 Fyglwyddiad, fawr! Felly maen nhw i ddim yn y 7 beth rydych chi wedi ddiwedd yn y Llyfrgell Fyglwydd, i gyflym, yn y cyfgrifedd y mae'r ysgol ynghylch mor hwnnw, oeddem eich iawn i siŵr i siŵr iawn. Felly mae'r mathan ddangosir ymwrdd a'i bwrdd mwy o'r llwyr o hyd yn y gyfgrifedd yn fawr o fwrdd ymwrdd ymweld ymwrdd i ffwrdd, i gyd yn fyw i'r pandym. ond Fishing, Firth of Clyde Order 2022, SSI 2022-35. I welcome to the meeting. Our first panel consists of fishing organisations. We have Simon McDonnell, the chair of the West Coast Regional Insure Fisheries Group, Sean McElrath, the Galloway Static Gear Association, Alistair Bally Philp, the national coordinator of the Scottish Cruel Fishermen's Federation and Elaine White, the executive secretary from the Clyde Fishermen's Association. We have about 45 minutes for questions this morning. I'm going to kick off some of our first questions to all the panellar. What impacts will the closure have on fishers in the Clyde? And specifically, what extent has the changes made in the revised number two order and how will it mitigate those impacts? If we start with Simon, please. Good morning. The whole thing will have an effect to a degree on the fishers. Not as great as was originally forecast to be. I got called the evening before the announcement was made that there would be the corresponding closure, but all the exceptions were being removed. Of course, there were a lot of hurried calls back and forward. We had a meeting a few days later with Marine Scotland and other stakeholders to discuss the matter further. It was decided that there would be an area that could still be opened for fishing. Generally, cod do not spawn on mud. They will spawn on rocky, shingly and gravel areas instead. The Llangosteen or nephrop fishery in the Clyde is a very important sector of our fisheries. It is so important and vital that the fishery should continue. Joins and plans were brought up at the meeting to show clearly the areas that would have to be closed off because that is where the cod were reckoned to be actually spawning. It was leaving a good corridor open, covering all the muddy area. Since then, the decision has been made to cut some of the muddy area off so that it does not encroach on the cod a very sensitive to sound. That was to prevent the cod from being spooked and not spawning. There is still an area for fishing to continue. That applies to both mobile and static gear. I know that there are concerns about the area being reduced, so it means that there are issues possibly pertaining to conflict with trollers and creel bouts. Sean McElraith, please. The only thing that I first heard about this closure is that I am fishing for Lobster and Crab, coming out from Loch Rhine and fishing up to the Bininghead, the Smorfer Ballantrae and now all our gear has been in that area in this closed box. It feels like it has been a sneak attack because we did not know anything about that. I heard it online through Facebook, believe it or not, and it was like I had one month to shift my gear. The weather has been really bad, which was a struggle to get it over the line to comply. We had some gear over the line by the closing date, but the weather hurt on the last big storm and we have lost some creels out of it. I suppose that we have had an impact already. We have no really had much fishing done since then, but it is certainly going to be a struggle to work out the new ground and stuff like that. By the time we work that out, it is going to open again and move. Obviously, we have got bigger expenses of diesel and stuff like that for steaming about. We are all working out a gyrdyn, but then that will become tidal and we cannot leave or catch in there safe. We would have to be left at the sea and stored, obviously at risk of weather and stuff like that. We have the added pressure of harburgers for gyrdyn, so it is all in all, it is not a very good start for us. The impacts of the original proposal were quite devastating across all the sectors. The whole southern part of the Clyde looked like it was going to be closed. The mitigations from the changed proposal certainly alleviates the impacts for some of the Clyde vessels. However, for the static gear boats that are working, the prawn fishery, which is a fishery that takes place on the soft mud, I do not think that the amended proposal mitigates anything for them. I appreciate that the mitigated proposal opens up about 30 per cent of the area that was previously proposed to be closed, and that that area is mostly net drops, ground soft mud. However, it is worth noting that you cannot fish prawn keels in the same area as you have prawn trawlers. The business regulatory impact assessment refers to keel ground. I am not quite sure what that is. I think that it means hard ground where the trawlers do not work, where maybe the cab and the lobster fishery stake place. However, keel ground is exactly the same thing as trawl ground when it comes to the nephrops fishery. Unless there is some sort of spatial management or allocation of zones for keels and for trawlers, opening up nephrops, ground or muddy areas within the Clyde does nothing to alleviate the problem for the keel boats. They are essentially disbarred from fishing those areas if those areas are going to be occupied by trawlers at the same time. I think that what that means is that for the few nephrops keel boats that are impacted, the impacts are quite dramatic and the mitigations from the amended policy do nothing to lessen that. The business and regulatory impact assessment does acknowledge that the smallest keel boats will have the biggest trouble moving, so it explicitly acknowledges that the impacts will be greatest for those boats, but we do not see any kind of proposals to mitigate for those boats who we are already acknowledging are the most adversely impacted. For a small group of boats, especially the nephrops keel boats, I would say that the impacts are quite dramatic and the changed policy does nothing to mitigate that. I think that the first thing to say is that trust in process has been a massive impact, because a lot of fishermen still do not understand even why that has happened because of the speed and the confusion with the level of consultation. I will say that there were a number of consultations that came out or were revised, and I had fishermen phoning me saying, have I actually responded to this already or haven't I? It was such a confusing landscape for them that I was confused about how fast things were moving. Financially, of course, it has had a massive impact. We have had mobile boats that have lost areas, but more significantly, we have had keel boats that have completely lost their areas and have no other option to go anywhere. I personally have three families who are directly impacted by this. The wording use was a short impact, but it is not a short impact. It is three months of no income for boats with hardly any warning to do anything else to diversify to go anywhere else. That is not a short impact. More long-term, the impact is markets. We have just come through Covid, we have just come through Brexit, and we are trying to build up our EU markets again. Those are the markets that particularly the live and fresh boats will be reliant on. We are talking about strangling supply over about four months of the year, and that will have a massive impact on who wants to work with us going forward in terms of the EU. You are putting us at a regional disadvantage to other areas in the UK and other EU countries such as Ireland or various other places that can supply that product. We have asked whether there would be some kind of compensation for those men, because they did not have warning of what is happening, and we have not heard anything back from