Rural Affairs and Environment Committee, 29 Oct 2008

Meeting date: Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Official Report 239KB pdf

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Fisheries Council

As we reach agenda item 4, we are 12 minutes ahead of schedule, which is useful. We have allocated roughly half an hour for this evidence session. I welcome our panel of witnesses from the Fisheries Research Services. Nick Bailey is co-ordinator of fisheries advice, Coby Needle is assessment scientist and demersal stock adviser, and John Simmonds is assessment scientist and pelagic stock adviser.

We have received written evidence from the Fisheries Research Services, so we can dispense with opening statements and go straight to questions.

Good morning, gentlemen, and welcome to this annual fixture. Your role is to advise Government on the science from a Scottish perspective and to try to relate that to what is happening in a wider set of fisheries. We have the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea advice for the current round of negotiations. To what extent do your perspectives marry with those of ICES? Are there clear differences in your views about the state of the stocks and the implications of that?

You could answer that question fishery by fishery, but it might be difficult to do so. Perhaps you could give us a general picture and tell us where there is a clear divergence of view.

In broad terms, our position regarding the advice that is given on the states of stocks is pretty much in line with the ICES view. Where we sometimes differ in emphasis from the ICES approach and the advice that it gives is in the precise formulation of some of the management recommendations that are put forward by ICES. An obvious example relates to cod stocks. Last year, a fishery had an allowance but this year the approach is no longer precautionary and the fishery must close. It is very much an on-off switch related to a line in the sand, and we feel that that is in some ways an unhelpful way forward. Surely, we could do things better.

It is probably best if I allow my colleagues to have some input. As you said, we cover a range of species and one answer on one stock does not cover them all.

I will address the advice relating to pelagic species in general. The advice on mackerel and herring is subject to management plans in the development of which we have been closely involved or that are on the brink of being developed. We are slightly more in line with the ICES advice in that area, as we are quite heavily involved in preparing some of that. In such areas, we are closer to and more supportive of the ICES advice. I do not see any major differences.

I agree with my colleagues. We are quite heavily involved in the ICES process, in the generation of the stock assessments that give an indication of stock size and structure. We are involved in the collation and management of data in the assessment process that goes on. It would be difficult for us to say that we do not believe the ICES indications of stock size, because we have been involved in that process.

There are occasional differences over the advice that is issued. As Nick Bailey said, ICES tends to adhere strictly to a particular protocol that it has, and we may find fault with that occasionally. However, I do not think that there are strong differences of opinion on how many fish there are and what is likely to happen next year.

That is helpful. On how ICES reaches broad agreement about the robustness of the various stocks and turns that into policy recommendations, picking up on your point about North Sea cod, is it your view that the ICES advice is too precautionary, given the circumstances as you perceive them? What would give rise to your view if that were the case?

With regard to North Sea cod, ICES has been consistent, in recent years, in advising as small a catch as possible or a zero catch—the smallest catch possible is, in effect, a zero catch. That has been the advice for several years, since the cod stock reached its low level. There are indications of at least a partial recovery in that stock. There seems to be an interim period in which the stock is increasing to a certain extent, but not at the rate that would allow ICES to say, with its precautionary management hat on, that the stock is recovering sufficiently quickly for the precautionary approach to apply and for it to advise a catch of a certain amount.

At the moment, the situation is difficult because we are teetering on the line between allowing a catch, which is what we did last year, and not allowing a catch, which is the ICES advice for the current year. Presentationally, there is a big difference between advising a zero catch and advising a small catch. However, because of the way in which the advice structure is set up, ICES will fall on either one side or the other, and the side on which it falls can come down to uncertainty in the assessment. That structure is not without its problems. However, although there has been a slight improvement in the cod stock—certainly, in comparison with what it was in previous years—the overall conclusion that it is still fairly low is robust.

I will not ask you to reveal your exact advice to the minister, because you would probably not tell me, but your instinct is that the same approach as last year—a low catch rather than a zero catch—is okay.

