Examination of Witness (Questions 920-939)
Mr Andrew Charles
11 JUNE 2008
Q920 Earl of Arran: Do you not talk
to them? Do you not try and influence it? Do you not try to bring
out moral indignation or bear some influence towards them?
Mr Charles: Yes. The fishermen and the processing
sector talk a lot. They know our feelings about discards, ie we
do not approve of them. Discards were not the fishermen's fault;
they were the fault of a failed Common Fisheries Policy. They
caused the discards. If you are going to force a boat with a very
limited quota to go into a huge stock of haddock, he is going
to pick the most valuable haddock to land and the rest of it is
going to go back into the seabed. That is what Europe watched
the Scottish fishing industry doing year in, year out and they
did nothing about it.
Q921 Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe:
Mr Charles, do you have a view as to how the fish processors could
help if there was a ban on discards, such as in Norway, where
you would pay a minimum price for the small fish that might have
been discarded? Would you be able to manage that do you think?
Mr Charles: That already happens. Small fish
generally make small money, although what you must understand
is that the Scottish industry is based around a fairly small haddock,
the block haddock. That is a huge industry in Scotland. Underneath
that size of haddock, if the boat is caught landing it, it would
be fined and it would never enter into our food chain.
Q922 Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe:
But you can manage it now.
Mr Charles: We would not receive it. It would
not be allowed to be landed.
Q923 Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe:
Let us say there was a ban on discards and the boats had to bring
back those fish, would you be able to market such fish in a comparable
way to what they do in Norway where they only give the fisherman
a small amount of money?
Mr Charles: Yes, we could absolutely use every
bone of fish the fishermen landed. There is absolutely no reason
to discard any fish. What I would say is let us not go there.
Let us have the right technical measures so the fish are released
back into the sea alive. There has been huge progress made in
those areas over the last few years.
Q924 Lord Plumb: You spoke earlier
of the decline in numbers both of processors and of fishermen.
I could say, "What's new?". Whereas there were almost
150 farmers not so long ago, there are now less than 50. You could
say the same with car manufactures and every other business. We
would be interested to hear how you see the various organisations
working together, the processors and the people who are catching
the fish and the retailers, of whom there are only now a few.
Is there a degree of vertical integration which is taking place
with the fishermen related to the processors, cutting out the
middleman to some extent or at least cutting costs?
Mr Charles: I think the industry is as efficient
as it gets. You have got to process your fish somewhere. You have
got to catch your fish. They are two different industries. Although
we do have companies now, if you look at the pelagic sector, which
actually owns its boats and they own their factories and they
produce the whole thing under one umbrella, I would suggest that
they are separate businesses in the unit of that picture. The
pelagic model cannot be put aside the whitefish model because
they are two completely different fisheries. The whitefish industry
is so diverse. What we need is a lot of small boats, medium size
boats and large boats. We need them spread geographically over
many areas in Scotland for two reasons. The first is the weather.
If the weather is bad in one area the boats will fish in another.
That is something we have paid a huge price for with the contraction
of the fleet. We are integrating with fishermen and we integrate
with our customers. That is nothing new and it will always happen.
The retailer, the processor and the catcher have always worked
reasonably closely together. You might not think it.
Q925 Lord Plumb: Come on, pull the
other one!
Mr Charles: Over the years the fishermen and
the processor have had many bun fights, but if you actually go
under the current of what the leaders of that industry are saying
and you actually go under the current where the trade is going
on, that is where the real talk happens between the skipper and
the processor, the people who are trading are talking about what
they are catching, and there is a lot of talk goes on between
the retailer and the processor and they do work closely together.
They work together more so now on the conservation side and the
presentation side, which we were forced to do because of the way
that our fishing industry has been handled over the last five
or six years.
Q926 Lord Plumb: I think we witnessed
that at Peterhead to some extent. To what extent are contracts
used between the fishermen and the processor or direct to the
retailer?
Mr Charles: It is quite common. Like in any
business, fishermen will land fish directly into a processing
unit for a specific retailer. It is a way of trading and there
is nothing wrong with it. I do not think you will ever stop a
true fisherman from presenting his fish on a fish market to see
exactly how much money he gets. Peterhead is a thriving fish market.
They get extremely good money for the fish in Peterhead. When
Aberdeen lands fish it still gets very, very good money for its
fish because we have a nucleus of buyers down there. The fishermen
are hunters and they like a gamble. I do not think you will ever
take away that spirit from our industry. I hope that spirit never
leaves the industry. There is nothing finer than when a fisherman
has been out in a gale force ten and he lands fish when there
is very little fish on it and he gets a fantastic price for it.