that yet. We will commend a lot of our MSPs who have done the best that they can to do that, but to pursue that. The static gear obviously cannot move. I would say that our fleet in the Clyde has been reduced by 50 per cent over the past few years anyway, but they are very old boats. They are the oldest ageing boat in the whole of Scotland. They are not safe to be going out in various other areas. They do not have that option, so I think that that is very concerning. Also, the increased effort is a concern because it is not a large area, so you are going to have potentially keel or keel boats fighting other keel boats, you are going to have mobile conflict with other keel boats. It is causing a lot of conflict, and I think that the main issue is that that should have went through the IFGs. It should have been fully explained to fishermen in terms of what was happening. I think that, if there had been engagement with the local fishermen, we could have come up with a system that would have worked. I think that the massive impact here is the lack of science and how that can negatively affect management and fisheries going forward, and we really need to get that sorted out. Thank you. I have a supplementary from Mercedes Villalba. Thank you. I think that it was raised by Simon about cod not spawning in muddy areas, but I understand that the evidence on that is not conclusive. In Sweden, cod has been found to spawn in a muddy sheltered body of water that is similar to the Clyde. I was interested to hear from the witnesses whether they feel that more research should be done into this before a decision is made. Simon, would you like to respond to that? Yes, indeed. With this whole thing, there was really a great lack of consultation beforehand. As I had stated earlier, I was only informed of this the evening before the announcement was actually made. It did not give me any time to then work on informing the other fishers. The science evidence seems to be very sketchy and has not really been carried out for quite some time. There is a great need to have more scientific evidence and a concentration on that in that very important area. It needs to be done now while we still have a fishery. That does not just affect the boats but all the coastal communities around the processors, the holliers, local businesses and suppliers to the fishermen and even the local coroner shops are going to be affected because there are so many fishermen left with absolutely no income. However, we need to have a strong effort on the scientific aspect to establish exactly where the cod spawns in the Clyde. I would be most surprised to see whether the cod spawns on the muddy area. I am interested to hear from Mr MacDonald about the science around that. I have conveyed that. I am slightly disappointed that we do not have Governments scientists here today. I would be interested to know your view about the science here and particularly the science around the decision to move away from the initial proposals from the Government and what you have been informed about that. I still feel that there has not been sufficient scientific input over the years or certainly in recent times to establish the full pattern of exactly where the cod spawns. It is given that they would generally spawn on the rockier ground rather than on the mud. However, we need a strong backup on that to establish the total facts. The Clyde closure is nothing new. It has been going for the past 20 years or so and was instigated by the Clyde fishermen themselves. If you want a conservationist to ask a fisherman because their livelihood and their future and their family's future depend on the conservation of the stops in the waters to which they fish. It is so important that the scientific assessment is brought up to date. I hope that we will get that some more on that next week. I would like to ask Alasdair Philip again about how stakeholders were involved in the process of moving away. Obviously, the areas closed were reduced by some 28 per cent. How were stakeholders consulted in that process? There was an online meeting with Marine Scotland where they announced that they were considering looking at various options and the present proposal was shared. There were a couple of maps displayed to the people present. One was something called BMS, so it is vessel monitoring system maps. It showed where the intensity of fishing was in the Clyde. Although it is worth noting that BMS is only installed in vessels over 12 metres, so it predominantly showed for the activities of the trawl and the dredge fleet were within the Clyde. We were shown another set of maps that showed the seabed substrate, the mud and the shale and rocks and so on. What Marine Scotland suggested was that because they thought mud was not an ideal spawning ground and the BMS showed where the fishing activity was by allocating the area that they had identified, they would maximise the amount of ground that they could open up to the fishing industry, while we minimised the impacts of that process on the cod spawning. We objected at the time because the BMS was identifying areas that were predominantly operated in by trawl and dredge fleet, which is good for them. Obviously, that does not mitigate the impacts on the creel fleet. We requested that there was some sort of mitigation to introduce for the creel fleet, but that was not accepted at that time. As I understand it, the closure came into effect on 14 February. Can you say a bit about to what extent fishermen—or can you explain to the committee to what extent fishermen are still able to fish and whether you feel that there are any issues around compliance on that? For those people who removed their gear in time before the gales struck, I think that, for those guys, they either abandoned their gear where it is or they have moved their gear somewhere else, but if they have not had the opportunity to move their gear, they are in a bit of a sticky predicament. I do believe that there have been some negotiations with compliance about opening up the option for people whose gear is essentially trapped in the closed area to access the gear to remove it, but that still begs the question of where exactly should they be moving it to. Elaine White, would you like to respond to that line of questioning? Yes, of course. It is predominantly my members, both static and mobile, who were impacted by the closure. To be honest, if your belly is entirely correct, they could not even access the gear. Initially, we did have to negotiate that. In terms of the science, how do I feel it has been operated in terms of compliance? We have a significant compliance presence there. The men are feeling particularly intimidated by it because we have a very good record of the compliance in the Clyde. As Simon pointed out, it was our association that led on the cod box and led on the no-take zone in the Clyde, so we are very compliant fishermen and we are very concerned about the science. In terms of what we might need for the science, I think that I said in a report explaining that the biomass is four times higher in the Clyde to what it was a number of years ago, but the science is absolutely essential because we have issues with predation. Cod will never probably recover. There are temperature issues in terms of where it moves, but if we have massive predation issues with pelagic stock with four times what it used to be, they eat the eggs. We have escaped, we have dogfish, and we have various things that we are calling out for science on. Our fishermen helped to work with Marine Scotland and St Andrews University, who I hope are giving evidence today, to do the only Clyde trolls that we have to have an idea where the spawning could potentially take place. However, I think that Simon is right that