In the early years of this century, when the use of the seabed was still regulated by the Crown Estate, the sea lochs of mid-Argyll were affected by a rash of speculative applications for the installation of mussel farms. The Crown Estate were not then charging fees for scoping applications, with the result that anyone could apply to site anything, anywhere, for free. One of the would-be entrepreneurs who latched on to this was a Scottish sea captain, who whiled away his shipboard time making numerous applications in our immediate area. Had these been granted, several bays that are in constant use by kayakers and boating people would have effectively become out of bounds, with considerable impacts on the local micro-economy, which relies heavily on summer visitors and the leisure industry.
Some of us locally organised a petition and the resultant publicity put a stop to this nonsense, with one exception. A Swiss-owned company called Celtic Sea Limited, owned by Dr Philippe Heiniger and Cornelia Heiniger of Aarau, Switzerland, managed to obtain revival of an old consent to instal a unit near Asknish Bay, curiously and in breach of Crown Estate guidelines without their application being advertised.
The Heinigers obtained financial support from the then Scottish Executive to establish their project. While the latter no doubt felt it laudable to encourage a new enterprise, even when it damaged existing ones, one has to consider the chances of a Scottish entrepreneur getting consent to try something similar on a Swiss lake.
The original lease of the Asknish site had been obtained many years earlier, but the unit there had failed due, it seems, to the prevalence of curious creatures known colloquially as sea squirts. These are disgusting, jelly-like things, that quickly colonise any available ropes and render them uninhabitable by other creatures. This was why the original consent had lapsed. The result is that we now have a single line of unused floats, several hundred metres long, which is left in place to ensure that the statutory consents are not lost. It’s a fact not much remarked upon that in our neo-liberal age any consent, be it a planning permission, a Crown Estate lease, or a fish quota has a commercial value.
Regarding the last of these, when concepts such as Total Allowable Catch and Fixed Quota Allocation were first developed about forty five years ago as part of the European Common Fisheries Policy it was left to individual countries to regulate how these would be administered. Quota was initially distributed, free of charge, on the basis of what the various fishing fleets had been doing historically. It would have been competent, legally, for governments to insist on it being surrendered on leaving fishing, but successive United Kingdom governments have allowed anyone retiring from the industry to sell his quota to a new entrant. Further, it’s not essential for the purchaser actually to own a suitable vessel, or to be in any way local, or to have any intention himself to fish. The result is that 80% of English quota is now owned by other nationals, mainly Dutch or Danish, Scottish less so, but concentrated mainly in five or six North east families. It’s extremely difficult to find out who is ultimately in control, because the larger vessels are invariably owned by companies, with shareholders frequently entities in tax havens.
The effect of this is that if you wish to do some actual fishing and catch a quota species your required permission will cost you more than your boat. As was remarked by a retired fisherman at a meeting I was at, “it’s like cutting two rungs off the bottom of the ladder”.
It seems that most countries have a similar problem; it would be interesting to know if any has insisted on surrender rather than sale. In Canada these non-fishing investors are termed “slipper skippers”. Under the European Convention on Human Rights, much reviled by the Brexiters who supported “getting back control” of fishing, such quota is a right of property, which cannot be taken away without compensation.
Michael Gove is insisting on a deal on fisheries being in place by 30 June, which is eight weeks away. To date the United Kingdom has not yet tabled its proposed solution. Things haven’t moved on at all since the Greenpeace article referred to.
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