How Brexit caused a 'perfect storm' for Westcountry fishing

The fishing industry which supports 2,000 jobs in Plymouth has been hit by a “perfect storm” of Covid-19 and Brexit, councillors heard.

Fishermen say the post-Brexit trade deal has failed to deliver the increased catch they were hoping for, and processors say extra costs and paperwork are hitting exports to the EU which account for four-fifths of trade.

The concerns were highlighted in evidence to a special hearing on Friday morning set up by the city council to investigate the impact on the fishing industry of the Brexit trade deal.

Fisherman David Stevens of the Newlyn-based Crystal Sea, who sells his catch at Plymouth fish market, said nine out of 10 fishermen voted for Brexit. But he said the post-Brexit deal was “disappointing” and had not delivered anywhere near the increase in catch the industry was expecting.

Fisherman Steven Walker said the industry had been “massively affected” by the Covid pandemic, and needed Government support to promote fish to UK consumers. He said the hope from Brexit was to regain control of the six-mile to 12-mile waters and a bigger increase in catches, which would have provided a strong basis to rebuild the industry for the future.

Mr Walker said it was important for the Government to listen to and act on the concerns of fishermen, who felt they were being disregarded. He said: “If we want a sustainable fishing industry, it has to come from the fishermen.”

The fisherman added: “We have been almost promised the world, and we have been given nothing. It is heartbreaking to think that the Government would do that to an industry.”

Mr Walker said although fishing was a small proportion of the country’s economy, it was an important part of coastal communities. He said the industry had seen exports shut down and the fleet was not equipped to take advantage of the increase in quotas.

Both fishermen praised the city council’s Call 4 Fish initiative, set up to promote sales during the pandemic. Mr Stevens said it had been a “Godsend” for the industry, and had kept boats in business.

Rodney Anderson, former director of marine and fisheries at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said the industry had been hit by the effects of the pandemic, but the trade agreement with the EU had “made a bad situation worse”.

He said the weeks following the first of January, when the UK left the EU single market, “have been something of a perfect storm” and the post-Brexit trade deal on fishing was seen as a “huge disappointment” across the sector.

Mr Anderson said: “They felt that what was being delivered fell well short of what they had been led to believe. On top of that, there were severe difficulties with the export arrangements.”

There has been an increase in catch quota, with a figure of £146m quoted as the value of the uplift over five years, but that was an “apples and pears comparison”.

Mr Anderson said European coastal countries agreed an annual total allowable catch for up to 100 species, but often the total of fish caught was lower than the maximum. He said that according to the Fishing News, 1,500 EU boats over 25m had been licensed to fish in shared UK waters, within six to 12 nautical miles off-shore, which was the element of the agreement which “caused the most grief” to the industry.

Mr Anderson said most of the UK boats were under 10m and tended to fish “in their own patch”, which could become crowded. He said the six-mile to 12-mile water “are particularly important for the majority of UK vessels licenced in the UK.”

Mr Anderson told the committee: “There needs to be a much clearer strategy. Marine Scotland, the Scottish Government, has a strategy which it has published. The UK Government doesn’t have a strategy, and I would argue that is now urgently required.”

Fish processors outlined how the extra paperwork needed for exports to the EU had added time and cost to their businesses.

Charlie Samways, of the Dorset-based fish merchant Samways founded by his grandfather 60 years ago, said there had been huge difficulties with exports since the first of January, and he had to employ a vet to get export health certificates signed off. He said he had heard “horror stories” from others in the industry.

He said in the short-term, the Government’s Seafood Disruption Support Scheme, designed to compensate businesses for losses in January, should be widened to provide funding for extra costs including driver hours, container rental, extra mileage, vet costs, admin and operational time, loss of orders, freezing fish, and loss of sales.

He said his business had planned for £200,000 extra costs due to the work needed to meet the new rules, but was unable to pass that on to customers as the service provided was worse. He said the EU and UK did not prepare borders well enough, and now businesses were being asked to pay for the result.

In the longer term, improved IT systems to simplify the paperwork could start reducing the costs. He told the hearing he was “frustrated by the feeling in the media that the Government seems to think that this is a success story for them, because it really isn’t.”

Mr Samways had earlier described to the BBC how a single lorry of fish needed 71 pages of paperwork to be accepted into France.

Fishing industry consultant Robin Turner said the cost of extra bureaucracy was adding between £750 and £1,000 to the cost of a two-tonne van load of crustaceans being shipped to France, but that could be reduced by streamlining IT systems to cut down on form-filling.

He said leaving the EU had damaged the market for UK businesses, pushing prices down, after they had been supplying the best products for the best prices. “What we’ve effectively done is we’ve cut off both our legs by leaving the EU,” he said.

Mr Turner added: “This is going to be of no economic benefit to the fishermen, no economic benefit to the processor, buyer, seller, et cetera, et cetera, and I find that very, very heartbreaking to see that scenario playing out.”

He doubted whether attempts to grow the UK market would be successful now after years of trying, because of cheaper imports.

Mr Turner recommended that Plymouth should work with Roscoff in Brittany to co-ordinate export paperwork and support the licensing of the French port for molluscs, as currently exports from the area had to go via Portsmouth to Caen, adding extra time and cost.

Andrew Truss, a fish merchant based in Looe, Cornwall, said the extra export procedures had made it “very difficult” because of the expense involved, as any profit margin was being eaten up by extra costs. He told the hearing the EU was the biggest market, but as a small merchant sending smaller consignments, the extra paperwork and cost made it unviable.

Sarah Holmes, legal director of Womble Bond Dickinson solicitors, said the unavoidable trade barriers facing the fishing industry as a result of leaving the single market were apparent four years ago, but there was little information provided by the Government on the changes required, or advance preparations being made at ports.

She said: “You can see the scale of bureaucracy that has descended on the sector. It is a permanent loss of competitiveness for British fishing vessels and their produce in their biggest market.”

She said a small business could find the cost of an export health certificate being greater than their profit margin on a small consignment. Ms Holmes added: “I think for the fishing sector, there has been a great deal of prejudice caused by a lack of knowledge, a lack of understanding, about the real impacts of leaving the European Union.”

Ms Holmes said there needed to be evidence-based honest discussion and evaluation with politicians and the industry about what was needed to facilitate continuing fisheries exports. She said the main barrier was the UK’s refusal to agree alignment with the EU, which meant that evidence of standards would need to be provided which was a heavy burden, especially for smaller exporters.

UK fishing boats could land suitable catch in EU ports, as a boat from Newlyn had done in Brest in northern France this week, but that would affect the local fishing-based economies. She said there had been no gain for trade with the rest of the world, with no new markets opened up.

She said it was hard to see how MPs in the South West could be effective in achieving improvements in policy to benefit the industry, because they had over several years voted to consolidate considerable power in the hands of the Government, without adequate accountability or scrutiny by Members of Parliament.

She said there were a wide range of terms of how post-Brexit trade arrangements could have ended up, but the political choices resulted in “the greatest possible barriers to trade for fishery produce”.

Darren Winter, chair of the council’s Brexit scrutiny committee, said: “The difference between what was promised to our fishermen and exporters and to the wider industry is markedly different to the actual reality which we currently have.

“Rather than making things easier, we now have a situation where there is more red tape. We are less competitive, our quality of fish is suffering under the amount of paperwork and transactions which are required.”

He said the hearing was important to give the fishing industry a voice so that the challenges could be acknowledged honestly, and the council could play a part in helping to make a success of Brexit. The committee will produce a set of recommendations for the city council to take forward.