Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Scrutiny of the Fisheries Bill, HC 1722
Wednesday 12 December 2018
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 12 December 2018.
Members present: Neil Parish (Chair); Alan Brown; Kerry McCarthy; David Simpson; Angela Smith; Julian Sturdy.
Questions 192 - 250
Witnesses
I: Dr Thomas Appleby, representative, Blue Marine Foundation; Martin Salter, Head of Campaigns, The Angling Trust.
II: Helen McLachlan, representative, Greener UK; Dr Abigail McQuatters-Gollop, Lecturer in Marine Conservation, University of Plymouth.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Dr Thomas Appleby and Martin Salter.
Q192 Chair: Welcome, both of you, very much. As you probably know, we are scrutinising the Bill as it is going through Committee, so we are getting on with it. Starting with Martin, would you like to introduce yourselves and we will go forward?
Martin Salter: Thank you very much, Chairman. My name is Martin Salter, formerly of this parish until I retired in 2010. I worked for 18 months in Australia as an adviser to the recreational fishing industry, while living in Sydney and forgetting about this place. I then returned to become head of campaigns for the Angling Trust. The Angling Trust is the national representative body of all forms of recreational fishing. That includes sea fishing, an industry worth some £2 billion to the UK economy, generating over 20,000 jobs and supporting thousands of coastal industries.
Chair: You are very welcome. I wanted to bring in somebody from the angling side, so it is great to have you here this morning. Dr Thomas.
Dr Appleby: I am Tom Appleby, an associate professor at the University of the West of England. My PhD was on the need for a new fisheries Bill. I am also head of legal affairs for the Blue Marine Foundation.
Q193 Chair: I will get on with the first question. Does the Bill provide the basis for the UK to become a viable independent coastal state? We will not talk about the Brexit deal one way or the other, at this stage.
Martin Salter: The White Paper certainly provides the basis for reforming, as I said at the Bill Committee, the discredited common fisheries policy and heralding in a new chapter of world-leading fishery management. That was the aspiration in the White Paper but, unfortunately, the Bill itself is a rather timid little document. In fact, it is even weaker than the common fisheries policy in terms of binding commitments on Ministers to fish at sustainable levels. It is quite incredible that, despite six references to recreational fishing in the White Paper, there is virtually no reference to recreational fishing on the face of the Bill, apart from a concession that some of the EMFF grants might find their way into the recreational fishing sector. That is something we are hoping that Parliament will put right.
There is also in the Bill, as there is in the White Paper, reference to learning from world-leading fishery management practices. Look across to New Zealand, as you will know, Chairman, and their fishery management and conservation Act, which enshrines in legislation resource sharing between the recreational sector, the commercial sector and customary fishing, in other words Maori fishing. That is a world-leading concept that is adopted in probably the primary piece of fishery management legislation, which we were hoping the Government would take more cognisance of, which is the Magnuson-Stevens Act of 1976. The Magnuson-Stevens Act divides the North American fishery into eight regional fishery councils and, on the face of that legislation, makes it a statutory requirement for those fishery councils to assess the viability of each individual fish stock, species by species. Where they fall below scientifically safe conservation levels, there is a statutory duty to publish a rebuilding programme as part of that stock assessment. We are a long way from that in what is being suggested in this Bill, Chairman.
Q194 Chair: We will drill down on it in a minute. The interesting thing with fishing is that you have the professional fishermen and you have sea anglers. How do we make sure we have a balance, so that you get a fair crack at the fish but do not threaten the professional fishermen? That is the crux of the matter. You, being a former politician, are more than able to answer that one.
Martin Salter: First, on professional fishermen, the UK fishing industry collects considerably more in VAT on fishing tackle than the value of the first-sale landings of finfish into English ports. We have a professional industry. We have professional fishing guides. We have professional charter boat skippers and I am sure you do not wish to impugn their professionalism. That is the first thing.
The second thing is the value to the economy itself and changing the terms of how we manage UK fisheries as an independent coastal state to ask, “What delivers best value for the economy? What delivers best value for local communities? What delivers best practice in sustainability and conservation?” For far too long we have looked at fishery management from the producer end, hence the professional versus hobby fishermen issue. It is not like that in more grown-up fishery management regimes.
Q195 Chair: Are we in a situation now where we should potentially get access to extra fish? I am keen to have you here because we do not necessarily need to take fish away from the large fishing fleets, but we can make sure that sea angling has enough. Do you see any of that in the Bill?
Martin Salter: Let me make a point on that, but my colleague, Tom, has more expertise on that. I refer you to the evidence to the Bill Committee of Andrew Clayton from Pew, who was quite clear about the need to ensure that this opportunity is not frittered away by having a less rigorous regime in terms of fishing at maximum sustainable yields or taking account of best available science. It is disgraceful that, despite the reforms in the CFP in 2013, which were piloted through by my neighbour, Richard Benyon, last year, in 2018, the EU set 44% of targets above scientific advice. Only a few months ago we agreed to overfish mackerel stocks by something like 100%, so we are still a long way from delivering on even the limited aspirations of the reformed CFP.
In terms of taking best advantage of the opportunities presented by becoming an independent coastal state, a lot of that is not just about trying to net more fish out the sea. A lot of it is saying, “Hang on, does it make sense to remove an entire spawning biomass?” Does that aid sustainability? Should we not be looking at spatial and temporal closures? Should we not be protecting reef systems and estuaries, and deliver an engine room for sustainable stock regeneration?
Dr Appleby: To go back to the first question, the Bill is implicitly about Brexit. The Defra drafting team has had to try to take the CFP and shoehorn it into the UK, with the complexity of devolution. That is a game of three-dimensional chess, particularly as we do not know where we are with the Sewel Convention. It makes it difficult to repatriate powers when you are not sure where you are going to be repatriating to. Does it do that? Essentially, if we crash out of the EU in March, will we have a workable system? That is what we are looking at here and that is the urgent need behind the Bill. Yes, we probably have. There are all sorts of technical amendments coming in, which need to be scrutinised carefully, but you largely have a system in place.
By saying that, you are going from one system to another. Does this produce a world-leading fisheries management regime? No, but is it on the way to producing a world-leading fisheries management regime? It possibly is. One thing you have in here, which you do not have in the CFP, are the fisheries statements, which enables at least some degree of planning.
Martin Salter: We support those.
Dr Appleby: They could be tightened up and we could look at how the consultation mechanisms work, but that is something that is not currently available, in this sort of form, under the CFP. That is an improvement. You have bits and pieces, but it is not a robust system where you have an independent scientific adviser who comes in with robust science that everybody complies with, where you have a known decision-making system, which has appropriate duties to overfish, which you have in the Australian legislation.
Q196 Chair: I hope that this is the same as the Agriculture Bill in many ways and is an enabling Bill to get us out of the CFP and into another regime. I accept that a lot of it is the same. What we need to do and what I expect to do from this Select Committee is to be able scrutinise what the Government do thereafter. In some ways, that is almost the most important thing. The way we change fishing schemes, methods and dish out future fish is going to be interesting. As far as you are concerned, what would you give it—six and a half out of 10?
Dr Appleby: It is in that region. This is not easy drafting by any stretch of the imagination. It has been a compressed time. As you can see at the moment, the Committee is having to dual‑track something where, in an ideal world, we would have had all these conversations before the Bill.
Chair: We would have had pre-scrutiny and all those things. We seem to get it for the Environment Bill, but he has difficulties with that.
Q197 Angela Smith: Good morning, Martin. It is good to see you again. Based on what you have both said, is it a mistake to insert scientific evidence criteria in the Bill as an objective rather than a duty?
Dr Appleby: It needs to be in there. It is question of how.
Angela Smith: That is what I am saying.
Dr Appleby: There is a difficult question of how you do that, so you do not hamstring yourself in international negotiations.
Q198 Angela Smith: How would you do that? At the moment it is an objective in Clause 1, but it is not a duty on the Secretary of State to make sure that scientific evidence is used to make decisions in relation to maintaining maximum sustainable yield.
Dr Appleby: Under international law we are not allowed to fish beyond maximum sustainable yield anyway, so we should adhere to scientific advice. Arguably, we already have a situation in which we should adhere to that advice. You could say that the Government are already under a duty to fish to MSY. How do you incorporate that into the Bill in its current form? Amendments have been put into Clause 18, for instance. Also, the difficulty you have is that you do not necessarily have an agreed scientific methodology for looking at different countries. If you put in something that is too methodologically pure, you could find the UK using one scientific methodology and, say, the Norwegians, the French and everyone else in the EU using a different one.
