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Exclusive 12 mile limit - what 12 mile limit? |
"A new deal with the EU drags UK fishing back into a past we thought had been left behind, as fishing communities’ prospects are traded away yet again.
Our industry has been much in the public eye and in the news this week, as the UK and the EU reached a new deal on fisheries matters. A summit in London that had been billed as the start of a process of revisiting our post-Brexit relationship turned out also to be the end of it. Hurried talks behind the scenes had already ended in agreement. History repeated itself, as the EU again pushed for more concessions on fishing at the last possible moment and the UK again lost its nerve: caving in to pressure so that its government could announce a quickly done deal.
The deal reached in the 1970s, when the UK joined the EU, restricted the ability of British fishing boats to work in their own waters, while giving that right to European fishermen. The result was a huge decline in the British fishing industry and the start of a long period of economic hardship in coastal communities. European fleets, meanwhile, were helped to thrive: growing beyond the ability of their own waters to support them and becoming massively dependent on the freedom to take resources from Britain’s seas.
When we left the EU, there was very little immediate change for Britain’s fishermen, to their intense disappointment. The Trade and Cooperation Agreement that set the scene for relations between the UK and the EU allowed the previous situation to continue unchecked for another five years. We may have left the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy, but its boats could still work in our waters, up to the inshore line 6 miles from the coast.
The one saving grace in this otherwise bleak picture was the promise that, after five more years of business as usual, the UK would again be able to control access to its own waters. From 2026, access for European boats to UK would be negotiated on an annual basis. The same relationship that both the UK and EU already have with Norway, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands would apply between them as well.
The ability to determine who will fish in your national waters is a significant benefit to any nation, and a prerequisite for being considered an independent coastal state. Those other North Atlantic nations use that power to strengthen their hand in the annual negotiations over quotas and total allowable catches from the various fish stocks that they share.
Just as the UK was about to acquire that power for the first time in more than 50 years, our government has surrendered it.
They have agreed that EU boats can continue fishing freely in UK waters for the next 12 years. Instead of adding that vital card to our hand in the annual fisheries negotiations, we have given it to the other player and the UK fishing industry has received nothing of value in return.
The NFFO, in conjunction with UKAFPO, had been speaking to the government about the renegotiation of the TCA for some months. Knowing that the EU would want a multi-year deal on access to our waters, we suggested ways in which this negotiation could achieve benefits for our industry. Our negotiators could have insisted that European boats operate only outside of 12 miles from our coast. They could have used the leverage offered by the power to grant or decline access to obtain more quota for the British fishing fleet, to rebalance the unjust and inequitable distribution that has restricted our industry since the 1970s. They could have insisted on better collaboration on the management of non-quota species. They could have done any of this and more, but in the end did none of it, instead giving away the single best tool we will ever have for improving the lives of fishermen and fishing communities.
The prime minister and others have been determined to say that the fishing industry has not lost anything through this deal. They talk about it as a rollover of the existing arrangement, as though nothing has really changed. The reality is quite different.
If nothing had changed, the 2020 agreement would still be in force; the UK would soon have the power to decide annually who could access its waters; and benefits for the UK could be negotiated from anyone wanting to be granted that right. Instead, when the EU demanded to not have to abide by the deal it signed up to five years ago, our government capitulated to that demand and changed the deal.
Moreover, it would be quite untrue to say that the UK’s fishermen lost nothing from this change.
They lost the prospect of becoming more like the fishermen of Iceland, Norway and the Faroes: whose governments use access to national waters to secure them a better outcome from annual quota negotiations.
They lost the most straightforward and direct route to kickstarting sustainable growth in the UK’s fishing sector.
They lost the possibility of starting to remedy a 50 year-long injustice that has consistently disadvantaged fishermen and held back their communities.
They lost hope.
It has been suggested that access to our waters for the next 12 years was traded in return for an agreement to make exporting food and agricultural products between the UK and the EU simpler and less costly. Some have tried to claim that this will benefit the fishing industry, as though there was not already a good trade in fish and shellfish between the UK and the EU. True, that trade became more difficult after Brexit, but exporters adapted to the new systems and trade resumed.
No doubt trade in some products will become easier under this new agreement, but that is expected mostly to benefit supermarkets and exporters. It is completely fanciful to suggest that these merchants and wholesalers will pass any savings from the new system all the way down the supply chain to the men and women who actually catch the fish. Europe’s importers and consumers may benefit from being able to demand lower prices from those they buy from in the UK, but Britain’s fishermen are unlikely to see a penny.