On nephrops, the recommendation is for no increase in effort in the North Sea and on the west coast; in effect, as I understand it, that means a reduction. Will that lead to a reduction? What is your view of that, given the apparent advice that stocks are pretty stable?

With regard to cod, I agree that a zero catch advice is pretty much unworkable in the North Sea. More or less all the fisheries would have to be closed, and it is a very mixed fishery. The various management plan proposals that are on the table, from various parties, all suggest that a quota of some kind is a reasonable option for achieving the sort of exploitation rate that you would want to achieve for that kind of stock.

The circumstances with nephrops arise for an entirely different reason, which I will explain as briefly as I can. Two or three years ago, we were fortunate in securing quite good outcomes for nephrops and a rather large increase in the TAC. That was based on an approach that made use of a scientific method using underwater television and what we call a harvest rate applied to the absolute count of the animals, or the burrows of the animals.

In science, things move on, and in the past couple of years there have been at least two workshops considering the TV approach and incorporating new ideas and new developments. It meant that this year, when ICES was confronted with the information from the TV surveys, it felt unable to agree that it was safe to use the information in an absolute sense. The abundance indices from the TV surveys can still be used to indicate what the general state of the stock is— whether it is going up or down—but it was considered unwise by ICES to say, "This number of animals means that we can take this amount of total allowable catch."

ICES has reverted instead to an approach that is based on average landings for a recent period. I will clarify why that is important. Historically, with nephrops, there was a long period when landings were regarded as unreliable because of underreporting and various practices of that sort. The use of average landings was considered unsafe for the reason that it did not generate a reasonable TAC.

More recently, legislation has been introduced covering buyers and sellers. I am sure that the committee will have heard from many sources that the platform on which fisheries data is built is much more secure now, and the landings information much more reliable. ICES agreed that the average landings should be based on the past couple of years, when the information was more reliable.

Having said that, there is concern among us and many other scientists that, in the long term, the persistent use of average landings is not a sensible way forward for providing advice on stocks. As I have indicated, stocks go up and down. Historically, previous landings are not necessarily a good reflection of what will be best over the next two or three years. To that end, ICES has established a workshop early next year with a view to revisiting that. There is even the possibility of an update assessment next year, which will mean that we will get nephrops advice a year earlier than we would otherwise have done. That is the background to that stock. It is a change in methodology.

On the face of it, if you took the average landings of the past couple of years and maintained that as the allowable catch in future, no one's interests would be terribly badly affected. However, we are advised that that would result in quite a big reduction—of 24 per cent, in the case of the west coast. First, how does that arise? Secondly, were that to be the ultimate position, what would be the implications for Scottish fishing?

First, those comparisons—the figures that you quoted—are made in relation to the total allowable catch. In fact, landings for recent years have come nowhere near the total allowable catch. This year, the uptake for nephrops is in the order of 70 per cent. It is unlikely that we will take the TAC at all.

The trajectory of fishing effort by different fleets in Scotland is being monitored as part of another piece of evidence on conservation credits, which we may touch on later. In the nephrops fleet, the effort that is going in is at least as much as, if not slightly more than, in previous years. As we are not taking the TAC in that context, the likelihood that the TAC for next year will seriously impact on the industry's economics is small. In fact, I think that the available quota for next year will deliver something akin to what we have at the moment. As has been mentioned, however, the move can be presented as an enormous cut in the TAC that will cause great hardship.

So even if the TAC fell to the actual catch, it would not make a huge difference to economic effort in Scotland.

I return to my point that that idea maintained in the long term can run into difficulties because stocks move. In the short term, however, my judgment is that that would not be likely to cause serious problems.

Do you have a supplementary question, John?

It is more of a philosophical point, convener. The forecasts are obviously an inexact science, so what is their margin of error? I think that all members would like advice that was the same year on year. It is difficult to cope with the changing patterns.

I think that the same question was asked at the evidence session last year, and the point was made that, even with the best will in the world, the advice will always be variable and some predictions will always go up and down. John Simmonds may have some comments on scale and mitigating the problem.