He deserves it. They really are some of the bravest people in
industry in this country.
Q927 Viscount Ullswater: When we
want to Peterhead we did not see any shellfish. Is that something
which is more under contract?
Mr Charles: Yes, very much so. The nephrop industry
is practically all under contract. Had you gone to Fraserborough
you would have seen a lot of shellfish on the market there. One
processor, the SFO, which is a cooperative of boats, a tremendous
amount of that shellfish now goes into there and three or four
other companies. You do not see so much of it on the market.
Q928 Lord Wallace of Tankerness:
Mr Charles, one of the more recent innovations in the fishing
industry is the advent of the Regional Advisory Committees. Could
you give us some indication of your Federation's engagement with
the RACs for the North Sea and what your experience has been as
to its effectiveness or otherwise?
Mr Charles: We have not had huge engagement
with it. We have been to meetings. We fully support regional management.
We believe that regional management is a way forward for the industry.
If we could get rid of the Common Fisheries Policy completely
and give every European country control of their fishing area,
I believe we would have an extremely prosperous fishing industry
and we could revitalise the fishing communities around not just
Scotland but Britain because we could tackle the issues there
and then and we would not be doing destruction to our fishery.
We would be able to manage that extremely well. I think it is
a fantastic way forward. I cannot emphasise enough the fact that
politicians need to support regional management. It is a great
idea. It is the only way forward in our opinion for the industry.
Q929 Lord Wallace of Tankerness:
Is the processing industry represented on the RAC at the moment?
Mr Charles: Yes, I believe so.
Q930 Lord Wallace of Tankerness:
But it is not your Federation specifically?
Mr Charles: No. It is just not my department!
Q931 Lord Wallace of Tankerness:
Would you know what opportunities you have to shape agendas?
Mr Charles: If we had an opinion on the fishery,
we would have a very good opportunity to have input there on that
Committee, there is no question of doubt about it. I do not see
that as a problem and far less so than trying to deal within our
Common Fisheries Policy.
Q932 Lord Wallace of Tankerness:
One of the issues you raised earlier was your frustration with
the way the science was limited. Do you see the RACs as having
an opportunity, because it brings people together from the science
and the catching sectors, for more fine tuning of where the science
takes place?
Mr Charles: Regional management in our fishery
is like a breath of fresh air blowing through it. There is so
much we can do. The real-time closures is a fantastic example
of how you can spring that idea forward, implement it, act on
it and then, instead of fishermen being penalised, they get a
reward for conservation efforts. It is a fantastic opportunity.
I cannot say enough about it.
Q933 Lord Wallace of Tankerness:
At the moment what we have got are advisory councils. You have
used the word management many times. Would it be fair to say you
would like to see advisory councils evolve into management?
Mr Charles: I think we have got to take the
hot air out of managing the industry. There are so many committees
and so many people talking about the industry, but what we need
is action. Clearly we know what we need to do to revitalise the
Scottish fishing industry. Lord Plumb suggested the only way is
down, our farmers are getting less and our fishermen are getting
less and less. I have never heard a European committee of any
description suggest that our fishing industry should increase
in size and we should prosper and that is the thinking that we
need to get through. We need to ask how we can revitalise our
fishing communities. I will give you one example. Probably one
of the most conservation-friendly methods of fishing is hook and
line by little boats throughout the fishing areas in Scotland,
in Fraserborough and Peterhead in particular where wonderful little
boats are fished by local people. They are tied to the harbour
wall most of the time because they do not have any quota to go
out and fish for those mackerel. That product is a hugely valuable
product. Those boats could fish from now until the end of time
and they would not damage the stocks. All it needs is a very simple
agreement by Europe which said, "Take away the red tape.
Go out and fish and catch your line cod and mackerel and let's
have a thriving harbour of small boats and of young skippers."
That is where your blood comes from. That is the next generation.
We face a massive problem in the fishing industry and that is
that we have an ageing filleting workforce and we have an ageing
skipper. We are seeing very little young blood coming into the
industry, which is not surprising with the bad publicity. If you
were to invest in a whitefish processing plant, dare I say it,
somebody may take you along to the doctor because, after what
we have had to go through over the last five or six years, you
just would not invest in it. What we have got to do is change
that. We have got to create an environment where we attract entrepreneurs
into the industry. We can expand this industry. There were 30,000
people employed in the industry in 1980 and there are 10,000 employed
now. If you manage your fishery and get it back to the kinds of
stocks there were back in the 1980s potentially Scotland may have
not 20,000 new jobs but possibly 10,000 and that is at a time
when oil might be running out. That might be something Scotland
might need and, dare I say, Britain as well and the fishing communities
down there. It is not something that we need to be thinking negatively
about all the time, we have got to be positive about it.