In an attempt to deny this reality, much has been made of the fact that salmon and bivalve mollusc exports to the EU will now be easier, as though this were somehow a benefit to fishermen. These, of course, are farmed animals. In terms of trade, fish farming has no more in common with wild capture fisheries than sheep farming does. Commentators with no experience of the fishing industry who continually insist otherwise demonstrate only that their ignorance is matched by their arrogance.
The most comical attempt to pretend that fishermen will be happy with this deal has been the suggestion that giving away access to our waters provides them with ‘certainty’ and ‘stability’ that they welcome. I suppose knowing with absolute certainty that you are going to get nothing out of a deal every year is a stable situation. It’s not a very desirable one, though. Doctors describe a patient’s condition as ‘stable’ when no change is expected. That, of course, is precisely why we are so angry.
Some who seek to defend the indefensible have gone even further: criticising the UK fishing industry, as though we had asked for something unreasonable and been rightly denied it. Such dismissals of fishing generally centre around the idea that our industry is small: an insignificant contributor to GDP and therefore reasonably and justifiably surrendered to increase profitability elsewhere. Fishing’s importance is minimised by describing the industry’s value only in terms of the price that fishermen receive for the catch that they land. All the other supporting trades and industries that depend entirely on that catch for their continued existence are ignored. All of the jobs in ports and fish markets; the engineers, ship builders, and hauliers; manufacturers of fishing gear and safety equipment; processors, retailers and restaurants – all these and more are ignored. Economic analysis of the Cornish fishing fleet, for example, has suggested that the seafood sector there supports 15 jobs on land for every fisherman at sea. Even if we look only at those people who work on the deck of a boat producing food, there are still around 11,000 of them. However much outsiders may want to diminish the importance fishing, it surely feels very important to those 11,000 families depending on it. For the commentators so keen to see fishing traded away to benefit a different sector, other people’s livelihoods are evidently a price they are willing to pay. They should have the honesty to admit that fact, rather deploying rhetorical tricks to pretend that fishing communities are simply too small to count.
This is not to say that nothing positive was announced for fishing this week. A fishing and coastal communities fund has been announced, worth £360 million, and this clearly has the potential to do some real good. As always, however, the devil is in the detail. The total sum appears to be based on a £30 million grant for each of the 12 years of access to British waters that has been surrendered to the EU. European boats use that access to take £450m-£500m of fish from UK waters every year. It is hardly an equal exchange. Moreover, if the plan is to give that money out in annual instalments, we must have real concerns about whether the fund will survive the two general elections (at least) and numerous government spending reviews that will inevitably take place over that time period.
The most important question is what exactly that money will be spent on. We have seen promises like this in the past, most notably the £100 million support fund for fisheries that was supposed to follow Britain’s exit from the EU. Very little of that sum ever materialised in a form that was accessible to fishermen. We hope that this government will work more closely with fishermen and their representatives, to ensure that this money goes directly to help an industry that has just seen its best hope for future growth and security given away. All doubts aside, the government has signalled that it wants to work with us by creating this fund and we can only take their intentions at face value and accept that opportunity.
For now, we wait to see exactly what is being offered and also to see the precise terms of the agreement has been reached with the EU. The fine details of that deal are still unknown, but it is the job of parliament to scrutinise the activity of government and so we will presumably know more when our elected representatives are shown the terms of the proposal and debate them. On Tuesday, the prime minister did not respond when asked how parliament would have its say on the fisheries portion of this deal, which is not reassuring. Nevertheless, he had previously promised that “none of this can go through without legislation”, so we can assume that the full and frank scrutiny that is the purpose of parliament will occur, so that the rest of us can understand exactly what it is that our government has done and how it will affect us in the future.
Life and business will go on for fishermen and the communities they support. We have lost much of what little was gained when we left the European Union, but we have not lost our pride in the fundamental and necessary things that our industry does. We provide food, jobs, and the continuation of a long and honourable heritage. These are things that matter far more to people who live on our coasts than some of those who work in Westminster appear to appreciate. Indeed, if the messages of support that have poured into the NFFO this week are anything to go by, they matter very much to a lot of people, all over the UK.
Those who have been so quick to dismiss and diminish us this week should perhaps reflect on that."
Full story courtesy of the NFFO website.
