British fishermen have been granted a big increase in the amount of haddock they will be allowed to take from the North Sea next year. But their catches of some other species will be cut or held at current low volumes and new conservation measures could reduce their fishing further in future years.
In more than 17 hours of negotiations which ended early yesterday, British fisheries ministers were able to persuade Brussels to drop a plan to compel 800 English and Scottish vessels to stay in port for 190 days every year to prevent overfishing of cod and haddock.
Manuel Marin, the Fisheries Commissioner, accepted that new legislation in Britain, the Sea Fish (Conservation) bill, should achieve the same conservation aim. The bill, which received royal assent last week, empowers the government to attach a condition to fishing licences specifying the number of days a vessel may spend at sea.
John Gummer, the agriculture minister who chaired the meeting, described the outcome as remarkable. Fishermen were "natural hunters" and getting them to accept restraint was never easy.
"There is no hope for the future of fishing if we do not ensure that we do not overfish", he said. "When stocks recover people will see why we had to take these measures".
Seûor Marin said the European Commission and member states seemed at last to be "operating on the same wavelength".
In a further move, EC ministers approved an extension of the Common Fisheries Policy for a further ten years. David Curry, junior fisheries minister, said this meant that Britain, as the biggest contributor to the EC's fishing grounds, would continue to be guaranteed "the lion's share" of the available catch. Fishing by other EC vessels within 12 miles of the British coast would remain limited to boats from countries with historic fishing rights there.
Fears that the Spanish fleet, the biggest in the EC, would soon be able to invade British grounds in large numbers, reducing Britain's catch share, appear to have been dispelled.
"The Spanish have been seen off at least until 2003," Mr Curry said. Spain, which joined the EC in the mid-1980s, was the only country to vote against this part of the deal. Mr Curry said the problem of Spanish boats registering in Britain and using a British flag could be controlled by tougher licensing rules.
British legislation has worried fishermen because it gives the government a free hand to limit fishing to any level at any time. The penalty for breaching a fishing licence condition will be raised to a maximum of ú50,000. Skippers will be able to appeal to a tribunal over their allocation of days at sea.
Britain's share of the haddock catch will rise by 82 per cent in the North Sea, from 42,640 to 77,620 tonnes and by 42 per cent, from 9,985 to 14,180 tonnes west of Scotland. This reflects scientific evidence of a recovery in haddock stocks over the past year.
Our share of the cod catch will stay at 43,220 tonnes in the North Sea, the same as this year, but will rise by 4.3 per cent west of Scotland and by 7 per cent in the Irish Sea. The British whiting quota will go up by 16 per cent west of Scotland but fall by 15 per cent in the Irish Sea.
The EC ministers failed to produce any answers to long-standing criticism of the Common Fisheries Policy. These include the high proportion of fish that have to be thrown back dead into the sea because quotas have been exhausted or because the fish are below the minimum landing size, and the large tonnage of fish - about half the entire North Sea catch - that is taken for processing into industrial oils and animal feed, mainly by Danish vessels. Conservationists say this is seriously depleting the supply of food for fish that are caught for eating.