It is more or less impossible to give the committee a number to say how precise the estimates are. We could go through the numbers stock by stock and try to give you a feel for the individual situation, and some estimates are more precise than others. For example, there is greater precision on North Sea herring than perhaps on mackerel and, although the information on cod is not precise, its position in broad terms is well understood.

The key point for us in providing advice is that the way forward is a movement to structured management rules that deal properly with variability and the restrictions on changes in TAC in order to provide the stability that the committee wants as an outcome. A way out of the difficult, fluctuating situation would be an approach in which we did not react immediately to every piece of information on rapid change but instead there was a structured shift based on repeated pieces of information over a period of time. We should go for exploitation rates that are workable under that scenario.

That approach would require taking a little lower extraction rate and leaving a larger amount in the sea but overall getting similar catches. It has worked reasonably well with haddock and North Sea herring, and it is on the table for mackerel stocks. That is the way out of the problem, but we will not get there for all stocks instantly. The structure takes time: there is a process to go through and there are a lot of arguments and difficulties to sort out before arriving at a sensible management process for each stock.

Marine populations are naturally variable—much more so than terrestrial populations. With the advice, we are trying to achieve a balance between allowing the quota to track the population directly and trying to maintain some consistency in quota from year to year.

The system can play both ways. When a stock declines, the industry and other stakeholders are keen to have, for example, a 15 per cent constraint on how much quotas can change from year to year, because that maintains their quotas above what they perhaps should be. However, more fish are coming back into the North Sea cod population now. If a consistency argument is applied in that situation—if we do not allow the quotas to change by as much as the population change would indicate—the amount of fish that is available is more than the catching opportunity allows for the industry. It is a balance between having quotas that more faithfully reflect the biological underpinning of the population and maintaining consistency from year to year. That shows the problem that we get into if we decide that we will have a quota of 50,000 tonnes for a given stock for the next five years, say. Almost inevitably, the stock will be either too big or too small for that quota within that period.

The traditional advice from ICES has been on an individual stock basis. As has been said, commercial fisheries are often mixed, and we have received written evidence from the Scottish Fishermen's Federation stating that, by the time the quota is set, the stock has moved on and recovery, discarding and mixed fisheries become inevitable. You, too, have expressed concerns about the deficiencies of the approach to mixed fisheries. Could you say a little more about that? What might be done to develop mixed-species fisheries advice in the future?

We anticipated that question—we were talking about it on the train. It is a hugely difficult problem to deal with, and I put my hand up to not having the answers—the other witnesses should feel free to pitch in. You are right to identify that ICES has tended to adopt the single-species approach, driven as much as anything by the structure in which we operate, and taking into account the fact that countries have quotas and interests in particular species. In fact, the boats go out and take a mixture.

On methods and the means of getting round things, it is fair to say that FRS has put in a lot of activity on selective gears and so on to avoid some problems. We have avoided some problems more successfully than others. We have not, however, made a great deal of progress in developing advice for truly mixed-species fisheries, or in developing TACs that are all in line with one another. That is true widely—it is not a problem just in Scotland or even just in the European arena. We are still a long way from achieving that. We have attempted various discussions on the matter. We belong to various of the co-ordinated European projects that conduct research in these areas, but progress is slow and extremely difficult to achieve.

Scientists generally recognise that single-species quotas in a mixed fishery will never quite provide the management outcome that we want. Individual vessels have different opportunities for catching fish, depending on where and when they fish and what kind of vessel they are fishing with. We are asked to provide quota advice that is applicable to the whole North Sea, for example. The northern North Sea and the southern North Sea are very different, and boats that fish in those two areas have very different opportunities available to them. We are trying to devise quotas that are equally relevant when they are divided up among all the boats and which avoid a mismatch between the catching opportunity and the catching availability for all the vessels involved in the fishery. If we think about the situation in those terms, achieving that is a functional impossibility.