cod is not strong enough for work. I think that all fishermen have been impacted by this because the stress of it has been quite unbelievable. If you have been through Brexit, Covid and everything else that has happened, the mobile men have lost ground. Some of the static men cannot fish at all. I do not think that that is strong enough in terms of basing that on. From our part as an organisation, we want to do the absolute best that we can to help to support that science in going forward. However, we really have to have it because we are the Forgotten Coast and we are going to end up with no fishing in that area. What is your assessment of the evidence, the reasoning, the process and the science that underpinned the prohibition proposals that led to the Scottish Government removing the exemptions on the Clyde? If you could give examples to develop that, that would be fantastic. I think that the whole process has been quite diabolical. I think that it is hard to argue that it was not anything but. As far as the evidence and the reasoning goes, I think that it really lacks as well. My understanding is that the cod box was put in place 20-odd years ago with the exemptions in place from day 1. Any reasonable person would have seen that it was destined to fail. Whether you can recover cod tall is an interesting question. We must understand that most of the previously targeted fish species in the Clyde have the same fate as the cod that is commercially extinct. There are some other species that have in turn replaced them, such as the dogfish that Elaine mentioned, and they are biting in such a way to fulfil the ecological niches that the other fish species that have disappeared occupied. We have seen a very crass knee-jerk reaction from Marine Scotland to an overwhelming consultation response that critiqued the failures of the cod box to achieve what it said it was going to achieve in the first place. The rationale for it is seriously lacking. The process did not involve the stakeholders properly, so there is this thing called the business and regulatory impact assessment process. There is a toolkit for it online and it explains how Marine Scotland or how any Government agency should go around looking at policy options. The first thing that it should do is identify the rationale for the intervention. I do not think that it started at the beginning. I think that it started halfway through the process. There should be analysis of what the market failure or previous policy should be and what is the evidence base for developing the policy. That is right at the beginning. That is the opening paragraph of the business and regulatory impact assessment process. I do not think that that was done. I am no scientist here, but my understanding is that the whole Clyde ecosystem is a substantially modified ecosystem. If we want to look at cod recovery, we have to look at it in the context of, well, we have got to start with the question of what happened to the cod and we have not even asked that question yet. My understanding and again I am no scientist is that the use of extensive use of mobile gears in the Clyde over nearly a, you know, I think it is, certainly since the female element opened in the 80s and before that in the 60s when the outer Clyde was open, substantially modified the habitat and the ecosystem and that it may not even be possible to recover the Clyde without attempting to recover the whole Clyde ecosystem. Therefore, having a sort of knee jerk reaction based around the, I think, Marine Scotland called it disturbance, that was the word they used. They said they did not want the cod to be disturbed, but I have yet to see any sort of evidence from NatureScot suggesting that if you stopped disturbing cod suddenly they would bounce back in the Clyde. I know that I am thinking about hearing from Pulitzer Post, but my point is that the whole process was a farce right from the beginning. Even right from the point of nobody has identified exactly what the objective of the measures is or if we can measure the output, you know, from what I have seen of the science, we could ban all fishing in the cod box and then have no reasonable way of measuring whether or not that exceeded and from what I understand there is a lot of skepticism from within the fishing industry and the scientific community that it is even possible to succeed in recovering cod using this mechanism. I would have thought that they should have started with asking the question, what happened to the cod, what can they do about it and what does the science and evidence say should be done about it. Everything that is derived from this failure right at the beginning is just a farce to be honest with you. I do not see if there is any credibility in the process or in the science or in the procedure or in the evidence for doing what we are doing. Can I ask Elaine the same question? Do you want me to repeat it? No, I think that I remember it. I think that the main issue here, the rationale, the process has been incredibly confusing. I mean, I think that the fact that we are sitting here discussing this in the second of March and it has been in since the 14th of February is testament to that in terms of how the stakeholders feel. I think that we are moving into the area of managing fisheries by campaigning, as opposed to by data and science and process, and I think that that is a very worrying precedent. Bally had mentioned whether the troll fisheries have had impact. I think that, to be honest with you, we need science to prove whatever is happening in the area, but we have got a lower than 1 per cent by-catch, which I believe is a lowest by-catch, and I think that it was in the EU. Earthlets are very, very selective. They have 300 square metre panels to make sure that we are not catching fish. That is one thing that we have observed trips on. I think that the science that we have on baseline stocks is very, very poor, and Bally is right. What are we going to consider the improvements with? If we close this area, how are we going to compare it with what was happening before? We have very limited survey about what was happening before. We cannot be comparing it to—I mean, the science that we have in terms of whether there is a rationale for it or not. The NIF report that is in Trixbeth, Glensales and Arata are right as well. What we are comparing it to the North Sea and Iceland is a very different type of fishery. We should definitely be looking to what is happening in Northern Ireland and how they have engaged their fishermen in their cod box and how they have tried to develop a system that would offer the right predictions and monitor the science continually. As well, it is really important to say that the initial consultation, the indication of the preference from Marine Scotland was a rollover of what has happened for the last 20 years, because we are going through a review of how we manage fisheries. For this year, it was very misleading to a lot of the people who would have consulted on it or responded to it who felt that it was going to be a rollover. They did not know that any of that was coming. It was a complete blindside. We are told that it fits in with the house agreement agenda. We need to know what is happening. I have mentioned the Bria. We should have detailed socioeconomic analysis of what that will mean to small communities. As I said, we are talking about very small boats here. Even the small mobile fleet is a small mobile fleet. We are not talking about industrial trollers. Those communities are so reliant. Those free boats that I am talking about now have absolutely no income. Nobody has considered them at all. There has been no compensation. Rational engagement is essential, as is science. We cannot keep forgetting about this area. If