Examination of Witness (Questions 899-919)
Mr Andrew Charles
11 JUNE 2008
Q899 Chairman: Good morning. Where have
you come from today?
Mr Charles: Aberdeen.
Q900 Chairman: Thank you very much
for finding the time to come today.
Mr Charles: Thank you for inviting us.
Q901 Chairman: It would have been
more convenient, I think, if we had been able to see people when
we were up in the north-east of Scotland, but it was a couple
of days and, in terms of time-tabling, it just disappeared, but
we are indebted to you for coming down.
Mr Charles: Not at all. I am glad to be here.
Q902 Chairman: Would you like to
start by, if you wish, making an opening statement, and then we
can get on to questions and answers?
Mr Charles: Yes; certainly.
Q903 Chairman: The other thing I
ought to say, and I forgot to say this last time, is that this
is a formal evidence session, and so a transcript will be taken.
That will be sent to you to revise and it is also technically
being webcast. There is a million to one chance that someone is
listening! We have never had any evidence that there is, but at
least there is the possibility. There you are; go ahead.
Mr Charles: I am Andrew Charles; I represent
the Scottish Seafood Processors Federation. To give you a little
bit of background on myself, I am involved in three businesses:
one is processing farmed salmon, one is processing white fish,
another one is processing crustaceans. So that gives you an idea
that I have a fairly broad view of how the processing industry
works.
Q904 Chairman: You do not process
any black fish then.
Mr Charles: I do not believe there has ever
been any black fish, Sir, but we will come on to that point later.
Anyway, that is my processing background. I started out processing
fish, joining a business that my grandfather started some 70-odd
years ago. I came into that industry and it was a thriving industry
that delivered top quality fish, reliably, consistently. We had
fantastic customer bases, we had customers lining up at our door
to buy this product, and we did an extremely good job for many,
many years. I would say the last 10 years have probably been the
most difficult of my life in the business. Every aspect of our
business has been undermined by the Common Fisheries Policy. It
has been a total disaster to fish processing in Scotland, and
I believe it has actually been a disaster to many processors in
Britain. There are some that thrive on our fishing industry in
Britain being reduced in size, the importers of fish prosper,
but I truly believe, in the needless destruction of our valued
fishing fleet, we have lost an incredible amount of talent that
we will never get back, we have lost an incredible amount of really
good processors, quality processors, skilful processors—we
have lost them, and we will never get them back—and I think
we are at the point now where we are at end of a cliff. We cannot
go any further, because once you actually get to that point the
whole thing collapses in a heap. You look at transport links and
the whole efficiencies of the business. At the present moment
probably our industry thrives on the back of farmed salmon. If
it was not for the volumes that were going up and down the country
of farmed product I think we would have lost an awful lot more
processors that we have done. When I started in business there
were roughly 200 processors in our area. There are now about 50.
It is a dreadful situation that need not have happened. I truly
believe the Common Fisheries Policy is responsible for that demise,
and I would like you to fire questions at me and I will give you
my opinion as to why I think that is the case. Thank you.
Q905 Chairman: I am sure that will
come out during the course of the next little while. Can we clarify
the nature of the organisations, the range of companies, that
your federation represents and speaks for?
Mr Charles: Yes. We represent many companies
from the small one-man, two-man band operation up to companies
that employ maybe 100, 150 people. So it is a wide variety of
companies. The white fish companies, the shellfish companies and
a little bit of farmed product. It is important to stress "farmed"
product. To say that if you starve a fish processor, a skilful
white fish processor, of white fish, he can just move and become
a farmed processor, he cannot, or he can, but it is really difficult.
It is a bit like saying somebody who produces timber could overnight
become a metal merchant. It is two completely different industries
and is not a solution to the way forward for the processing industry
in Scotland.
Q906 Chairman: It was pointed out
to us when we were in Peterhead a few weeks ago that, as a rule
of thumb, what we catch we export and what we eat we import. Is
that a rough rule of thumb in terms of fishing?
Mr Charles: No.
Q907 Chairman: It is not.
Mr Charles: No, I do not believe so. I think
that problem has been magnified by the point of fact for the last
five years, I believe, we have had a fishing minister, prior to
Jonathan Shaw, who discredited our Scottish fishing industry.
By blackening its name by bad management of it and keeping harping
on about black fish, illegal landings, he did it no favours whatsoever.
As a result of this customers do turn their back on that product,
and I think the Scottish fishery industry has got a huge task
ahead of it to get that credibility back into our product and
get it back on to the shelves of our supermarkets; and, believe
me, our supermarkets wanted it. It is a fantastic product, and
we still provide a lot of product on to the shelves of the supermarkets
but less than 10 years ago. A lot of the supermarkets said, "We
are no longer running with this product because there is far too
much bad publicity about it."
Q908 Chairman: Is your industry affected
by what seemed to us to be the movement of processing to places
like China?
Mr Charles: I do not believe so. I think it
was a horrible thing to see shellfish processing going outside
the country and jobs being lost, that is not a nice thing to see,
but as far the white fish processing business is concerned, Scottish
caught fish still gets processed in the UK. Very, very little
white fish, if any, is exported to places like China. I think
that was very much a snowball that the media picked up on.
