a vessel taken into
Norway about three weeks ago for an inadequate boarding ladder.
He did not do it deliberately because the boarding officer, who
was Norwegian, actually fell back into the sea. He was fined £5,000.
He did not want to get fined £5,000. It was just an accident,
but the guy is okay just in case you are curious. He is just a
wee bit wet. I am sorry; I am not really in a position to answer
that question.
Q564 Viscount Ullswater: You were
saying that in the working of your own PO you have really got
a tradable quota system working, an internal tradable quota system.
Do you think that is something that ought to be adopted by the
UK nationally?
Mr Dougal: Do you want my opinion or do you
want NESFO's opinion?
Q565 Viscount Ullswater: I would
like your opinion.
Mr Dougal: My opinion is yes, I think we should
go down an ITQ route. We had a board meeting on Friday and there
were only five of them there, and it would have been worth you
sitting there to listen to them arguing round the table about
who wants an ITQ system and who does not. Personally, with the
work that I do within the organisation at the moment I have already
said we work an internal ITQ system. With all the dealings that
we do within the UK and internationally with other Member States
we are operating an ITQ system as it is, so personally I would
not have a problem with it.
Q566 Viscount Ullswater: If it was
adopted would you see a danger of it being bought out or small
ITQ owners being bought out by larger concerns and maybe not based
in the area of the locality, like Peterhead, for instance?
Mr Dougal: That is a possibility but there are
two points here. I certainly do not think it would go down the
route that Iceland went down, just because we are such a mixed
fishery. That is one of the main things about Scotland. We catch
about six or seven of the major stocks, not just one stock. If
somebody from another country wanted to come in and buy up cod,
haddock, whiting, whatever quota it may be, there is nothing to
stop them in the past five or six years of doing it.
Q567 Lord Cameron of Dillington:
Yes, but what they are doing is buying in a year's lease of a
year's catch that then reverts back to the original owner, whereas
an ITQ is transferred for good.
Mr Dougal: Where, in Iceland?
Q568 Lord Cameron of Dillington:
No, in this country. You are saying that what you are doing is
tantamount to being an ITQ. It is not actually, is it, because
the quota does not leave the producer organisation?
Mr Dougal: No, you are right. The example I
gave was doing a swap with Holland with regard to North Sea plaice
because they need to access North Sea plaice. They came in ten
years ago and bought up the amount of plaice that they required,
and it is just swapped annually to Holland to get fish back, so
it has to work in an ITQ system. Everybody thinks that the fish
that is in the UK belongs mostly to the UK vessels. It does, but
the difference with the Netherlands is that it was a single fishery,
it was a plaice fishery, and it is a lot easier on a single fishery,
but, as I have just said, the Scottish industry operates on a
mixed fishery. It makes it a lot more complicated. There is nothing
to stop them coming in, but with regard to your point about organisations
possibly buying it up, it is happening already with regard to
major processors or major players within the UK buying up little
bits and pieces. They are keeping their business going because
what is happening is that you have larger organisations within
Scotland buying up quota but they also have the vessels and they
have got the factory, so they are buying the vessels going to
sea to catch the quota that they own to supply the factory that
they own to give to the consumer, because that fish is going to
Marks and Spencer or Sainsburys or whoever it may be. Is there
anything wrong with that? Probably not because they are just covering
the whole spectrum of the industry.
Q569 Viscount Ullswater: That sounds
like business to me.
Mr Dougal: That is all it is, yes.
Q570 Viscount Ullswater: What about
people who decommission their boats and then reclaim the quota?
Is that sensible? Is that fair? They could lease it, of course.
Mr Dougal: In an ideal world what would have
happened is that when we had the decommissioning the Government
took the quota back, but I was at the meeting with the Scottish
Fisheries Minister, who was Ross Finnie at the time, and he said,
"We cannot buy back quota that does not belong to the fishermen",
which I can fully understand, but it is happening in Belgium because
the Belgians are introducing a decommissioning scheme and the
owners have to give up the quota so it benefits the vessels that
are left, or the owners that are left, but it did not happen in
Scotland. Whether it is right or wrong, ideally they would have
taken the quota back and split it up amongst everybody who was
left, but it did not happen that way. The last decommissioning
scheme was in 2003. There is only a handful of guys left that
decommissioned and kept their quotas because most of them sold
out.
Q571 Lord Plumb: Do you want the
quotas to continue after 2013?
Mr Dougal: I do not know if I will still be
here in 2013. I do not know. I am not sure quotas work if you
set TACs, to be perfectly honest.
Q572 Lord Plumb: It is an important
question though. This is the way it is going to be.
Mr Dougal: Yes. I do not know if quotas work
at the moment. As I have just said, there are 20 vessels that
work out of Peterhead that are now going to discard fish for the
rest of the year because of the quota system, whiting, so does
it work? No.
Q573 Lord Plumb: I am more familiar
with quotas in other commodities.
Mr Dougal: I believe so.
Q574 Chairman: Can I just put one
very quick question? The opposite point of view has half been
expressed, which is that the fishing industry is associated to
some extent with small, vulnerable coastal communities that have
limited economic opportunities, and if you have transferable quotas
that can be bought out for ever then you nasty big east coast
boys are going to make offers that these people in these small
communities cannot refuse. You will take their quota and Fred
Macdonald will be all right but Jimmy McBride and whatever will
not because they will not have anything going on in their community.
Mr Dougal: Do you not think that is happening
already? Can I give you an example? As I say, I come from the
Scottish Borders, Eyemouth. My brother has a fish business in
Eyemouth and it is 220 miles away. He used to travel up to Peterhead
every week to get his fish supplies because there is no fish landed
at all between Eyemouth and Peterhead. Are there any communities
left? I do not think so. Yes, there is a very small community
in the Firth of Forth catching bream and nephrops, but, reading
the Fishing News last week, that is probably not going
to be viable now because they catch so little and there are escalating
fuel costs, so even that is in jeopardy. When I was a fisherman
for the two years with my father there were about 20 vessels catching
fish from Eyemouth. There is not one left now. The nearest port
for my brother to get fish is Peterhead from Eyemouth, 220 miles
away, and the nearest port going further south is Grimsby about
the same distance. I think it would be great to leave the community
aspect within Scotland but I think it is a fallacy because I do
not think there are any communities left. If you go from Fraserburgh
north you finish up at Scrabster. That is another 200 miles away
so there are only three ports within about 400 miles.
Q575 Viscount Brookeborough: Have
these people got other jobs? They are not all on the dole today?
Mr Dougal: No; they are probably still involved
with the industry.
Q576 Viscount Brookeborough: They
have merely diversified?
Mr Dougal: Yes.
Q577 Chairman: Management by effort
limitation or ITQs or both?
Mr Dougal: You never had that on the list of
questions.
Q578 Chairman: No. You see, you make
us think.
Mr Dougal: Personally, ITQs.
Q579 Chairman: Okay. Well done. Thank
you very much. I hope you enjoyed it.
Mr Dougal: And I hope you have a safe flight
home.
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