I can give a practical example, we had a skeleton survey done about two and a half years ago, which was only the result of a cancelled pelagic survey in the North Sea, which allowed some signs in the west coast to prove. It showed that we have some very healthy socks in the Clyde and Scallops. It is a different area, but it gave us a far better idea of what was happening, in only because it was a cancelled survey from the North Sea. We need to have reliable data sources, and fishermen are willing to help in any way that they can to work with neutral sciences in the Government to make sure that we do not have processes like that. It is blindsided people. It is lost trust. I cannot justify it. I thank the panellists for coming along. I am sure that there is clearly a lot of very strong feelings here. I am just trying to get my head round. There seems to be an awful lot of competing pressures on the cod box. There seems to be lots of different types of boats going out there. How do we get the balance right in order to allow the three boats that you are talking about, Elaine? Even more so now, I am more concerned that we do not have the Government scientists here to answer that, because, clearly, those people have issues that they want answered by the Government scientists. We have not got a lot of time. How do we get the balance in the future for all the competing pressures that we see, whether it is on cod, creelers or trollers? How do we balance it? Simon, would you like to come in on that? I think that, with the science, there needs to be a very comprehensive analysis carried out in the area as to why the cod numbers are not there. I would not necessarily put the blame at the door of the fishermen. In fact, I would say that the fishermen are way down the food chain when it comes to apportioning any blame for the lack of cod in the area, as Elaine rightly pointed out. The troll nets are fitted with escape panels, so the cod are not getting trapped. Creels are low for nephrops in particular. The eyes of the creels are quite small, so you tend not to get too many cod getting in there, so it is very low in the catch. I would look at the likes of the predators, in particular the spherodogs, which are becoming more and more prolific in the area. They are voracious predators, and I think that that is the area where we really have to concentrate the science on to establish exactly where the issues are lying. I am very concerned for the smaller vessels as well, particularly lobster boats, where they are fishing very close to the shore, and they have absolutely zero income until the closure is lifted. I worry for their future. I should have stated at the start that my cell is a fisherman in the Galloway Static gear association that has been affected. As Elaine said, there is no strong evidence, so I have told her that closing the area is going to work. I would like to see something like that happening, but I do not know whether I can put all the boats into the same area to fish. It is not what I would like to see neither, because I think that we will get gear conflict that I think was mentioned before. Obviously, as it goes to recover, and just back to what Simon said in Elaine with the predator spherodog, my worry as well is that the seal population is everywhere, and they have deep something as well. I am worried about that, but I just need evidence like that, because it is obviously very work. I will put men out of jobs at the moment for what I can see you like. Jenny Minto. Just a very quick question to expand on some of the evidence that Elaine and Bally have given. You have both referenced how fishermen can support the science. Can you give some specific examples? Also, if you could expand a bit on the work that has happened in Northern Ireland as well, thank you. Elaine, would you like to kick off? Yes, of course. Obviously, we have structures in place. Somebody had mentioned about conflict and how we can resolve it by getting the science right. We have IFGs so that we can engage as fishermen, and we also have IFMAX and IFMAX so that we can engage as a multi-dimensional stakeholder group so that everyone from the NGOs to fishermen can engage. Those are the right forums to be talking about how we take science forward. Obviously, I explained that we had done some very limited trials working with Marine Scotland and working with St Andrews University. It was a very useful exercise but very limited. We can do those things in minimum resource. If you look at what they do in Norway, they have a reference fleet and they work with their fishermen to monitor everything from temperature to spawning grounds, which means that they can close a spawning area for three weeks and open it back up again and be that reflexive. That would be my ideal. We get to a point where we are actually working together. My concern is that there has been a real loss of trust, and we want to try and rebuild that as quickly as possible. We do not want to be in the opposite end of the table from our Government or we want to be working with our Government and scientists and our fellow fishermen. The best way is to look at what they have done in Northern Ireland in continual assessments, working with your fleet and working with really good neutral scientists. We need to stop making policy on campaigns. We need to start working together on sensible facts. I have another point in that as well, which was raised by Sean Brot in the predation with SEALs. I know that the two types of SEALs that we have in the Clyde are the common SEAL, Fokker Vitulina and the grey SEAL, Helicorps Gryffords. They need between five and nine kilos of fish per day to keep them going. That accounts for a lot of fish stock in the area as well. That is on top of the spherodog that we have already discussed earlier, which is a veratius predator as well. This really is an area that science has to consider and look at very closely. Government has the powers to turn around and say, right of cave, that we are closing off the fishery for the area and you cannot catch anything there. We have to look at the actual problem below the waves to establish where the issue is coming from. We have heard in some of the answers to questions this morning and responses to the call for views, concerns about the decision making process and decisions being made without consultation, without much warning and also being inconsistent with policy commitments. I would be interested in the panel's view on what impact that has had on trust, which Elaine reference just now. What impact has this had on trust in decision making and collaboration between Government and industry on fisheries management? As a consequence of the handling of the order, how do you think that fisheries co-management across Scotland might be impacted in the future? I do not think that it is any secret that the Scottish Cove Fishmen's Federation—sorry, was that myself? No, go for it, continue. I do not think that it is any secret that the Scottish Cove Fishmen's Federation are quite contentious of existing policies or the failure to implement existing policies and rules and regulations, and we have very little confidence in Marine Scotland in their existing fisheries policy and their facilitating of it. I could give you one quick example. It is a little bit retrospective, but in 2014 the common fisheries policy was amended. It was meant to be a revolution in the way that we do fisheries policy. Introducing article 17, which said that member states should give preferential access to fishing opportunity based on social, economic and environmental criteria. At that point, we thought brilliant, and we are going to see the lowest impact years getting the first shout-out fishing opportunity. That is exactly what the common fisheries