Angela Smith: That would not be a matter for the Bill. The Bill is an enabling Bill. All I am asking is whether there should be a duty rather than just an objective.
Dr Appleby: Yes, I think there should be.
Martin Salter: It is funny how we are being told by Government that it is all too hard. The Australians manage it, New Zealand has managed it and America has managed it since 1976, so it is not too hard. Secondly, you are absolutely right that it would be a mistake to try to prescribe formula on the face of the Bill. That is not the purpose of legislation. The purpose is to enable it to happen. For example, independent panels could be set up.
Perhaps the most unedifying aspect of current fisheries management is the annual horse trading that takes place at the EU fishery council every December, which resulted in 44% of stocks being fished beyond sustainable limits, which always sees huge pushback from the commercial catching sector against almost any attempts to limit catch or conservation policies. Some kind of independence, rigour and something that could pick up Tom’s point about changing with the best available science would make a lot of sense. The Bill should enable it to do that.
I get sick and tired of the pushback from the commercial catching sector against scientifically proven conservation measures that can rebuild fish stocks. The best example was bass. We pushed very hard, as the recreational sector, alongside some environmental NGOs, when bass stocks were falling, according to the ICES assessment, off a cliff. There had to be limits on the recreational catch and on appalling commercial fishing techniques, like pair trawling, beam trawling and the rest. They came, in partly because of the persistence of ourselves and the Minister, through the European process, through the European Commission and in the face of opposition from the commercial catching sector.
I find it worrying that the commercial catching sector, which does not have a great record in conservation management, seems to be the tail wagging the dog in terms of whether there should be binding duties or a meaningful commitment to fishing at sustainable levels, informed by the best available science, delivered independently of the political process. You have to get politics out of it.
Chair: Martin, you are giving good evidence, but we have to be a bit quicker. We are not going to get through everything.
Martin Salter: I am sorry. There are only two of us, Chairman.
Q199 Chair: As much as I enjoy all that you are saying and doing, we have to be a bit quicker, if we can, please. There is one last part to this question before I move on, which is mainly to Dr Thomas. The Bill proposes to control access to UK waters with conditional licences for non-UK fishing boats and to preserve equal access for UK vessels in all UK waters. Is this the right approach?
Dr Appleby: That is a good question. There are two parts to that question. This is a commercial industry question about whether we currently have equal access. We have four different fisheries regimes operating in the UK commercially and the IFCAs have slightly different regimes as well. You can have a regulatory hedge that stops access. I know from colleagues—Andrew Oliver, who is a solicitor from Hull, gave some brilliant evidence on just how difficult it is currently to operate with devolution and moving things around. We do not necessarily have that internally.
When you have foreign vessels coming in, potentially licensed from abroad, you then end up with the situation of another suite of rules where we will be different, because presumably the conditions on their licences may be different from the conditions on our own licences. How you draft that so that the licences we grant do not put our own commercial fishermen in any worse situation than our domestic fishermen, I do not know. There is a risk of that, but I am not sure that the aspiration to have a completely level playing field is real.
Q200 Chair: Couple that with the fact that the Fishing Minister might be trying to negotiate access to other waters as well. That adds a further complication to it, does it not?
Dr Appleby: It makes it very tricky. To some extent, it must be quite tricky for the Minister doing that already. You can see the Scots taking a lead in some of the negotiations, and quite rightly because they have more waters than we do.
Chair: They do and, arguably, they have some of the fish that we eat more of as well. We catch a great deal of fish off the south coast, but we export a lot of it to the rest of the EU.
Q201 David Simpson: Thank you, Chairman. The Fisheries White Paper talked about the importance of fishing to coastal communities and the economic links. However, many respondents have said that the Bill does not contain sufficient provision to support coastal communities. Do you believe there is enough in the Bill and, if not, what needs to be added?
Dr Appleby: That is a good question. The way the Blue Marine Foundation has approached this, and legally I suppose, is to try to treat the fishery conceptually as a public good and a public asset. In that way, you can see that the fishery is managed for the benefit of the public, which in that case includes the local community. That is how we would include that focus. In the past, we have treated the fishery as an open-access resource and then, when people have gone at it, we have thought, “Oh my gosh, we are going to have to regulate them. They are overfishing that stock”. The whole thing is regulating the horse after it has bolted.
What we have not done is got upstream of the horse and tried to direct it. We thought that if you treat it as a public good and start thinking of it in that way, which potentially comes in through the fisheries statements and marine planning—which we also tried to link to this, but the amendment has so far been rejected—you step out and say, “This is our fishery; what do we want to do with it?” That is where those conversations fit in. Does it do it? It does not really, but does it do it better than the current CFP system? Yes, but you are looking at something that has zero out of 10 and going higher than that.
Q202 David Simpson: I do not claim to be an authority on fishing. Martin, you referred at the start to the financial contribution that fishing makes. Is there a financial breakdown or division anywhere between coastal communities and fishing?
Martin Salter: I am sorry, David; where is your constituency?
David Simpson: It is Upper Bann. We have one river, which does not have any fish in it.
Martin Salter: You have fantastic coarse fishing at Portadown.
David Simpson: That is correct.
Martin Salter: You will know, as a Northern Irish MP, that back in the 1970s when there was a freshwater close season, thousands of English anglers came across the Irish Sea to take advantage of fantastic freshwater fishing in the spring months. That has withered because anglers have started to travel and spend their money elsewhere, and the rules have changed in Britain. If you go across the pond to Florida in particular or to Cape Cod, billions of dollars are generated for coastal communities by having a thriving recreational fishing experience.
You will do that through investment. One thing I do welcome in the Bill is the deployment of EMFF funds to support the promotion of recreational angling. That is to be welcomed. San Diego has bespoke fishing piers, but the one thing you need for a successful recreational fishing business and all the economic benefits it will deliver to coastal communities is fish. That means a fishery management regime that protects inshore fish stocks. We need to see the end of the disgrace of trawlers operating literally a few hundred yards off the Sussex coast. We need to see the end of inshore netting for species of primarily recreational importance, such as grey mullet. This is a fish that takes 12 years to mature. They have very little commercial value, but entire year classes are scooped up in a net and quite often sold at less than £2 per kilo. That is not a good use of that resource and, if the resource is not used well, you will not create the fishery, the tourism, the bed and breakfast trade, and the economic benefit that flows from having a properly managed inshore coastal fishery and all the benefits that would accrue to coastal communities which, let us face it, are suffering and could be given an economic shot in the arm by a rejuvenated recreational fishing experience.
Dr Appleby: Can I add another point to that? In the Bill, we have noticed that there has been very little input from the inshore fisheries and conservation authorities in England. Allegorically, performance of those is patchy, but the ones we know operate very well. I have seen lots of MMO amendments coming in, but I have not seen the same sort of amendments coming in from the IFCAs. We have done some research on this at UWE with my colleague, Alan Terry, who looked at the sea fisheries committees in Wales when they existed and then when they took them away. Very little has happened locally since they removed the sea fisheries committees in Wales. It has pretty much been a disaster.
Chair: We are going to deal with that in a minute, on the MMO in particular.
Dr Appleby: That is a potential vehicle to ensure there is joined-up thinking to take local communities forward, because they have local councillors, local representatives and, in most cases, angling representatives sitting on their boards.
Martin Salter: I want to put on the record that only six out of the 10 IFCAs have a recreational angling representative sitting on them, which is a travesty. Those that have are working very well.
Q203 Julian Sturdy: I want to broaden this a bit. I accept everything that has been said about coastal communities and I think the US example is very good, but I want to broaden it to inland communities. For example, salmon fishing brings a huge amount of money to communities that sit on certain key salmon rivers. What impact can we make on those communities from better controls over how salmon is either netted or fished at the mouth of these salmon runs?
Martin Salter: Your timing is brilliant, Julian. We have just produced an excoriating analysis of the netting proposals by the Southern IFCA, which covers Hampshire, Dorset and the Isle of Wight. If you know about salmon rivers, that covers some iconic rivers: the Test, the Itchen, the Frome and the Hampshire Avon. Under pressure from the commercial sector, they wanted to allow continuation of ring netting in those estuaries, in the teeth of opposition from salmon fisheries further up in the intertidal zone and up into the rivers proper, and in the teeth of opposition from the Environment Agency. It is another example of a very small commercial interest, which is not particularly economically significant, potentially putting at risk both the conservation status of an endangered and highly protected species, like salmon and sea trout, all for a few pounds of mullet.