The value of single-species quotas is that they enable a direct means of dividing up the available resource between the different countries and the different vessels that are prosecuting the fishery. That is their main purpose. As Nick Bailey said, we are working on different ways to get round the problem. We might think of different schemes to do that, but the aim is to devise them in such a way as to maintain fairness across the fishing industry while changing from one scheme to another. That is extremely difficult work.

I appreciate that the question is difficult and that there is a difference between the advice that you can give people and other ways in which you tackle the problem of discards. Obviously, the Scottish Government has considered the issue recently—indeed, it has been considered over a period of time—but will you elaborate on the other side of the question? Will you elaborate on TAC issues? Suggestions have been made about net sizes, temporarily closing areas of the sea and increasing quotas but reducing the number of days that a boat can be at sea—I think that the Scottish Fishermen's Federation suggested that. Obviously, discards are among the most offensive side-effects of the approach that has been taken. Fish that have been caught over a quota and which will die are being thrown back into the sea. Everyone wants to avoid that happening. Will you say a little more about the ideas that have been discussed recently?

Many recent ideas have developed rapidly under the conservation credits scheme, which Scotland has uniquely run this year. One tool that has helped is real-time closures. To begin with, the approach was particularly directed at cod; it started with the idea of protecting juvenile cod. When the idea was first mooted, we thought that it was particularly good for Scotland. The year class that is causing the problems or the good things with respect to cod at the moment, depending on one's viewpoint, was very small, so protecting them to allow them a chance to grow was a good thing. Time moves on, of course, cod grow fast, and the scheme moved on fairly quickly to protect spawning fish at the beginning of this year. It has now extended to protect all sizes of cod, and the discussion has moved on further—I am getting to your point—to the need to extend the concept to whiting, haddock and other species. One can envisage a mosaic of closures around the North Sea that target different things and help to avoid unwanted mixtures of fish in catches at certain times. The scheme is therefore developing.

We have been quite supportive of the scheme in providing advice on thresholds that would trigger a closure or otherwise, on where to target the most effective places for real-time closures, and on shape configurations. It is easy to think of a square box or a circle in the sea, but configurations are based much more on the topography of the sea bed and the distribution of fish. To that end, we have made much more use of vessel monitoring systems with material provided. A hugely helpful database that indicates exactly where boats are going and is linked to landings material gives us a picture of which areas contribute most for different species. The issue is live and is one of the elements that you have mentioned.

Is the scheme voluntary, or is it policed in any way?

Essentially, it is still a voluntary scheme. A vessel is required to observe closures in order to stay within the scheme, but there is no legislation that will mean that a boat will be penalised or people will be taken to court if they go into a closed area. They would simply lose the right to belong to the scheme for the remainder of the year. There would be a sanction of that sort.

I am not a long-standing veteran of December fisheries councils, but I bear scars from them.

That technical measures and real-time closures, for example, have been accepted as part of the suite or armoury of management tools is a positive step, and you have painted a positive picture of the conservation credits scheme. Last week, I had a meeting with the European Commissioner for Fisheries and Maritime Affairs, Joe Borg, who accepted that the common fisheries policy needed to be reformed and that the conservation credits scheme may be one of the routes that the Commission will look to go down, but he remained to be convinced that it was delivering its objectives. Do you share such pessimism, or are you optimistic about the scheme delivering its objectives?

I share his reservations, but "pessimism" is too strong a word—I am not a pessimistic person. The acid test will be what happens next April or May, when we conduct the next round of assessments of the species. Will we be able to demonstrate that the stock as a whole is benefiting? To be realistic, Scotland has implemented the scheme but Scotland accounts for only 30 per cent or so of the cod quota, so the scheme has to achieve an awful lot if it is to make an impact that will show up on the international stage.

Analysis of what is going on is a key element, particularly in relation to discussions in advance of the end-year council. We are considering matters such as the performance of vessels prior to the introduction of a real-time closure and we are tracking vessels during the closure. Do vessels just go to another area of cod or do they land reduced amounts of cod? What happens when the area is reopened? Do they go back in? There are positive signs from such analysis, which give me cause for optimism that the approach can work.