Q934 Chairman: We still get lots
of young boys leaving Peterhead Academy at the earliest opportunity
to go to sea.
Mr Charles: You get one or two. I am not saying
there is nobody going out there. If you look at the average age
of our processing and filleting capacity, it is very old. There
is very little young blood coming in. There needs to be big training
work done there. The knowledge and experience of many skippers
whose boats were chopped up by the Common Fisheries Policy have
left the industry. What you used to find is that most skippers
would hand their boat down to their son, but the families of the
ones that were chopped up and destroyed have left the industry
and that experience we lose forever. That was hugely valuable
fishing experience of where the fish were, of fishing in the blood,
which was lost and we will pay a massive price for that in the
future. I hope I never see that happen again.
Q935 Chairman: Can I just tease out
your view on the Common Fisheries Policy because when you were
answering Lord Wallace you were saying that regional management
was a breath of fresh air and that real-time closures are absolutely
excellent. That is all within the framework of the Common Fisheries
Policy.
Mr Charles: Yes, it is and I suppose it has
been fought for very hard, but it does not take away what the
Common Fisheries Policy has done to our industry, it has destroyed
it. It is a huge tanker that was too slow, it cannot react. The
processors believe the best way forward to manage our fishery
is outwith the Common Fisheries Policy. If you are going in to
negotiate about what and where the Common Fisheries goes then
give your minister a gun full of bullets. Do not let him go into
the negotiation with no bullets in his gun.
Q936 Chairman: The fundamental difficulty
with the position you have outlined is that the Common Fisheries
Policy is an integral part of the legal structure of the European
Union. The Common Fisheries Policy is grounded in the Treaty.
It is not legally possible to come out of the Common Fisheries
Policy while remaining a member of the European Union.
Mr Charles: That is what we are told.
Q937 Chairman: It is true.
Mr Charles: I will have to take you up on this
point. I was very interested to hear Commissioner Borg say that
if Scotland went independent it would have to reapply for membership
of the European Union and if it suggested coming out of the Common
Fisheries Policy it would have to be thrown out of the European
Union. I think that is total nonsense. I think it is up to ministers
to negotiate a position that is fair and good for the Scottish
fishery. All laws can be changed, all management structures can
be changed and if there is a strong will from Westminster and
from Scotland to change something then I believe we can do it.
I think Scotland deserves a chance to manage its own fishery after
the destruction that the Common Fisheries Policy has put on Scotland.
I can think of no other nation in Europe that has been penalised
with so much taken away from it over something as unnecessary
as destroying communities and destroying businesses. I think we
must have a strong case for saying, "We've had 30 years of
you making a mess of it. Give it to us to manage. We can do it
better." It is not anti-European saying that because if we
have a stronger fishing stock more European boats will be able
to come in and enjoy the fruits of our fishery.
Q938 Chairman: Let me put to you
the alternative, which is not to go down the route of saying,
"Let's come out of the Common Fisheries Policy because we
do not like the Common Fisheries Policy" because really that
position is not legally compatible with continued membership of
the European Union. The only way to get a change like that would
be to get a treaty change and to remove the Common Fisheries Policy
from the treaty and the chances of that happening are minuscule.
The other way is to say, "Yes, let's change the Common Fisheries
Policy. Let us move away from it being a top-down regulation driven
policy. Let us have some much more bottom-up, much more regional
involvement, much more regional management. Let the role of the
EU be at a very broad, very high level, setting overall objectives
and targets and the delivery of the successful fishery being managed
at a much more regional level." The signs that that is possible
are through the way in which, as you said, the RACs are going
with the real-time closures and things like that. Can we not build
on that, which is much more likely to deliver success in a shorter
term rather than chase this chimera of coming out of the Common
Fisheries Policy?
Mr Charles: My Lord Chairman, in a perfect world
you may be right. Europe has made so many promises to our industry
and broken them. They have gone a long way to destroying the Scottish
fishing industry. I do not think they deserve to manage our industry.
The best way forward is to remove it from their management. I
think that is something Britain should feel is worth fighting
for. Why do they want to manage an industry that they are making
a mess of? Allow somebody else to manage that industry for the
good not only of Britain but of Europe.
Q939 Chairman: That is a clarion
call on which to end! Thank you very much. Is there anything else
that you feel you want to say that you have not had the opportunity
of saying?
Mr Charles: No. I think we have managed to cover
all the areas. Thank you for allowing me to come down and give
our views.
Chairman: Thank you very much for coming.
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