Our overarching fishery management policy, which I hope will find its way into the annual fisheries statements, needs to recognise the incredibly valuable role of estuaries, both as spawning habitat for marine fish and as incredibly diverse ecosystems in their own right. They are also important routes for economically and environmentally significant migratory species like salmonids. At the moment, we do not. It is a hotchpotch of management. We have had great netting restrictions brought in Cornwall, Devon and Severn, and a dog’s breakfast being proposed in the Southern IFCA. That is no way to manage our prime salmon and sea trout fisheries, and no way to manage our inshore environment.
Dr Appleby: Can I add to that the Scots’ situation? Part of the purpose of this is to repatriate the CFP. The Scottish Parliament has produced a report on salmon aquaculture, which is devastating. I would have liked to have seen some mirror legislation and we need to think of how this goes forward. There is some mirror legislation going through the Scottish Parliament on how we repatriate things, because these things should marry one another. We are doing what we can in this Parliament, but it is a shame there is no equivalent legislation going through the Scottish Parliament that marries up with this.
Chair: The interesting point with fishing is that, to a degree, there has to be some similarities. That is the problem. With devolution, Scotland naturally wants to make its own decisions, but we have to try to make sure we marry up a uniform policy. That will probably be an even bigger challenge in the future. We will perhaps put some of these questions to the Minister when George Eustice comes this afternoon. That was a very good point.
Q204 Alan Brown: I know what you are saying about aquaculture. That is a separate issue, albeit it is the marine environment. Martin, again, it is always a bit of groundhog day when you see me. If we go back to the Bill itself, it copies the CFP’s objectives but, as we know, it is an enabling Bill so, therefore, a lot of the objectives of the CFP are not taken forward in terms of duties. Do you think there are sufficient binding duties in the Bill to ensure these objectives are achieved going forward?
Dr Appleby: We are in a different place. We are going from European to British legislation. We are finding trouble with the European Union with electric fishing. It is illegal under European law and yet it still continues. There is experimental electric pulse fishing in British SACs in the North Sea. You are taking legislation from one environment, where it is difficult to sue the European Commission, to the British environment, where you are open to judicial review. I wish it were not the case, but this will be the Government’s argument back, in that you are taking something legally binding, when you put duties on our Ministers, but is not binding in the EU context. You can see why Defra will be cautious about doing this but, for a properly functioning fishery, you cannot allow the Minister to have their hand in the next generation’s biscuit tin. This is what the legislation should contain, but I see this piece as a stepping stone to something else.
There is another mirror piece of legislation here, which is the Environmental Principles and Governance Bill, which we have not seen. It would be nice to scrutinise them both at the same time because then you would have an idea about how the duties and that interrogation is going to operate. There is a recognition that we are losing infraction proceedings, so the ability for the law to be enforced against the UK by the European Commission and the European institutions. That should sit alongside this, so it would helpful if we saw the two together.
Q205 Alan Brown: You mentioned a stepping stone. What else would you like to see that the stepping stone takes you to?
Dr Appleby: This is 43 sections, I think. The Australian Fisheries Management Act is 168. The Marine and Coastal Access Act was 325 sections. There is an awful lot that needs to go in there. Martin introduced it very well, I thought; a governance body, which has a plan.
Q206 Chair: Do you think the Australians manage this much better?
Martin Salter: I do not know about Tom’s view. We have not colluded on this. I would put America, New Zealand and Australia as the three leading examples, in that order.
Dr Appleby: BLUE did a conference on this. We got Australians, New Zealanders, Americans and Norwegians to come over and do a talk at Fishmongers’ Hall. It was interesting to see how structured their whole planning system is. Sure, you will never get anything that is perfect, but the beauty about looking at those legislatures is that they are working from common law principles. We are not taking European law and trying to put it into ours.
Chair: It is common law instead of Napoleonic law, I suppose.
Dr Appleby: Absolutely. You look at the wording from a British point of view and think, “Oh, that is familiar”. Their structures work well into ours. We are nowhere near getting that sort of structure in place in this Bill, but I am not sure we could be, given what we are trying to achieve.
Martin Salter: Can I make a point in answer to Alan’s question? There is no doubt that since the reform of the CFP in 2013 we have seen less fishing pressure, stocks rebuilding and higher profitability. I am sure my colleague Helen, from WWF, will expand on that point. Given that we are moving outside of the CFP, it is important to look at the context in which we will be fishing, and that is a global context. What the human race is doing to global fish stocks is frightening.
I refer you to the 2016 United Nations Food and Agriculture assessment of global fish stocks. Back in 1974, 90% of global fish stocks were fished at sustainable levels. We are now down to the situation globally where 30% are overfished, 60% are fully fished and only 10% are allowed to exist as nature intended. That is not good. It is going in the wrong direction. It is even worse in the north-east Atlantic where we are looking at between 39% and 40% of stocks being overfished. If you go back to 1975, there were 194,000 tonnes of cod were landed in England. In 2016, there were 1,876 tonnes of cod. There are similar figures for plaice and coalfish, and yet the White Paper boasts.
Chair: I think there was a slight dispute with Iceland, in the meantime, since your original figures. If Paul Flynn was here he would be able to put you right.
Martin Salter: Let us talk plaice; 23,000 down to 2,000. The general point, Chairman, is that, whilst the White Paper boasts about dramatic stocks recovery, we are nowhere near where we were in the 1970s and nowhere near where we should be.
Chair: I understand, and we have an opportunity to make it a lot better.
Q207 Alan Brown: The Government made it clear in the White Paper that there would be further measures to support recreational sea angling. The suggestion was that would be in the secondary legislation. I kind of know the answer—this is almost a rhetorical question—but are you happy with this approach and is there something you would prefer to see on the face of the Bill?
Martin Salter: Chairman, to save time—I figured that you would ask that and am very grateful that you have—we have prepared a note on some of the commitments in the White Paper that are likely to be followed up in secondary legislation. Can I table that and then give a two-minute summary?
Chair: Yes, we will take that as written evidence, further to your evidence this morning. That will be very useful, thank you.
Martin Salter: It is no problem at all. I understand that if we are on the one hand arguing to take politicians out of the process and to have an independent and scientifically rigorous system, as indeed we do for climate change targets, air pollution and the rest of it, it is difficult to be too prescriptive on the face of the Bill. We take at face value the Government’s intentions to do more for recreational fishing by way of secondary legislation. We understand that, but the way the Government could restore faith in the recreational fishing sector is to acknowledge us as direct stakeholders in the publicly owned resource. Some 10 years ago, we were told by the EC commissioner when we tried to meet them, “I am not sure why I am meeting you because, according to the CFP, you do not exist”. I kid you not. There is an amendment that the Angling Trust is promoting—it is in the evidence and we are hoping that politicians will back it—to recognise recreational fishing.
Chair: I tell you what we will do with that, Martin. We will try to make sure one of us puts that directly to the Minister this afternoon.
Martin Salter: That would be very helpful, Chairman. Thank you.
Chair: I really think there is an opportunity now to embrace sea angling more than we have, so it would be a shame if we missed this opportunity.
Q208 Alan Brown: Going forward, is there anything you would like to see in terms of quota allocations for recreational fishing?
Martin Salter: One of the disappointments of the quota is that it is not seeking in any way, shape or form to reform the quota system. You still have a public resource that is effectively privatised and there is a bigger issue with that. I said at the Bill Committee we should be taking lessons, particularly from America, in resource sharing. The fishery statements and the decisions by the regional fishery management councils allocate a share of harvested stock. Take the striped bass fishery, which is now worth $6.5 billion a year to the east coast of America. It was driven to the point of extinction by commercial overfishing. That is now shared on an 80/20 basis in favour of the recreational sector. Other stocks are shared at different allocations. It is sensible, science-based and looks at the social and economic benefits of the different forms of exploitation of those particular fish stocks. I am hoping, Alan, the Minister or the Government will start to embrace that as we move into secondary legislation and look to flesh out this policy.
Dr Appleby: There is an absolute requirement for quota to be reformed. Is it not there on the face of the Bill and they can probably do it under existing powers.