policy intended to achieve. We lobbied Marine Scotland for the better part of the next six years, and we never got one example of this policy being implemented even though it was EU law. Now that we are transitioning through the Brexit process, the UK legislation has introduced section 25 of the UK Fisheries Act, and it says that the administration should seek to incentivise the use of selective fishing gear. We are seeing not a single example of that. If that was applied in the Clyde, like it should have been, we would have seen preferential access to fishing opportunity allocated to those gears that did not catch cod, which substantially did not interfere with the cod's population. We would have seen diving and keeling not being impacted by those measures at all, and we would have seen dredging and trawling being impacted more so. In fact, what we are seeing is the exact opposite. What we are seeing is that the keel boats are suffering the most, even though they are the least contributing to the impacts. As far as our confidence in Marine Scotland in the process goes, this is just one more example, as far as we are concerned, of a long list of examples of Marine Scotland failing to implement existing policy or legislation competently. You saw what happened when this order was made. We saw the SFF come out and make a statement, but we are not part of the SFF. We saw CIFA partners make statements. We saw Shetland make statements about the concern about how we take co-management forward. I would say that we have worked incredibly hard with Marine Scotland, and we want to keep that relationship going. We do not want to see it disappearing. We want to fix that, although it has not been correctly handled in our view. If we can't work with our regulators within a terrible position, I made the point that the Clyde Fisherman's Association is one of the only areas where we piloted the no-take zone, working with the NGOs, piloted the cod box. We are one of the most selective gears in terms of the 300 square meter panel, etc. We are not catching cod. It seems as if, no matter what we do, the good work that we do may be penalising our area. What I am concerned about is the message that that sends out. Let's not try and do something in case it gets taken out of context. I think that Vally was just talking about who is catching cod. As I said, mobile gear is not catching cod. Another is static in any great way at all, but that is about spawning. That is one of the main issues that we have about understanding what we are talking about in terms of policies. That is about spawning cod. That is actually what is causing the confusion between fishermen as well. They think that maybe one type of gear has got preferential treatment over the other, etc. It is not. They have to understand that if that is about spawning, let's justify why it is about spawning and if that affects any gear or all gears. The whole process is under my trust. I am concerned about that, but I want to get it back on track. We need neutral science. We need to move away from people not understanding the policies and running on campaigns. We need to start getting baseline science and our door is open to help with that in any way that we can. A short supplement from Alasdair Allan. Clearly, the Government has moved its position on this and moved its position to some extent towards or at least taking account of what has been put to them by fishing interests. What is it that you would advocate that the Government should have done that they didn't do and how would they have done this in a way that would have protected, in your view, cod spawning? The process was done rather rapidly. I stated right at the beginning of the session that I had been informed just the evening before from the director of Marine Scotland about the announcement that was going before coming in the morning, announcing the cod spawning closure and advising me that all the exemptions had been removed. It left me a matter of a few hours to sort something out, which really is not sufficient time. That was coming up through a weekend. A meeting was arranged for the Monday morning with various stakeholders and Marine Scotland. Valley was in attendance at it as well and Elaine and myself. It did not leave a lot of time. We had been preparing ourselves for the worst-case scenario where the closure was going to be total. Hence, the reason for this meeting that we had was to try to give an understanding of the ground that the cod would be spawning on, as opposed to the ground that it would not be, which should remain open for the fishers. It is a little bit selective in the fact that it affects really more than effort fishery as far as the opening of the ground. The cod fishermen and crab fishermen are still hot in this area where there is a total closure. It is an impossible situation to please everybody all the time. However, it has happened very rapidly. Initially, there has been a certain amount of confusion because the exemptions would be there and they were not there and they were back again. It has damaged the faith and confidence that people have in the likes of Marine Scotland, the IFGs and Elaine as well in the Pike Fishers Association. That is something that we really have to work on to repair to get the confidence back. We are here to try to establish the situation and get everything back on track. Yes, thanks. Just a quick question for Simon, if that is okay. Earlier on, I thought you seemed to suggest that, rather than fishers, it is predators that are having the biggest impact on cod stock. However, the research that I have seen from Marine Scotland, and I think that it was in conjunction with the European Commission, stated that a drastic reduction of juvenile biting bycatch is necessary for the stocks to recover and that predation from grey seals had little impact overall. If you could share the evidence for your statement with the committee. Yes, can I ask you when that report was written? It was published 2019 February. Right. Things move rapidly just now. As we all know, we have climate change, water temperatures are changing, fish move accordingly and there have been recent reports of more particular spur dogs in the area and, as I said earlier, various predators. Seals as well. I am hearing all the time that, right up and down the west coast, there is an increase in the number of seals, both the grey seal and the common seal. I am a short, so I am afraid Jim Fairlie. What other measures should we be taking to protect the cod stocks? I think that we are pretty much covered. We need scientific evidence. We need to look at the predation side of things and we need to get an up-to-date assessment on cod numbers. We need to look at all the different factors that affect the cod. Noise is one thing as well. I remember 30 or 40 years ago at the old Tory research centre in Aberdeen and having this very well illustrated and shown to me that noise and vibration on the ground is a big factor that affects the cod. I am not a scientist and I do not pretend to be, but I observe and I take those things on board and I listen to them and I make notes on them because there comes the day when you will need that information and here is the day. I do sense a lot of frustration from you this morning in regards to not just the science that has been disputed but also the process in which Marine Scotland followed. I would like to ask you, in terms of the science, why are you disputing that? What evidence do you have that is disputing that? In terms of the process, when there is that science there, what action do you think should be taken when the science is showing a particular situation that needs action? It is just really to drill down on what is it that you are disputing here and what process. Perhaps