Q909 Chairman: Surely you are encouraged
by that, because what we heard was that, okay, there will be some
very preliminary processing done on the boat and in Scotland,
and then the product would be exported to China, was the example
we are given, to be blocked and then re-imported.
Mr Charles: I think a lot of the product that
would go into China would probably come from Russian block-frozen
factory ships and containers would go over to China for reprocessing,
but I know of no company in our scope of companies that freezes
Scottish white fish and sends it over to China for reprocessing.
I do not know of any.
Q910 Lord Palmer: Can you remember
who it was who gave us that evidence, because it was very, very
strong?
Mr Charles: As I said, you could find that there
is fish but it is not Scottish fish. You could get a container
in from Russia, you could get a container of haddock in from Norway,
so it may come in and then be shipped out to be reprocessed and
then shipped back, but certainly, to my knowledge, practically
all Scottish landed fish is processed within the UK, or Europe,
whole fish certainly. A lot of whole fish now is processed in
Boulogne, in France, and a lot of whole Scottish fish is processed
in Spain. Some of that is caught by the Scottish fleet but, unfortunately,
the majority of it now is caught by Spanish and French vessels
fishing in Scottish waters. When I first started in the business
I used to buy my fish in Aberdeen. Come lunchtime I would jump
into my car and I would drive up to Lochinver or Kinlochbervie
or Mallaig, I would buy fish until nine ten o'clock at night and
be back in the fish market for half past six the following morning
buying fish again. Those markets have been devastated—Lochinver:
never a market there; Mallaig: part-time market; Kinlochbervie:
part-time market; Scrabster: part-time market; Wick: part-time
market; Aberdeen, one of the finest white fish ports in Scotland,
faces, I believe, closure. That was 37 miles away from Peterhead.
Yes, things are going well in Peterhead, but 37 miles away there
is a port with a fish market, one of the finest fish markets that
we were ever to have, on the verge of possible closure, and that
is an absolute disgrace.
Q911 Lord Palmer: How many companies
does the Federation represent?
Mr Charles: The Federation has 50 members.
Q912 Lord Cameron of Dillington:
To some extent you have already dipped into this area, but I wanted
to clarify or expand a bit on the connection between the fishing
industry and the processing industry. The reduction from 200 processors
to 50 processors which you spoke of a moment ago is clearly as
a result of some of the decommissioning that has been going on
in the early part of this century, shall we say. When the quota
gets revised on an annual basis does that also affect the processing
industry? How do the links work? Then, as a subsequent question
to that, you mentioned aquaculture. What percentage of the processing
industry deals with the products of aquaculture at the moment?
Mr Charles: Out of the 50 companies we represent,
the amount of farmed product that would go through there would
be very small. As I have tried to explain earlier, it is a separate
business. Your farmed salmon companies, your marine harvest, the
big players, produce their own product, and it is very much a
highly automated, different skills, different business.
Q913 Lord Cameron of Dillington:
Okay, ignore that question and go back to the links?
Mr Charles: The links between the quotas being
set and the processing industry is incredibly important. If we
do not have the right quota to go through and keep the processing
companies going, they go bust. It is as simple as that. This has
been a complete failure, in my opinion, of the way that the Common
Fisheries Policy has worked. If I go back, if I am allowed to,
to the eighties when the Common Fisheries Policy was working,
what seemed to happen was we had this Common Fisheries Policy,
the ministers had their yearly bun fight and the industry got
on with it. If there was a lot of cod or a lot of haddock, it
was taken in and the industry got on and the next year there would
be another bun fight, and there was never any serious penalisation
of over-quota fish, it was just considered part of the negotiation.
What happened over the last eight years and during your time was
that those parameters were suddenly, over night, fixed in stone.
If you were granted 400 tonnes of cod, you took 400 tonnes, and
if you go a kilo over 400 tonnes you are facing legal action.
That is okay if you are working in a common fisheries policy that
is working with good science. I truly believe the science in our
industry is under-funded, unreliable and very often so far out
it is not funny. I think a very good example of that was last
year when we were told that there was no cod in the sea any more
and the Shetland fishermen were walking over cod. The scientists
said, "Yes, you are walking over cod, but they are very small
cod." They were not, they were a mixed bag of cod, some large
cod, some medium cod and some small cod. In discussions with one
fishery scientist, I was told the possibility for this is that
they have completely missed out a year-class in their calculation.
It is not the scientists' fault. We have got good scientists.
I believe there are 300 marine scientists looking after our industry,
but if the parameters of where those scientists can go is so tied
in by European legislation and they are not allowed to explore
the whole nature of the industry, we are always going to get poor
science. Can I give you an example of that? I am not a scientist,
but this is what we are hearing; when we are speaking to Defra
and speaking to people this is what we are told. One of the ways
science is brought forward to count fish is that the boat goes
out, it goes out with the scientists and it tows in a straight
line for 50 miles. They count the fish and this acts as a percentage
for biomass. Those boats were going into areas where the fishermen
knew there were no fish. These boats were going into areas; the
fish had moved on. The experiment that they were trying to perform
had changed. There was absolutely no consideration given to global
warming. Our seas had warmed and possibly the cod had moved further
away; they were in colder waters. Is that why the scientists suddenly
believed there was no cod in the sea? There were many different
areas. The scientists were not allowed to go and change the way
that they did this experiment, and we ended up getting information
that would lead to our industry being destroyed and, also, beautiful
mature cod being thrown back to into the sea dead. As long as
we have a management in place that allows that to happen, we are
in deep trouble. We have got to change it.