Chair: We are finding the same with the Agriculture Bill. There is not as much on the face of the Bill as we would like to see, basically, but we will put this to the Minister later.
Q209 Angela Smith: Going on to the common fisheries policy and its commitment to achieve maximum sustainable yield by 2020 in terms of exploitation of fish stocks, this commitment is not included in the Bill. What is your view on that? Could the Bill be improved in this regard?
Dr Appleby: You are getting evidence from WWF on this later, but my sense is that it can, because we need to have a stick to hit the Minister with. The safeguard is to make sure you are not hamstringing the international negotiations by sticking too heavily to one particular evidential creation criterion. Absolutely, you need to stop people taking the next generation’s fish.
Q210 Angela Smith: The pressure came from the catching side of the industry to drop that commitment in the Bill. Other European Union member states have that commitment, so the management of these stocks is not going to be a level playing field.
Dr Appleby: No. This is the dark art of international negotiation. The principle of this is that our rights, outside of the 12-nautical-mile limit, to the edge of our EEZ, only extend to maximum sustainable yield. Now, the complexity varies. There is also the scientific term “maximum sustainable yield”, which leads to a bespoke mathematical methodology, but the principle of this in law is that the only rights we have outside of the 12 are to fish sustainably. We can have the interest and not the capital. To some extent, if the Minister goes beyond explicit and well-recognised scientific advice, he is already breaching that duty.
Q211 Chair: Is this ICES advice? Where does it come from?
Dr Appleby: It usually comes from ICES.
Martin Salter: On that, Angela, is it not ironic that we have depoliticised the setting of interest rates to the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee, that climate change and air pollution targets are prescribed independently of the party-political process, yet when it comes to fish, a publicly owned resource, somehow it becomes producer-driven? The annual fisheries debate is an exercise in pork-barrel politics, if ever there was. I took part in it for 13 years on the trot and it was pretty disgraceful. Conservation did not really come into it. We can do a lot better than that and set this independence.
Q212 Chair: Each country traded off against each other, did they not, for particular types of fish?
Dr Appleby: The reason that Defra wants to maintain flexibility here is that they are going into the unknown, as far as things go, with the relative stability key, which is how you allocate between member states for historic catches and the methodologies to use on how to settle that. There is a huge amount up in the air, so I can see why you will get Government kickback on this, but you cannot have a Bill that does not ultimately put a duty of sustainability on the Minister.
Q213 Angela Smith: We have exactly a duty of sustainability with that stick in there, as you describe it, Dr Appleby. That, combined with the lack of a duty in relation scientific evidence, potentially weakens the Bill quite considerably.
Martin Salter: Having that as an aspiration rather than a duty makes very little sense. We can argue about the process by which we determine the best scientific advice and the levels, but we should have a binding duty on the Minister. He has binding duties to consult with the Welsh Assembly, but he does not have a binding duty to ensure that fishing limits are set sustainably. It is ridiculous.
Dr Appleby: You probably want to flip this the other way round. In court, when I was solicitor, I sat and saw two expert witnesses argue black is white and white is black to one another, with a bemused jury or judge sitting in between, trying to work out the credibility of each one. You will always find some sort of scientist prepared to argue the case the other way, but you need a situation, where things are manifestly wrong, to be able to take the Government to task through the judicial process.
Chair: You can certainly find two lawyers to argue. That is absolutely certain. You are making a fair point here and it is good evidence. Do you have any more, Angela, or shall I pass on? I want to keep going. Are you done?
Angela Smith: I am done, yes. I was fascinated to hear the detail about the tonnes of cod landed in the 1970s. It is now 65,000 tonnes, I believe, and has significantly reduced.
Martin Salter: Angela, I have some time this afternoon, so will do a follow-up letter to the Committee Clerk with some of the information I have here, if that is helpful.
Chair: Yes, that would be really useful. That would be great. Thank you, Angela.
Q214 Julian Sturdy: Just moving on to marine protection, Martin said earlier that we are on the way to delivering a world-leading fisheries management system. Did you say that?
Martin Salter: I hope I did not say that, Julian. I said that was the aspiration of the Government. I might have said we are a long way from it.
Q215 Julian Sturdy: I thought you said we are moving slightly forward. I apologise if I have quoted you slightly out of context there, but the Bill extends the protection powers of the marine environment, especially in relation to the marine protected areas. Does it go far enough and, if it does not, how far should it go? That is to both of you.
Martin Salter: I would like to see marine protected areas be more than seagrass or interesting reef systems. I would like to see them expanded. I would like to see them look at areas where certain species aggregate for spawning and for them to make an even more positive contribution to regenerating and rebuilding severely overfished and damaged fish stocks. That is the first thing.
The second thing is that it is easy to draw lines on maps, but fish do not read them. If you do not have a robust system of enforcement and some kind of cost recovery system when it comes to licensing to pay for that enforcement system, there will be a danger that Parliament legislates, we pontificate and anarchy continues to prevail in the sea. It is about being bold with ambition, but also about willing the means.
Julian Sturdy: First, you are arguing that there needs to be better enforcement going forward.
Martin Salter: Yes, and it needs paying for and for there to be an income stream.
Q216 Julian Sturdy: Are you also arguing that those marine protection areas need to be expanded?
Martin Salter: There are greater experts than I but, from a conservation point of view, my colleagues in the marine and environmental NGOs could make a case for expanding marine areas on a case-by-case basis. I can make the more general case in terms of protecting valuable spawning substrata for species to create that engine room of regeneration that we desperately need.
Dr Appleby: At the Blue Marine Foundation, we do a lot to promote and develop marine protected areas. It is an iterative process. You designate, regulate and manage. One of the interesting things that will happen is that, outside of the 12-nautical-mile limit at the moment, we have big special areas of conservation that are set up under the Habitats Directive. They are currently fished with bottom-towed gear and there is a massive consensual process that has been taking its Byzantine way through the European system, but that will go once we leave the EU.
Julian Sturdy: What you are saying at the moment is that they might have been designated, but it is completely irrelevant.
Dr Appleby: They have been designated and regulated, but they are not being managed. You need all three to get protection. One of the interesting things is what will happen to those. We have not investigated that yet, but it is an interesting question to put to Ministers later because there is a potential win that comes out of that if we start doing the kind of regulation that we are doing on our English inshore, which is quite good. The IFCAs and the MMO out to the 12-mile limit have been promoting all sorts of measures around protected features.
Martin Salter: They have, apart from Southern.
Dr Appleby: You should hear what has gone on in Europe. We are miles ahead in what we are doing in the UK with those, but it is an iterative process and there are opportunities there. I take Martin’s point that designating around particular reefs and features is an old-fashioned way of going about it, but it has 1990s source code, so that is what we are working with. There are still some opportunities there that would be interesting to explore.
Q217 Julian Sturdy: How would you enforce that, if that is a way forward?
Dr Appleby: Essentially under the Habitats Directive, you have to do an environmental impact assessment before you allow the activity to take place. If it does not pass the environmental impact assessment, you cannot do it, which is why there are bans on bottom-towed fishing gears in many of the inshore marine protected areas. We do not see those in the offshore ones.
Q218 Chair: We should be able to stop fishermen using gear that would damage the sea bed and conservation. Is that right?
Dr Appleby: Yes, for those SACs. This process has been going on for years, to the extent that we have ended up with experimental electric pulse trawling. How can we possibly end up with that? It is absolutely mad.
Chair: That is one thing we should be able to stop.
Q219 Julian Sturdy: My last point is to follow up on that. To deliver that, does the Bill need strengthening? This is something I am sure we will put to the Minister. Can that be delivered under the context of the current framework?
Dr Appleby: It can be delivered under the context of the current framework, but it will involve a significant change in the way they go about doing things on the ground. That can be delivered under the current system.
Julian Sturdy: It is not necessarily the Bill; it is more a will within the department, potentially.
Dr Appleby: Yes and to answer your question fully about what could go into the Bill, the IFCAs have said that the way they generate their powers could also be explored to make them more efficient. The amendment that goes in there, as I understand it, makes the bylaw-making process more efficient for the MMO. At the moment, they have to use a different piece of legislation, but this brings the whole thing together, so it is a kind of technical amendment for improvement.
