§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr. Ben Bradshaw)The Prime Minister's Strategy Unit report"Net Benefits: A Sustainable and Profitable Future for UK Fishing" is published today.
The report concludes that the UK fishing industry can be profitable and sustainable in the long term, provided that it modernises to meet global competition.
56WS The report offers an extremely valuable and detached analysis of the situation in British fishing, which we believe offers the Government, the industry and everyone else with an interest the catalyst for moving forward. The report's broad conclusions are:
The Government should clearly define its economic, social, environmental and safety goals for the fishing industry and fishing communities.The aim should be to foster and support a competitive, profitable and sustainable UK fleet.Compliance with the rules by the UK fishing industry and other member states should be improved.UK fisheries management should be further modernised and be more decentralised and flexible.The fishing industry must be more fully incorporated into the broader marine management process, with a balanced set of rights and responsibilities.We should actively encourage and support progressive regionalisation of EU management under the CFP.Government policies should recognise and support vulnerable fishing dependent communities.Fisheries management should play a full and equal role in wider systems of managing the marine environment.These are underpinned by a large number of more specific recommendations. They all demand a more developed partnership approach with the industry if implementation is to be successful.
The Government welcome publication of the report, supports all the report's broad conclusions and will now explore and discuss the report in depth. It is important that this is a fully inclusive process. Our aim is for the fisheries departments in the UK to work closely in partnership with each other, and in collaboration with the industry and other stakeholders, to work up practicable and deliverable solutions, building on the proposals and recommendations in the report. Defra have already set up a team to take this process forward, which will be consulting actively with stakeholders over the coming months. A strategy, and a timetable for delivering it, will be agreed by the end of 2004.