would you have done differently from Marine Scotland if using your evidence? If we kick off with Alistair and then go to Eileen. I think from my point of view, I may be on a different perspective than the other guys. We exclusively represent killers and divers and so we are not really so much concerned with or we do not understand the detail of concerns of Lane or Simon with seals or trawl bycatch. My particular argument on the science is that it just was not used. There was no science. It should have started with a SNH or NatureScot making a recommendation. There is a group called Clyde 2020, which was convened by Richard Lochhead to look at how they could recover the Clyde ecosystem and bring it into good environmental status. They have submitted a very extensive contribution here. I think that you will hear from the author of that later on, so I will leave him to speak for himself. That makes recommendations and explains what can be done. My position on the science is that it is just that we are not using it. There is no process to describe how we are going to evaluate the outcome of this afterwards. From that point of view, there should be policies that we are applying here, the ecosystem-based approach. We should not be looking at the cod when they spawn, we should be looking at the cod throughout the whole life cycle, what predotates them, what protects them, what they have to eat through their various different size classes as they mature and do the habitats exist in the Clyde that the cod needs in order to thrive. From our point of view, we are going about this completely wrong. We should start with some scientific advice and then apply the policies and processes that are in place, such as the ecosystem-based approach. We should apply the spirit of article 17, which gives preferential access to selective gear that does not impact cod as much, and we should transition the fishing industry towards a lower impact fishery, not just for cod but for the whole of the insurer ecosystem. From my point of view, that would be the scientific approach, and we are just not taking it. The first thing that I would say is operation in silos and not having baselines. I think that that has really caused a problem, because you have heard everyone here talk about gate dogfish sales predation. I think that I have said that the biomass in the Clyde is four times higher than it was in 1949. There is the last science that was done 30 years ago on that, that was the last report on that. The fishermen on the ground are saying that there is a change in the ecosystem, but without the science to show what is changing, it is very difficult to do anything about it. What I would say is that we need to have baseline science. We need to do what Norway is doing, we need to do what Ireland is doing, we need to work with our fishermen on the ground through IFGs, through associations, however we do that, that has to happen. I am pretty sure that later on in this meeting there will be misunderstandings of what the actual process was, because if I misunderstand sometimes what the dates were and why we were doing something, that is about spawning. I am pretty sure that later on in this session we will hear people not understanding that or having it coming at it from their own angles. We all have our own angles, and we are all here to represent different people, but it has to be about the science, and we do not have that. Whilst we do not have that, we are subjected to bad decisions. We have saw that compared to things such as the North Sea scheme called closure. You cannot compare it. We do not have a cod fishery in the Clyde, we do not have one, we do not have a targeted fishery. We lost eight boats in trying to do it, eight white fish boats were lost to the Clyde because we wanted to do this closure. It was a massive hit, and I think that the thing is that we always assumed that we would be monitoring, and there was not monitoring, so we do not have any white fish boats any more. In the North Sea they have intensive monitoring, they have sampling, they can close areas off quite quickly and they will sample what is happening. It is not happening, but we maybe do not need it to happen to that level, but we certainly need it to happen. In terms of what we think we can do differently with the process, sitting with the stakeholders have a 12-week consultation, let everybody have their voice, let every sector have their voice, but then let us go back to the science and let us work together to make that science. What I would say is please, please, if I can say one thing, comparative science is important, baseline science is important, camparing and is all coming from different angles. It is not what we should be concentrating on, we should be understanding what the policy is there for. If it is about recovering cod, if we are never going to recover cod because there are different stops coming in, we have to have a basic understanding of how we will always get into this. A brief supplementary from Emma Sears and then Alistair Allan. Thank you. Just a quick question in response to Elaine's call for more science. I understand that a study was undertaken by the Scottish Oceans Institute and the Clyde Fisherman's Association and that that found early results from the study showed that the presence of spawning cod in the closed area during the closure period, which suggests that the closure is in the right place at the right time. I was just wondering if Elaine could share with us where specifically the cod are spawning according to that research and when that research is going to be published in the public domain so that we can all see it. Yeah, I think this touches on the confusion. This wasn't done by the CFA. It was done in collaboration and in partnership with the CFA, with St Andrews University and Marine Scotland because we would never do any science without Marine Scotland because we are very subject to campaigns and we want to make sure that we seem to be neutral. In terms of the four reports that were done, they were with St Andrews University and I believe they will be being published shortly. It's not to do with the CFA, we have nothing to do with the science, we just let them use our vessels. In terms of how long it's been published, we've been asking every single year since 2018 to get those trials back on place and to have it published, we've got no issue. The initial reports were published but they were signed off of the scientists in Marine Scotland. Due to Covid and Brexit, there's been a delay in that and so it's not been public. This is another thing about campaigning. We are getting a lot of people saying, oh the CFA are holding information or they know, we haven't said anything about the report, we've not said anything. That report will just say what it says and it will be up to every stakeholder to take out of it what they can. We are not saying that there's any evidence in there that suggests that there's definite warning in a certain place and that will be consistent for the next few years. What you must remember is those reports from 2018. They'll already be out of date probably. I think that Mercedes, you've just touched on why I have a concern. We have been attacked for the last few weeks over the reports that we were withholding and we know where spawning has happened. We don't and we don't say that those reports say anything. That would be up to the scientists to say that and they haven't been signed off yet, so hopefully they are soon. You haven't actually seen the report yourself? I haven't seen the report but I won't make an assessment on what it means because this is what I'm saying. This is a baseline science and I can't really send it in public until Marine Scotland and St Andrews University sit down and