Martin Salter: I have a very quick point here. If you look at the early sections of the Bill—I am sorry that my iPad is too slow to load it—it talks about fishery objectives. If you want to strengthen it, that is probably where it needs to go, either in fishery objectives or the areas that would be covered by the annual fisheries statement.
Q220 Angela Smith: The Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009 empowered Government or put a duty on Government to develop an ecologically coherent network of protection around the country. Is there anything in this Bill that will make this either easier or harder? Let us face it, progress has not been good so far, has it?
Dr Appleby: What you have here are two totally different and distinct suites of legislation. One of the amendments we put forward was to incorporate marine planning into it, because you have a planning process and you have this. There has been fisheries exceptionalism, and one of the things we have been trying to do is to normalise this and put it into the bag of being a public asset; we manage it and take into consideration all the other things we should do, and stop putting it into a box somewhere else. That is where we have sat on this. It should just sit in the suite of all the other things. In that way, you bring it into the MPA-making process.
Martin Salter: I would like to put on the record a tribute to Sir John Randall, who steered through the Marine and Coastal Access Act, first as a Private Member and then in legislation. I sat on the Bill Committee. It was a huge leap forward, Angela. There are problems with it on which I wish I had pushed harder at the time. For example, having the IFCAs responsible for the intertidal limit was ridiculous for the tidal Trent, which goes up to just outside Nottingham. The Act does not think through the management of those estuaries and the problems I was talking to Julian about. There is an opportunity in this Bill to right some of those wrongs in respect of the management of inshore fisheries and the estuarine environment but, overall, they are two distinct pieces of legislation and there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the Marine and Coastal Access Act, other than the slow, glacial pace of implementation.
Dr Appleby: There is the issue with that Act that you need to rely heavily on scientific advice before you designate. This is why one of the things we have been looking at is marine national parks, which have a more open remit. People just want to put something there and that is enough. I can see why you need an ecologically coherent network of marine protected areas, but there is almost a limit in there that means you cannot just designate stuff because you want to. It is a public open space and we do not go into that kind of level of detail when we are, say, looking at a public park.
Q221 Chair: That is the fascinating thing about the sea. On the land you can see it all, can you not? In the sea, you cannot necessarily, but it is the same principle in many respects.
Martin Salter: Neil, in your part of the world, if some of the fantastic estuaries in Devon and Cornwall were on land, with the level of biodiversity present in those estuarine environments, they would all be SSSIs.
Chair: We will park it there, because it is good evidence.
Q222 Kerry McCarthy: Do you think there are sufficient legal provisions and enforcement measures in the Bill?
Dr Appleby: Enforcement is such a technical question. It is a law unto itself. You need the right provisions to do what you can. You really need to take evidence from some of the marine enforcers on that. I am not sure I can comment any further. I can tell you this: enforcement spend has gone down.
Q223 Kerry McCarthy: I was going to say that powers are one thing, but enforcement is something very different, is it not? It is about using those powers.
Dr Appleby: There are bigger concerns about Eurostat, which is the way we share information within the European Union. I am not sure where we sit on that, as far as the bigger Brexit picture goes, when we are trying to enforce internationally. There will be big enforcement questions, but it is such a technical subject. You need to make sure you get evidence from someone who is knee-deep in it.
Q224 Kerry McCarthy: Who would that be?
Dr Appleby: There are MMO officers who do it.
Q225 Chair: Do IFCAs as well?
Dr Appleby: IFCAs would, yes.
Martin Salter: It is a crucial point and it is worth looking at the problem we are dealing with. There were two big cases in recent years of significant black fish landings and serious frauds. In Cornwall in 2009, six vessels were ordered to pay more than £200,000 in fines for fiddling quotas. The value of the black fish scam, which involved the whole fish-processing industry down there, ran into millions, and it was an organised conspiracy. In 2005 in Scotland, we had the scandal of £63 million of black fish landings. There were fines totalling about £1 million to around 37 skippers and fish processors. This is not an industry that does not need regulation and enforcement, and actually the MMO will do a good job on these big-ticket items. The day-to-day flouting of rules and regulations is a deep concern, and the IFCAs do not have the resources to do the job properly.
I will give you some classic examples. We have a network of 30 bass nursery areas in this country, and we still allow people to go in there to net for mullet. You can guess what happens when a sea trout or a salmon is caught accidentally. For goodness sake, we all know what is going on and it is dreadful. On top of that, there is a loophole that allows commercial fishing boats to sell 30 kilos of finfish at a time to a buyer straight off the boat, straight on the slipway or straight off the landing dock, per transaction. If you did 10 a day, 300 kilos of fish could bypass the buyers and sellers regulation. That means the landings are not recorded by the MMO. I am not entirely sure how income tax is paid on that.
Chair: It is basically not registered as being caught.
Martin Salter: It does not allow us to have a fully documented fishery. We have a system that is riven with loopholes and an enforcement system that is not properly resourced and is very easily exploited. That can lead, in certain areas, to not much short of commercial anarchy.
Q226 Kerry McCarthy: That is the current situation. Do you feel the Bill takes it any further forward in terms of having greater powers or do you go back to what you were saying about needing to get the experts in?
Dr Appleby: Technical prosecutions need specific powers to get the evidence and judge liability. It is a very technical point.
Martin Salter: All I would say is that it is a mess and something that really needs to be drilled down into.
Dr Appleby: Generally, the position has been improving though, because you have had things like the Proceeds of Crime Act, which has come in and puts substantial fines on people, which they did not have in the past. You have seen the fine level gradually creeping up.
Kerry McCarthy: You mentioned that the processing companies were very involved in the black fish scandals.
Martin Salter: I do not want to slander everybody.
Q227 Kerry McCarthy: You mentioned two cases. Is there a disconnect between the way the fisheries end of things is monitored, regulated and enforced, and a lack of focus on what happens further down the supply chain?
Martin Salter: New Zealand has brought in a proper system, which was in the evidence that Pew and WWF gave to the Fisheries Bill Committee, which you can read into your own deliberations, which is rolling out full-scale on-board electronic monitoring of catches. There should be a direct correlation between what is caught in a net or indeed in a hook-and-line fishery, and what is actually landed. You could not possibly in a month of Sundays marry those two up. In the case of the big pelagic trawlers you can, but for a lot of the small-scale fisheries there is a lot of unreported and unregulated landings going on, some of which are perfectly legal, some of which are not, and none of which add to the overall objective—which is a key principle of good fisheries management—of having a fully documented fishery. We need to know what we are taking out of the publicly owned resource, and we do not.
Q228 Kerry McCarthy: Is there an onus on the processing companies to do any due diligence or to care about whether rules are being met?
Martin Salter: That is starting to happen for salmon, but not for mackerel.
Dr Appleby: This is a really good question. Tech is coming in to help. We have inshore VMS and various things coming in. We have also had austerity, so cuts and people looking at smarter ways of regulating. There are positives. Again, you do not necessarily need that on the face of this Bill, but there are things in there. The supply industry itself, the big buyers, has a strict chain of custody requirements. The private sector is investing in who they buy from, because there is reputational damage too. The enforcement landscape is changing slightly in that respect.
Kerry McCarthy: It sounds like the work being done on modern slavery, which is a big issue in some sections of the seafood sector as well. Reputational risk, in some way, drives it more than the actual legislation.
Q229 Angela Smith: Is it very important now to distinguish between the kind of processing that Martin was talking about and the larger-scale processing that relies on boxed-up landings coming into ports like Immingham from Iceland and Norway, which are compliant with EU single market regulations?
Dr Appleby: You are almost talking about completely different fisheries there.
Angela Smith: That is exactly what I am saying.
Dr Appleby: It is, yes. Ultimately, we want to encourage coastal communities as well. If you make the enforcement regime too expensive for the small boat, whether it is an angling charter vessel or a small commercial fishing vessel, you will make it too expensive for entrants to come into the market.
Q230 Chair: We will park that one there. Will the discard charging scheme do enough to reduce discards and protect the marine environment? Unless we land everything we catch, we will never know what we are catching. What do you think about the scheme itself? Have you looked at it?
Dr Appleby: I had a look through it and I almost want to duck that question. It is a way of dealing with an extremely complicated problem. It is heading in that direction.
Q231 Chair: Ministers are trying hard to get a system, but I am not 100% convinced of whether it is right or not. You need a system that allows fishermen to land what they catch, and make sure they do. That is also why monitoring with cameras on boats is so important, because then you know what is being landed. There is always a risk with fishermen that, if they bring up a lot of catch that they do not want to land or do not have the quota for, they will discard. Martin, I have obviously whetted your appetite with that one.