It is more difficult to be able to say, "The scheme has contributed this much to the further recovery of cod" or to be able to announce that the results are sufficient to make Joe Borg and others say, "That's the way to go. We can abandon all our ideas about effort." It is clear that there are reservations and scepticism about that—we share some of those reservations. We have to be able to demonstrate that the approach is working.

You said that you bear the scars of the end-year council. I think that we all agree that the scheme has engendered a great spirit among scientists, industry, non-governmental organisations and others. We get together monthly for the conservation credits meeting and we have frank and serious discussions about data that appear in real time. We do not discuss ICES material from 18 months ago; we discuss material from the previous month or week, which influences choices and decisions and forces industry to face up to the situation. For example, an element of the scheme was kilowatt days, which Scotland interpreted as kilowatt hours. During the scheme a day became 23 hours instead of 24 hours, because there was concern that effort was creeping up too much, and the industry accepted the transition. That kind of to and fro in debate has been encouraging to witness and to participate in, so I am optimistic in that sense.

What you describe certainly reflects what I am being told by the industry, which is that it feels that it has more ownership of the process and more responsibility for the management of fisheries.

You talked about year-on-year fluctuations and the difficulty of providing a degree of stability. What are your views on the cod recovery plan, which is under review? There are wide variations in the assessments of the extent to which the previous plan worked and how we might put right the plan's faults and do things differently.

I was involved in some of the ICES evaluations of the proposals that were on the table—there was a European Commission proposal and there was a Norwegian counterproposal. The differences were in the detail rather than in the overall direction of change. If we make assumptions about how the fleet as an entity will behave in future, the prospects for cod recovery are quite good. However, that depends on the maintenance of good behaviour.

The fish sellers and buyers regulations have made a difference to the possibility of landing fish illegally. Fish that in the past would have been landed illegally or just not recorded are now discarded, and during the past couple of years we have witnessed a dramatic increase in the amount of discarded fish that are marketable. That kind of change in fleet behaviour would cause a great problem for the success of any future cod recovery plan. If we assume that things will continue as they are now, that the biology of the stock will behave as we predict and that fishermen will maintain their current behaviour, the prognosis is fairly good. However, if circumstances change—particularly in fleet dynamics—it will be much more difficult to predict what will happen.

As for the development of recovery plans, a hybrid scheme between the Commission and Norwegian plans is now on the books. I do not know enough about the details of the scheme's latest incarnation to comment more precisely. The general theme of encouraging managers to move in the right direction is the underlying basis of all the proposals. That is worth while.

I must ask members to ask much tighter and more focused questions if we are to get through them all. Otherwise, members will be cancelling their lunch plans to finish the committee's work.

The west coast seems to have a huge problem with whiting, cod and haddock. I am not sure of the extent of the herring problem. Discuss, and tell me the solutions. We appear to have defined the problem, but what will the solution be?

In general, being more focused does not mean just saying "discuss". When members say that, they mean that the witnesses should be as focused as they can be. Thank you.

We should separate the pelagic and the demersal fisheries on the west coast, because they are completely different. It is true that the ICES advice is that the outlook for cod, haddock and whiting is rather bad and suggests that serious action needs to be taken. The scare story is that that means that the entire west coast will shut down for everything, but I understand that that does not represent how the discussion is going. Considerable work is being done on measures to enable the nephrops fishery and fishing for angler fish and other fish to continue.

The danger is that the fleet will displace to the North Sea.

For white-fish boats that are dedicated to white-fish fishing and which are looking for similar opportunities for similar species, the North Sea is one option. Another option is Rockall fishing, which still offers opportunities for some bigger vessels.

We move to questions on specific fish stocks. I ask members to address issues that have not been covered and I ask Rhoda Grant to keep her questions as tight as possible.

Can I ask a short supplementary question on the previous subject?

You can, but it must be extremely short, as the answer must be.

I return to the scare stories about the west coast fishery. Can we consider conservation measures that would overcome the need for closures?

For cod, haddock and whiting, we are beyond the point at which simple measures work. The consensus is that something more serious needs to be done for those stocks.

