As the Landing Obligation looms - the Lords to investigate.

How effective is the landing obligation in tackling the wasteful discarding of fish?  

See the dull extent of the problem in this booklet.

The House of Lords will debate the coming calamity of the Landing Obligation on December 13th 2018. It might seem a little late in the day as full implementation of the LO will hit the statute books and full implementation come January the 1st, 2019. Happy New Year fishermen.

Below is just a small example that highlights the scale and severity of the situation - namely, Haddock, Sole and Cod in ICES Area 7

Written evidence can be submitted online using the form found here. The deadline is 11:59pm on Thursday 13 December 2018.

Lord Teverson, Chairman of the Committee, said:

“Reducing discards is vital to protecting the health of our oceans. Discarding is not only a waste of finite resource, as many fish do not survive, it also makes it difficult to accurately measure how many fish are actually caught.  The landing obligation requires a shift in how we monitor and enforce fishing regulations but there is a lack of clarity within the industry over its implementation and how its requirements will be managed.

“The Committee want to understand the challenges that will need to be overcome, and potential solutions to those challenges. We would really encourage those with experience or interest in these issues to share their views with us.”

Just what our boats are up against in the annual TAC carve-up

Earlier this year - and in an attempt to pre-empt the Landing Obligation debacle where, in the South West, a single species (haddock) will disproportionately affect the trawling fleet the MMO put out a call for participants in fishing data and research programme - roll on nine months to the annual December Fisheries Council meeting to settle TACs for 2018....

and the 2018 TACs announced in Brussels yesterday and some detail specifically for the South West (ICES areas 7b-k) were quickly passed on by the CFPO on Twitter - where there was an immediate response from the one (award winning) boat Crystal Sea that has worked so hard (with video surveillance technology and more) to redress the quota imbalance for the single most crucial discards ban species - haddock.

If that was not enough, while the Crystal Sea and the Tranquility (the only trawlers over 18m working in Area 7b-k)...

were both sheltering in Newlyn overnight as stormy weather passed through the Western Approaches...

wind speed and air pressure as the Sevenstones lightship weather station recorded over the last 24 hours...

and, courtesy of WindyTV, with much worse to come...

so it's no surprise to see that there were two similar-sized french trawlers dodging all night east of the Scillys...

and 18 of them east of the Lizard deep off Falmouth Bay. With the huge SW fleet of French boats drastically reduced since 2000, their substantially larger haddock quota no longer poses a threat to them when the LO kicks in next year - perhaps if they had taken part in the research collaboratively - or even been encouraged to provide their own data things might have been different for Area 7 haddock overall.  Much of the data collected by ICES is fundamentally flawed by virtue of how it is obtained.

More recently the website Gearing Up has been launched to showcase innovative and informed fishing projects that seek to reduce discards and increase efficiency,