Martin Salter: I have two quick points. One is that the technology has advanced hugely and fishermen have a much better idea of what they are going to catch where. They have data and sonar, and they know the migration routes of many fish and the aggregation points. Some of the stuff about discards is propaganda, particularly on bass. I have seen videos of commercial fishermen bringing ashore bass and then saying, “Look, I have to throw them all back”. It was not bycatch. It was 100% catch of bass and they knew perfectly well what they were doing. It is a shame Sheryll Murray is not here, because I would have enjoyed that discussion.
Secondly, it would be worthwhile, Chairman, you quizzing the Minister on how far down the road of an effort-based system he is going. The effort-based system, which is basically soak time and controlling effort by how long they are at sea, has had perverse incentives. A RAND study was done under Richard Benyon’s time that showed you were creating perverse incentives by fishermen targeting more juvenile stocks closer to shore. It was not actually producing the outcomes we thought of. There is no easy answer to it, but do not be fooled that discards are always inevitable and that these catches are always accidental. They are not.
Chair: Adding to that complication, some species will recover if you discard them. That is another issue that makes it more complicated, because you may not always want to bring them back, but you do not want fish being discarded.
Dr Appleby: Similarly, you do not want them going to landfill.
Chair: They must go into good protein feed of some sort, either for fish or for animals. It seems crazy to waste it, definitely. We will give the Minister a real quiz on this one, this afternoon, because I know it is part of his idea. I do not necessarily disagree with him, but it is getting it right. Alan, you have the last question, and then we will let you escape and bring in our next panel.
Q232 Alan Brown: The Bill is going to bring in powers for a new scheme to replace the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund. To date, how beneficial has the EMFF been to the fishing industry, coastal communities and the marine environment? Looking forward, what should a replacement scheme seek to achieve and what should its main features be?
Martin Salter: I would just give loads of money to recreational fishing.
Dr Appleby: You are now in the EMFF this time. The Minister made an announcement this week, which was helpful. One of the things we did in our amendment to the Fisheries Bill is that there is potentially money coming in from charging for use of the resource, either the licence fees that might come in or the discard charges that come back. That should probably be recycled into coastal communities too, so there is potential to increase the pot of money that comes in. The devil is in the detail and where you spend it, and also some of the applicants.
The Blue Marine Foundation has been able to work with local interests to buy things like ice machines, which have helped the food supply chain and have successfully got EMFF money. The system has worked, but part of the bureaucracy about applying for EMFF money is that there is quite a high hurdle to get the application in, in the first place.
Alan Brown: There is not in Scotland, we heard during the Fisheries Bill Committee. The application process is easier in Scotland.
Dr Appleby: It may well be, but even then you have to account back and keep your records for quite a long time. You get the money, but you are still going to be audited by the EU, which is never a very nice process. There is potential there to streamline that process and make it more locally applicable.
Martin Salter: This is a serious answer to your question, Alan, building on David’s question earlier, and you might want to push the Minister on this when you see him this afternoon. The initial statement of the extra £37 million did not mention recreational fishing, by the way, even though it does in the Bill. The EMFF money should be able to be applied for by local authorities, particularly in coastal communities. Who else is going to build a recreational pier for local kids to catch their first fish from, for example? It would not necessarily be producer organisations or private sector organisations.
I would also push the Minister on how he envisages money being spent on the development and promotion of recreational angling, which is what they have said on the face of the Bill. Has he given that any thought? If you look at Australia and New Zealand, there are bespoke boat ramps, fish-cleaning stations and there is signage on how to engage in recreational fishing and the rules. There are lots of good ways of promoting recreational fishing among coastal communities to which that fund could be applied, but it is important that the criteria are drawn in such a way that they do not discourage applications to that end.
Q233 Alan Brown: Would it not be the case that you need to identify the criteria? When you identify the criteria, you start to look at the needs and then you can identify the amount of funding required, rather than taking a pot. That is where we were getting before, so we will do that.
Martin Salter: I could not agree more.
Dr Appleby: Yes, I agree.
Chair: That was excellent evidence, this morning. Thank you very much. We have plenty to put to the Minister this afternoon. It was great to have you both in. Martin, it was good to get you in on particular on the angling side, because I felt we had not taken evidence on that. We will take any more written evidence that either of you gentlemen have, because the inquiry is going to be very quick, as we have to try to make sure we get our report out before the Fisheries Bill is finalised. It is going through Committee now, so we have to get on with it, but we really appreciate your very good evidence. If you do not mind departing from your chairs.
Dr Appleby: Chair, I will submit some more written evidence about the mechanics of how you set the public good/public trust thing, if that is okay.
Chair: Yes, that would be really useful. If, when you leave, there are particular things you think about the session that you might have added, please give it to us in writing. Thank you, both, very much.
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Helen McLachlan and Dr Abigail McQuatters-Gollop.
Q234 Chair: Could both of you introduce yourselves for the record and then we will get on with it?
Helen McLachlan: Good morning. My name is Helen McLachlan and I am Fisheries Programme Manager for WWF UK.
Dr McQuatters-Gollop: I am Abigail McQuatters-Gollop and I am a lecturer in marine conservation at the University of Plymouth, and a marine ecologist.
Q235 Chair: It is good to see you both. Thank you very much. I will kick off with the first question. The UK will be able to control access to its territorial waters for vessels from other countries. What condition should foreign vessels meet in order to be granted licences to operate in our waters? Who wants to start with that nice, simple question?
Helen McLachlan: I will kick off by saying that, in terms of fishing in our waters, a level playing field will be an important aspect. As we depart the EU, it is an area where we can take the opportunity to improve our fisheries management regime beyond that which is currently in place in the EU. Touching on some of the conversations from the previous evidence session, the issues of enforcement and accountability are really important. Martin alluded to the issue of us being accountable for what we remove from our waters and the introduction of electronic monitoring being a condition of fishing in UK waters, so that it is not just our vessels, but anybody coming into our waters is also subject to that condition, and then you start opening up. We could even become European leaders.
Q236 Chair: Should we insist that everything that is caught in our waters is landed in our ports?
Helen McLachlan: I am not sure on that one.
Q237 Chair: It is quite controversial, but you need to know—and it is one thing we are all keen on—what fish are being caught in the sea, where and that it is properly recorded. Theoretically, if it goes back to other European ports, it should then be recorded, but we are determined to make sure we know what is being caught.
Helen McLachlan: That is right and it comes back to that accountability element. If you had electronic monitoring systems that were synchronised with the UK system, we would have that accountability and would understand what was being taken, and what part of the quota was being removed. That is an important point to consider. It makes sense economically, environmentally and socially to have that as a condition.
Dr McQuatters-Gollop: From an environmental point of view, it is important that any vessel fishing in our waters has to meet the same requirements our vessels do. If we have a closed area to bottom-towed gear, for example, they need to respect that as well. Whichever measure goes ahead on regulating discards, they would need to respect that just as our vessels would. It is not just the fish that we are taking out of the sea that is important, but it is how we fish. How we fish has an impact on the marine environment, which impacts our fish stocks. It is important that, whoever is fishing in the UK waters, whether they are British or from abroad, they obey our sustainability rules and our ecosystem-based approach to how we manage fisheries, so we can keep the marine environment healthy and our fish stocks healthy for future generations.
Q238 David Simpson: On the subject of fishing stocks, the Bill does not replicate the CFP’s commitment to achieve MSY-level exploitation of fishing stock by 2020. In your opinion, is this the right approach? If not, how could it be strengthened?
Helen McLachlan: Greener UK has scrutinised the Bill as it currently stands and identified that as one of the major failings. We have a commitment here to an aspiration of world-leading fisheries management. That is what the Secretary of State has set out and this does not measure up to that. As much as people like to deride the common fisheries policy, one thing that really turned things around was that commitment to a deadline for achieving MSY.
We saw a move away from that short-term political decision-making, which continuously overshot the scientific advice, to a much more reined-in regime that has started to comply with the scientific advice. As a result, the trends have started to be more positive, with increasing biomass and decreasing mortality. That was specifically as a result of that deadline. They knew there was a deadline to meet. If we lose that, there is a real fear that we will take a backward step. The outside narrative to this is to the rest of the world. The previous evidence provider said that the world is watching the UK at the minute. For us to come out with a Fisheries Bill that removes that commitment is not world-leading; it is a step backwards.