Fishermen have told us that the problems with herring stocks are not the result of overfishing. I am interested in why herring stocks are in a bad way.

It is not herring stocks everywhere, but those that are close to the United Kingdom that are in particular difficulty. The recruitment of young fish into the North Sea stock—the arrival of incoming year classes—has been for the past seven years about 40 per cent of the long-term average in the previous 40 years. That appears to be environmentally driven and certainly does not appear to relate to the fishing industry. Nevertheless, the inescapable outcome of that reduction is that only 40 per cent is available of the catch that would otherwise have been available if the stock had delivered the same productivity.

We know where in the life cycle the problem is occurring, but we do not have the exact cause of the process. The failure occurs in the first three months of life. We know that there are plenty of eggs and that larvae are being created from those eggs but, three months later, the fish do not appear among the youngest of juveniles. We have four or five potential reasons for that and we are researching some but not all of them. It is an expensive business to research things over such long timescales throughout the North Sea.

Similar reductions in recruitment have occurred on the west coast. We know less about that stock, but it seems that the same environmental drivers are giving similar results in that area, with the same consequences. That is not the fishing industry's fault, but the outcome is the same: fishing opportunities are reduced. It is therefore advised that there should be substantial reductions.

The reductions that have already occurred in the North Sea are nearly enough, but there has not yet been a big reduction on the west coast. That is why greater reductions are advised for that area. Over a four to five-year period, however, the two areas are probably fairly similar.

We have covered cod and haddock, but we have not discussed the reasons for the change in the assessment of mackerel in the new plans.

The mackerel assessment is driven by a single survey that is done only once every three years. The most recent one was conducted in 2007, and the one before that was in 2004. It is an expensive survey to conduct because it covers many months and many degrees of latitude. The stock extends all the way from Portugal to Norway. We simply do not have the resources to do the survey more than once every three years.

The data from that survey are the reason for the changes for the following three years. There was a preliminary change last year and the final results will be fully incorporated this year. The change was engendered by the incoming of that infrequent data and the consequential alteration in perspectives.

At the same time, we considered in detail the population dynamics of mackerel. As a result of requests from the European Commission, we developed a better way of examining the management of that in the context of the variability of the information and the way in which it comes out. A management plan is on the table and I guess that it will be discussed at the coastal states meeting, which starts tomorrow. Whether the plan is taken on board is a province for the politics of the situation and not for the science.

We have dealt with all the specific species and most of the general questions. We have a couple of minutes left. Does any member have a specific question that can be dealt with in that short time?

I have a question on the gear. Has there been any significant development in technology in the past year, since we last discussed the matter?

There have been a number of trials, several of which were conducted under the Scottish industry-science partnership, in which we are involved with the SFF. I am sure that representatives of the SFF will talk about that when they give evidence. A variety of gear has been trialled, some of which is already in place in the conservation credit scheme, such as the 110mm square mesh panel.

There have been some interesting results recently with much bigger meshes of up to 800mm, which have been used in the bellies of some white fish boats with a view to allowing cod to escape. Last year, we mentioned how inconvenient it was that cod tend to go down and straight into the nets, but the new method apparently allows some cod to escape by virtue of the fact that they go down. That is good news. On the other hand, the equipment is not suitable for all fisheries because, by the same token, we lose megrim, monkfish and others.

We are moving forward with the industry, which is also trialling a few gears. There have been some fairly significant steps. On the west coast, some people have suggested that they would be prepared to consider bigger square mesh panels—up to 200mm—in the nephrops fishery. Not everybody is prepared to do that, but some are. Those panels show good reductions in haddock and whiting, so the fisheries would become clean nephrops fisheries. That is a flavour of the work that is being done, but we have other trials in the pipeline.

I guess that, short of training the fish to stick to their own patches and stop swimming about with other species, we will never be able to do much about that. I thank the three of you for coming along. The session was slightly longer than the one that you were told to expect, but there is no harm in that.

Meeting continued in private until 12:52.