they agree what's there. It's basically a presentation of facts but in terms of the correlation about where the spawning takes place and does it take place there regularly and does it mean that this is in the right place, I can't assess that and I don't think that those reports can because they're very minimal. It's just scratching the surface. In as far as it's a presentation of facts, as you've just said, CFA supports the report. You don't have any issues with it when it is published. It's not about supporting or not supporting. This is about presenting baseline facts to people and actually trying to identify trends in a longer period of time, which we don't have. If we do a five-day survey once a year for three years and it's already from 2018, does that prove that the cause of spawning in specific areas? I don't think it can. It's up to the scientists to say that but what I'm saying is that we need more intense science. I think that the only exercise that this has really been very productive in achieving is getting fishermen to work with scientists to learn how they do it because it's been very minimal. Would I say that it proves one thing or the other? No, I think that we need more science and it's what we've said since the start. I appreciate that you're not going to thank me for making this point but we've just heard a call there for us to hear more about what the official science is and what the scientific data is. It's very difficult for us to have a discussion in this committee meeting today to argue those points. No, let me finish, convener. We discussed this earlier and it was a committee decision. Mr Allen, could you please stop? We've already discussed this this morning and we took a decision and we've heard it three times already. Time is very short. I don't think it needed to be put on the record again. I think that we've come to the end of the session. Is there any other questions? We'll briefly suspend until 10.30 for changeover of witnesses. Welcome back everyone and I welcome to our meeting our second panel. Our panel is maybe a bit of exaggeration but we're delighted to have Professor Michael Heath from the University of South Clyde with us. Unfortunately, we're unable to get any other academics to appear this morning due to time constraints. We've got approximately 25 to 30 minutes to ask some questions and I'll kick off. What does current scientific evidence tell us about the main factors impacting cod spawning in the Clyde and the wider marine ecosystem health? Factors affecting cod spawning are difficult to tell in the Clyde to be honest. Cods prefer temperatures of five to seven degrees centigrade in which to spawn. That's based on evidence from around most of North West Europe. Temperatures in the Clyde are rising. In the 1960s and 70s, the minimum temperature in the Clyde was between six and a half and seven degrees. By the 2000s, the minimum temperature each year was 7.1 degrees centigrade, so the temperature conditions for spawning are becoming less favourable in the Clyde, that's for sure. The numbers of cod are declining based on the limited survey evidence that we have and the catches of cod by the commercial fishery have declined. In the 1970s and 80s, the annual catch was about 1,000 tonnes in the Clyde. By 2005, the commercial catch, the commercial landings, I should say, was zero. Both the numbers and the environmental conditions for spawning are getting worse. I'm interested to hear from you what other measures could be taken to protect spawning cod, Professor Heath. I think we need to look at the history a little bit here. The original rationale for the cod bot closure back in 2001 was to reduce fishing mortality on cod. That's really clearly stated in the written evidence to support that. There was an EU working group in 2007 that reviewed fishing closure areas all around Europe, and there was a large section in that report on the Clyde cod box. It was very clearly stated that the purpose of the closure was to reduce fishing mortality. The reason for that was that, as cod stocks declined in the Irish Sea, trawlers from Ireland were coming to the Clyde to catch spawning cod in March and April. That area of the cod box in the Clyde is a really important spawning area for cod regionally in the Irish Sea and the south west Scotland generally. A very large proportion of the cod catch in the 1980s and 1990s in that region came from that one IC statistical rectangle that represents the closure box, and mostly in March and April when spawning was taking place. That was the original purpose of the closure, to protect them from fishing mortality. The new measures have shifted the goalposts and they talk about the protection of cod from disturbance. That's something quite different. The rationale there is to try to increase egg production, and that's based on the hope that you'll get more recruits, more young of the year coming through into the stock. The science for that is completely lacking. There's no scientific justification for that shift in the goalposts or the rationale for the closure. The withdrawal of the exemptions for fishing gears that don't catch spawning cod is justified in terms of increasing egg production. There's no evidence that that's going to carry through to increase juveniles. My question was what other measures could be taken? Well, it's clear that in terms of locally in the Clyde, the cod box hasn't had the desired effect of recovering the cod stock. So what are the measures? Well, you have to look for what the other sources of mortality are, and we've heard about predation, and that may be the case, but that's not a lever that we can pull in terms of fisheries management. The other remaining source of mortality on cod that we can influence is the by-catch in the nephrox trawl fishery. The nephrox trawl fishermen have made huge efforts to reduce that in recent years. They've really gone a long way, but it still remains that the by-catch of cod in the nephrox trawl fishery is about 100 tonnes a year. That's based on Marine Scotland and SFF by Observer Sampling Data, and that represents less than 2 per cent of the total biomass catch by those trawlers. Within the regulations that they can do that, nevertheless, that 100 tonnes represents 2 million fish. The average size of the fish that are caught in that by-catch is 15 centimetres, and there are about 46 grams, so 100 tonnes is 2 million fish. A very rough estimate of how many cod that are in the Clyde is about 3.5 million fish, of all sizes, from the smallest to the biggest. 2 million fish in by-catch is a significant fraction of the total cod stock. If we had to look at a management measure that we could address to go beyond the effectiveness of the spawn enclosure, it would have to be that. How we do that without detrimental effects on the very important nephrox trawl fishery is another matter. I think that we have to be really creative about how that can be done in terms of where and when and how we fish. Thank you, Professor Heath, for giving us the bigger picture. I want to dive in a little bit more detail there. You were talking about predation and by-catch. Is there any evidence that aquaculture and its side effects, including sea lice and pesticides, have an impact on cod populations? I think that I can say that there is no evidence about the relationship between cod and aquaculture. Is that because we have not done any research in that area? That would be right, yes. That is maybe something worth looking at, seeing as we are hearing this morning about the fluidity, to use a water word, the fluidity of the nature of the Clyde area that we are discussing and the changes that are happening there. I think that you could make a case for researching the relationship between cod and aquaculture. You