Q239 David Simpson: I take your point. What would you suggest to strengthen it?
Dr McQuatters-Gollop: It is laudable that we are saying that we want to be world leaders in fisheries management. We should be and this could be an opportunity to do that, but decisions about how much fish we take from the marine environment have to be based on scientific evidence. Having that as an objective in the Bill and not a duty puts the process at risk. Since we are gearing up to meet the 2020 CFP duty for MSY, the UK has to keep with that and say we have a duty to base our decisions on fishing on scientific evidence, and take this ecosystem-based approach, in which we consider fishing as just one thing happening in the marine environment. This will help us to obtain our goal of being global leaders in fisheries management. I totally agree with Helen about not having a timeline to achieving this. We can do better.
Q240 David Simpson: Lastly, how do you police that? I know we have cameras and all of that. We heard the previous evidence that not everybody is kosher when it comes to fishing. Not everyone is like that, but there are some. How do you police that? You can have all the rules in the Bill, but how do you police it?
Helen McLachlan: One of Greener UK’s recommended amendments is for fully documented fisheries. By that, we mean verifiable fully documented fisheries, where you can evidence what is being recorded. Yesterday, the Minister said that we had fully documented fisheries, because fishermen put their catch into the logbook and that goes through the system. Now, history has shown, and a lot of evidence suggests, that not necessarily everything that comes up in the net gets logged and goes through the system. Therefore, it is very important to have at-sea monitoring, because that is where fishing occurs.
When you have legislation, as we currently do, which talks about landing all of the catch, you cannot have a system with an absence of at-sea monitoring. Either observers, which are extremely expensive and have lots of compromises, or electronic monitoring with cameras at sea gives us a real understanding of what is coming up. The real benefits from that are it starts to provide you with that information base that you then need to manage sustainably, not just for the target stocks, but for the non-target species and the habitat damage that may be incurred by fishing. It starts to underpin the whole ecosystem-based approach to fisheries management, which we are sorely missing at this point in time.
Dr McQuatters-Gollop: One more thing is that the data that is collected should be made easily available, because it can be a challenge to get VMS data as fisheries scientists. One thing the UK could do to increase our position as global leaders in fisheries management is, when we collect this data, to make it available to the scientific community. The better we understand the dynamics of the fish stocks we have, the better advice we can give to people who make decisions about what kind of catch we can take from the marine environment that year. The fact that it has been challenging to get hold of this data puts us on the back foot when we make recommendations about fishing targets and quotas.
Q241 Alan Brown: Does the Bill go far enough in meeting the UK’s international obligations regarding the protection of the marine environment, such as under the Marine Strategy Framework Directive and the OSPAR convention, or does it need strengthening?
Dr McQuatters-Gollop: I work on the Marine Strategy Framework Directive a lot. The Bill is unclear about how we are going to link up with the Marine Strategy Framework Directive. I know it is mentioned in the 25-year environment plan, but what is important about the MSFD is that it promotes an ecosystem-based approach, in which we manage our environment holistically. If we do not have a healthy marine environment, we will not have healthy fish stocks. Sustainable fishing goes hand in hand with managing the marine environment in a way that is based on using scientific information to control or regulate how humans act in the marine environment.
It is great that we have objectives in the Bill for sustainability, scientific evidence and ecosystem-based fisheries management, but there is not a clear duty on those. There are questions about what our obligations are, how they will be implemented and how we might resource them. I know that, right now, EMFF has funded a lot of the science that goes behind implementing these bits of environmental management, and I understand that we will be leaving EMFF when we leave the EU. Thinking about this in an integrated way and how it interacts with the MSFD is important, so how we manage the environment and how we obtain a sustainable way of fishing.
Q242 Alan Brown: Yesterday, at the Fisheries Bill Committee, the Government voted against a routine amendment that had a list of treaties in it. The idea was to cross-reference treaties on the face of the Bill. The Government’s argument was that, if we are a signatory to these treaties, we need to apply with them and, therefore, they do not need to be in the Bill. Would that argument stand regardless of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive or do you still think there should be references in the Bill?
Helen McLachlan: The European Union (Withdrawal) Act will bring across the MSFD commitments, so they should still stand but, as Abigail said, the duty is the piece that is missing from the Bill in terms of being able to meet our current sustainability and fisheries objectives. They have set them out, but there is then no duty on administrations to deliver them and that is the key piece missing here. Without that, we fail to deliver world-leading legislation.
Q243 David Simpson: The Bill gives further powers to the devolved Administrations for marine protection. Does the Bill ensure consistent, coherent and complementary management of the marine environment across the whole of the United Kingdom?
Dr McQuatters-Gollop: That is a really big question.
David Simpson: Yes, it is, and we are expecting a big answer.
Chair: You have 30 seconds. There is no pressure.
Dr McQuatters-Gollop: It is good that the UK will have more power to regulate how we protect our marine environment. We are working towards a network of coherent marine protected areas, but one thing we need to do better in the UK is make sure these MPAs are meaningful. When we fish, we take out the big fish, and the big fish are the most productive and have the most eggs. By having marine reserves that do not allow fishing, we let these fish have a refuge where they can reproduce. Then their offspring leave the reserve, which helps build up the stocks. This could be our opportunity to strengthen our marine protected areas and marine reserves to help build up our stocks and help replenish our UK fisheries.
I know Martin gave the statistics earlier about how many fisheries are being overfished. In the Bill we have an opportunity to do better, but it is unclear again where the duty lies for marine protection in the Fisheries Bill. It is important: without healthy habitats we will not have healthy stocks. We could use this as an opportunity to rigorously protect the marine environment, which will help our fishing industry and those coastal communities we heard about earlier.
Helen McLachlan: We are obviously not constitutional experts, but fisheries management is devolved and it is exceedingly important to respect the devolution settlements as we go through this process. However, sustainable fisheries management and wider marine management, which this contributes to, need some clear common objectives and a means of setting them out, so there is not massive disparity across waters and between different regimes. It again comes back to this level playing field. We need an understanding by fishermen out at sea about what the rules are. There should be some consistency of approach there. The fisheries statements are a means of doing that. Again, we come back to the accountability of where that kicks in, but respecting the devolution settlements is important in this process. Scotland has a lion’s share in fisheries as well, so it is important to get that right.
Dr McQuatters-Gollop: Coherence is even more important for these fish stocks because they do not respect political boundaries. A lot of our fish stocks are transboundary and they do not know when it is England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, France, Spain or wherever. Having a coherent network of marine MPAs and a coherent way of managing our fisheries is important and will help us achieve sustainability a lot better than if we do not have these conversations with each other among the DAs.
Q244 Chair: On question number six, I am going to give you all three parts together. Do the provisions in the Bill, such as the discard charging scheme, do enough to reduce discards and protect the marine environment? Have similar policies in other countries resulted in improving environmental outcomes? Does the Bill include sufficient provision for the prevention of bycatch of protected species, including marine mammals? Those are very big questions. Do you see where we are coming from? Basically, will the discard charging scheme work? Is it being done in other countries? Do we do enough to stop catching dolphins and other marine mammals?
Dr McQuatters-Gollop: I could talk a bit about the ecological side. I have read about the charging scheme. I do not know if it will work or if it is used in other countries, because I am not a fisheries scientist, but it is laudable that we are doing something about discards and bycatch, because they are integral to this Bill. A solution may be to have an experimental run at it somewhere, where we try different methods.
Q245 Chair: Do you mean a pilot scheme?
Dr McQuatters-Gollop: Yes, a pilot scheme would help us see what would work. I have watched some of the other testimony and it sounds like other countries have different methods, but we need to find something that works in the UK. Doing some experimental work could be a way to work out what will work for us, but I was glad there is something in here about bycatch and discard prevention. The CFP is criticised all the time and it is not perfect when it comes to discards, but it made huge progress by saying that we need to account for everything that we take from our fisheries.
Q246 Chair: I have looked at this in the past, especially with catching dolphins as bycatch. You can have traps to let them out the nets and all sorts, but they largely do not work very well. There is more we could do on that.
Dr McQuatters-Gollop: This is where funding from EMFF, or whatever is going to be the equivalent, would be helpful, so that we can try different schemes. There are things called pingers that make a noise that could scare dolphins away. Then there are other types of fishing, where we use long lines that particularly take birds and sharks. There is a lot of technological research needed to help minimise this bycatch issue for the animals that we care about, these iconic animals like sharks, dolphins, whales and birds.