Q914 Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe:
Let me go back to illegal landings, which we had some figures
from a statement from a former fisheries minister earlier on.
We have heard that the problem of black landings has largely been
eradicated in Scotland. In stating that, we are making an assumption
that it did, in fact, exist previously. Do you agree with that
analysis, and, if so, what has been the impact that has had on
your members' operations and what do you think really has happened
in the past?
Mr Charles: I think in the past, as I spoke
about earlier on, the way that the fishery was managed and the
way that the Government allowed the fishery to be managed, there
was this political bun fight, parameters were set and the industry
got on with it. There was then this change to say, "No, you
are not taking it out. Okay." You are told haddock are on
the verge of extinction. Our fishermen are walking over haddock.
What do we do? We take out only the big ones because that will
maximise our catch so that our weekly trip will pay; so we will
discard hundreds of boxes of small haddock over the side in order
to achieve getting a larger, more expensive fish to meet the expenses
of the trip. There is also the situation where you have the choice:
do you take the fish out or do you destroy it? For years they
took the fish out and got on with it. As I said, they then changed.
When there was what I call mismanaged fish being landed, it had
a devastating effect on the processing industry. Like anything,
if you suddenly put volumes of fish onto a market that is not
on the radar, it devalues it. So suddenly processors who were
legitimately buying their product were maybe competing against
a processor who had got a lorry load of the product and they are
told, "Please can you do your best price on it." So
the processor who was legitimately trading was being very badly
undermined, his business was being undermined, and it was an awful
time, a terrible time the industry went through during those times.
Some processors took advantage of it and others did not, but our
federation did not support illegal fish landings. The fact that
they are now completely eradicated and we have a new way of thinking
has been welcomed by our federation, and I think we do have a
completely different attitude in that industry to five, six years
ago. Conservation is playing a huge role in our industry now.
We are having fishermen working with conservation groups, processors
working with conservation groups, rebuilding the image of our
industry so our customers will regain trust in our industry. It
has been a rollercoaster, but the fact it has gone has been welcomed
by our members.
Q915 Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe:
Is that partly due to the introduction of the registration of
buyers and sellers?
Mr Charles: A small part, I would suggest. I
think most of the credit for eradicating mismanaged fish must
lie with the fishermen themselves. They got their act together.
I think they knew the writing was on the wall if they continued
down the same vein that they were continuing down—it was
not in anybody's interests—and also the fact that a lot
of boats were decommissioned, so it was far easier to manage.
Q916 Viscount Brookeborough: It was
the effort that equates to that?
Mr Charles: Yes.
Q917 Earl of Arran: A brief moment
before we get on to discards. Am I not right in thinking that
on the scientists' advice they did actually get it right recently,
the scientists, when they predicted the quantities of haddock
around the coast in the last year or so? I think their prediction
was that there would be more than the fishermen believed. I think
I am right in saying that, and it did turn out to be correct.
Mr Charles: I do not know is the honest answer
to that one. What I can tell you is that the fishermen I speak
to are saying there is a very, very good stock of fish out there
of all species and it is not surprising considering there really
is not much fishing effort going on out there compared to years
past. If they have got it right I think they have been lucky because,
quite honestly, I do believe we need to spend much more on science
and we need to open our minds to how that science is put into
practice working with the fishermen at the coal face. With the
voluntary closures that the Scottish fishermen adopted, to their
great credit, the scientific work that could be done off the back
of that, by having scientists out there seeing what is happening
and then managing it allows the scientists to say, "Gosh,
there's a lot of small cod" or "There's a lot of large
cod. How could we manage that today?".
Q918 Earl of Arran: Of course, giving
more scientists more money does not necessarily make them any
better at their job.
Mr Charles: Correct. That is why you need to
give thought to how they go about that job. I am sure you could
pour a lot of money into science and they would manage to burn
it up, but if you give clear parameters as to how we can manage
this fishery better we could get a very practical scientific function
going on there to tie in with our management.
Q919 Earl of Arran: Does your industry
have any influence at the moment upon the reduction of discards?
Do you think it should have the responsibility anyway? What happens
at the moment?
Mr Charles: We have no responsibility over discards.
What I would say is define discards. Do you define a large, mature
cod as a discard, because I do not? I would describe that as a
complete and utter waste of money and asset that our nation has.
If we are talking about the discarding of small fish, I think
the fishermen have a huge responsibility to discard nothing. Seafish
must be credited for doing a huge amount of work into technical
measures, mesh sizes and improvements in gear. There are all kinds
of things going on there that have contributed to a massive reduction
in discards by the Scottish fleet. Can it be improved? I am sure
it can. The processing sector unfortunately has no input in that
area.
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