Chair: It depends on when you meet the shark, I imagine. If you were swimming, you would not be quite as keen on it.
Helen McLachlan: On the discard charging scheme, there is not quite enough information to allow a proper assessment of how it will work and its impact in terms of both foreseen and unforeseen consequences. The latter is possibly quite important. A lot of schemes have unintended consequences, so we need to understand this properly.
Chair: You have to give the fishermen enough compensation to be able to bring it back, but not so much that they potentially target bycatch or a species they should not be catching.
Helen McLachlan: This comes back to accountability, so retaining removals to the limits that are set. We do not want to see a situation in which the penalties are built into a business plan, for example, as part of the accepted economics of the catch. I am not suggesting that would be the case, but who knows? The important thing is that we fish within the limits that we set. If there is a risk that we go over that, it is a very serious threat and concern.
On the point about marine mammals, coming back to electronic monitoring, in Australian fisheries there was a view that there was not a problem with marine mammal bycatch but, when they put EM on the vessels, there was a 700% increase from the previously assessed levels. It demonstrates that when you have the ability to monitor what is coming out of the water you get a better understanding of what is actually happening, whether that is sharks, seabirds, turtles or marine mammals, and both your target and non-target species as well.
Chair: You have a better chance of knowing what is in the sea.
Helen McLachlan: Martin mentioned New Zealand. The reasons they set out for introducing electronic monitoring across their fleet, phasing it in between now and 2020, were to reduce waste, more data provision for stock assessment, more responsive fisheries management as a result, to be economically better off, improving the international reputation of the New Zealand fisheries as a whole and improving consumer confidence. All of those things, surely, we as the UK should aspire to, which is why we see it as a fundamental piece of this new opportunity. That is why it was disappointing to hear the Minister was rather dismissive of it and feels that we have fully documented fisheries, which we do not.
Chair: That is something again that we could put to the Minister this afternoon. Thank you for that.
Q247 Alan Brown: You already heard a similar question previously on the European Maritime Fisheries Fund. Do you think there should be a replacement scheme for the EMFF? Are there any specific criteria you would like to see aligned with that fund?
Helen McLachlan: Yes is the simple answer. The UK is privy to €243 million for this period. There are pockets of that assigned for specific use, so enforcement and helping the roll-out of new policies. For example, the discard ban was a key piece that they said the EMFF should have been used for, and we feel that that has not been as utilised as it could have been. You have to be absolutely clear about what it is that you want to deliver, then cost that out and make sure that you have the finances. I know there will not be a bottomless pit of funding, but there is a clear need to at least replace to equivalent amounts, if not more, for that future funding. Particularly if we are more innovative and ambitious about how we look at reforming the quota system, for example, to make it more equitable across coastal communities as well, it will need funding, time and commitment.
Dr McQuatters-Gollop: The great thing about the EMFF scheme is that it is so flexible. For example, I found out last month that I got a £200,000 EMFF grant. That is to help us organise the data sets that we have, so that we can use this information to inform the MSFD at Defra and OSPAR. There are all sorts of things happening with EMFF grants, where you work with local fishermen and think about technological innovations to minimise discards or bycatch. The scientific community is benefiting from this too, because the better we understand our marine environment and stock dynamics, for example, the better advice we can give to decision makers. The EMFF grant scheme has to at least be replaced, maybe even expanded. It is key to us achieving a sustainable fishery because, if we are going to be world leaders, it takes some investment. It is a shame to lose the scheme, so I hope that it is replaced.
Q248 Alan Brown: How difficult did you find it? It has been said a couple of times now that the application process is difficult and onerous, which puts people off. You have obviously been successful. How difficult did you find it?
Dr McQuatters-Gollop: I am a scientist, so I apply for grants all the time. I would not say it was any harder than applying for NERC or Horizon 2020. The communication with the MMO was good, so it was positive for me and we won, which is really positive. I guess it depends on your background. Scientists do this kind of thing all the time, but the simpler it is the better.
Helen McLachlan: It is not the sort of thing the skipper of a vessel is going to be doing. That is where the issue lies. You mentioned the Scottish EMFF system earlier. There is a lot of support and help for skippers to take them through the process, and it is possibly more user friendly. We need to build that in.
Chair: We had some evidence last week that that might be the case.
Helen McLachlan: We need to build that into the system, because it is not fair to expose people to a system that is quite onerous.
Dr McQuatters-Gollop: I could not imagine doing it other than by being a scientist and having to do it all the time. If it was not my job, I can see that it would be quite complicated and intimidating. I also have the support of the people from the University of Plymouth. I could not imagine trying to navigate it on my own, as a non-scientist.
Q249 Alan Brown: I have a final small one. In an ideal world, what is a realistic timeframe we should be looking at for the replacement scheme? If you are identifying criteria and need, and trying to align that to a budget, what kind of horizon should we be looking at initially?
Helen McLachlan: It depends what resources you put into it. A national operating plan is required now to meet EMFF. You can go for a shorter, more concentrated consultation period or for a slightly longer one-to-two-year process. Ideally you would like to involve the stakeholders from each level, which takes time. If we were looking at an implementation phase, you could come up with something clear by the end of that sort of period, with a solid consultation process, which includes all of the stakeholders. In the Bill at the minute, that advisory and consultative process involving environmental interests, the catching sector, and the net-to-plate supply chain are important, as well as the coastal communities. They are all important in this process. If we have an implementation phase, we could use that time period to develop that, and use the funding that we currently have up to 2020, which is in place. From 2020 onwards we need to have that plan.
Q250 Chair: That sounds sensible to me. I have one final question. We did not get to it earlier. Should the Government trial the use of effort-based management of fisheries. Under what circumstances would this approach be appropriate? It is quite controversial. Do you agree that we should trial an effort-based system? It is a wide‑open question.
Dr McQuatters-Gollop: I could say something. Having a trial before making a final decision is a good idea, because an advantage could be that it is particularly responsive to scientific information, rather than our current system.
Chair: You would have to make sure you landed everything you caught under an effort-based system.
Dr McQuatters-Gollop: It has to be recorded, because we need to understand what is coming out. What is complicated with quotas is how we account for all the stuff that we are obliged to land. Is that above the quota? I am not an expert on actual fishing methods, but it seems like the effort-based way could be a little dangerous for fishermen. I think a trial is sensible, as is having a clear route for how scientific information is used. There is a lag from when we get data collected and analysed to when it can be used to make decisions on fisheries. Being responsive about the amount of soak time you can have based on the scientific evidence is important and could help with our sustainability objectives.
Helen McLachlan: There has been talk of piloting, but it is not reflected in the Bill. There is a mention of effort. When you look across the globe, there are no indicators that an effort-based fisheries management regime results in sustainable management. My closest experience is from colleagues in the Mediterranean, which is a largely effort-based scheme and one of the most disastrous sea basins for sustainability. Some 83% of stocks are overfished. I met with colleagues last week who are talking about the move to try to introduce quota-based systems, because they are tangible and you can work with them, and have some degree of control. An effort-based system quite often incentivises a race to fish.
Chair: It has its dangers. There is no doubt about that.
Helen McLachlan: It very much does. We have a quota-based system. It is not perfect, but we can strengthen it, make it more effective and introduce accountability.
Chair: We will also have the ability to swap the quotas, trade them and stop fishing in areas if we are catching too much of a particular fish. It is all linked to discards and everything else. That is how we can do a lot better, but I am not sure that effort‑based would do it.
Dr McQuatters-Gollop: I know I keep saying this, but it is so important to have a clear link to the scientific evidence and that we stop this process of ICES or the scientists making recommendations that are then watered down. This brings us back to questioning what the impetus is on sustainability as part of the Bill.
Chair: Thank you, both, very much. We have gone through very fast so, if there are points that we have missed or points that you think of afterwards, go through the list of questions—if you have not got them, we will give you the list of questions—and if there is anything you would have liked to have said something about, please give it to us in writing. Alan and David, thank you very much for hanging on to keep us quorate. If we do not have three people present we can take evidence, but in a private capacity, not in a public one. We appreciate you hanging on and giving us good evidence. If there is anything else you would like to add, please do. Thank you very much and thank you to our first panel as well.