could also make a case for researching the relationship between the habitat for juvenile fish, the juvenile cod, seagrass beds and the sensitivity of them and the need to reinforce and protect seagrass beds in the areas of inshore habitat that are very, very important. It is an essential fish habitat for the juvenile cod. There are many aspects that we could research, yes. That seems like we need to be going in that direction, so I am just going to take that a little bit further and into that bigger picture. The joint fisheries statement will require Scotland to develop more fisheries management plans, but, in your view, does Scotland need an overarching fisheries management plan to address systemic pressures on fish stocks and marine ecosystems and bring about a just transition to sustainable fisheries? What should be the key principles within that plan? I really appreciate your perspective. There is certainly an overarching need for a more ecosystem approach to the way in which we manage fisheries, but the science to support that is going to be very expensive. We need very strong baseline studies and a clear strategy for measuring the effectiveness of the measures that we take. It needs to be a bit experimental. There is not a clear answer to what is the one thing that we should do. It will vary from area to area. It will vary enormously from between the North Sea and the west of Scotland. There are completely different systems in terms of geomorphology, sedimentology and fisheries economics, species and everything, so it is a great ambition to have something like that, but it is very expensive to implement. To defer to the guys in marine Scotland science, they are extremely short of resources, as we all are. I have cut Jenny Mintoff before she finished a line of questioning. You said that there is no way to mitigate the trigger on predation, and yet in the previous panel we have heard an awful lot about predation of dogfishing and various other things as well as seals. If you have two million young cod being taken out by nephrod nets, are you saying that there is no way back for cod in the cod box? The cod box is an ephemeral thing. The thing about cod is that they congregate in very specific areas to spawn. They have done that for centuries. Those areas are very long-established. The cod will gather into the cod box area from a much wider area than the cod box. They use that area to spawn and then disperse again. The cod box is to protect those very dense aggregations of cod. It is like taking a rifle to the zoo. It is so dense that it is easy to catch them in that cod box. They attract fishing boats in unless there is some regulation to prevent that happening. That is why the cod box is there, to protect those very dense ephemeral spawning aggregations at a particular time of year. The question about how the cod are affected when they are not in the scorn in cod box is that, during the rest of the year, when they are dispersed out into the wider area of the Clyde and, indeed, the north channel and the Northern Irish Sea, there is a different question that is not covered by the cod box. That is why we need to think about other measures that may be needed to protect cod such as habitat enhancement for juvenile fish, looking more closely at the issue of by-catch. That was kind of where I was going to next. What are you suggesting that they actually do? Just taking up what you said about the nephrop by-catch, that is a huge amount of fish. If there is only three and a half million fish in the cod box and they are taking out two million of them every year, what do we do to protect the cod? I did not say that there are three and a half million in the cod box. I said that there are three and a half million in the Clyde. That includes the very tiniest ones to the very biggest fish. The spawning fish, we do not have a very good estimate of the real stock in the Clyde. There just are not the data there. There has not been the attention to the Clyde as a focus to gather enough data to do a good stock assessment. However, back at the envelope calculations, it suggests that there might be 100,000 actual mature spawning cod in the Clyde. Out of the three and a half million fish that are in the Clyde, the rest are all immature fish. The vast majority of the fish are immature. There are very few, perhaps 100,000, spawning cod. Some of those are going to the cod box. Some of the fish in the cod box will have come from outside the Clyde, perhaps from the Mull of Galloway from the North Channel. It is a very fluid situation over an annual cycle. They are not staying in the same place all the time. Can I have some clarification? In an early response, I thought you indicated that there was potentially two million cod caught in Nefron as a by-catch. That would suggest that two-thirds of the whole population of cod in the Clyde is caught as a by-catch. That seems quite incredible. Is that absolutely right? Two-thirds of the total population of cod in the Clyde is caught as a by-catch of the Nefron fishery? As a back of the envelope calculation, that is what it looks like. There are 100 tonnes of cod as caught as by-catch. There is not much argument about that. It is a very small fraction of what is taken by the Nefron strollers in terms of their total catch, but they are all very, very small fish. The natural mortality rate due to predation of those very small fish is also very high. A lot of the fish that are consumed by a spur dog and seals are those small fish. There is an enormous predation loading on those very young fish. Quite naturally, it is not special to the Clyde that the predation mortality of young cod is very high wherever you go. The by-catch is part of that. I think that I have understood that you are saying that the main factors that impact cod spawning by-catch is the biggest one that we have the potential to do something about. With that in mind, do you think that spatial management can be a tool to reduce trawling by-catch? I am thinking about having differentiation between different types of fishing in different areas. Is that a useful route to go down? The by-catch is not influencing cod spawning. By-catch is affecting the survival of the young fish that are the products of spawning. The cod closure box is about protecting the mature stock from fishing. The by-catch issue is about the survival of the young fish. In terms of what we could do, there is a clear spatial pattern in the by-catch rate. That is the number of young cod caught per trawl in the Clyde. Most of the by-catch is taken in the northern part of the Clyde, and that is where the young fish are most abundant. The southern part of the Clyde, from Arran and southwards, is very low by-catch rates of cod in the Nerfops trawls, as far as we can tell. There are some spatial measures that could be taken. In the North Sea, there is a system in place of self-reporting by the fishing industry when they encounter high by-catch rates of a particular species to warn other fishermen not to go to that area at that time. It is a very reactive system where the fishing industry is contributing to an alert system, if you like, but we are encountering high by-catch rates here that do not fish in this area. There are many measures like that that can be taken. Professor Heath, it would be interesting to get your take on some of the things that were said by previous witnesses. We did seem to have some skepticism put about the effectiveness of previous measures around cod on the Clyde and also some questions raised about what could be done in the future. It would be interesting to have your view on the effectiveness of the measures that we have had in the past and whether, in your view, there is anything that can be done in the future to protect cod spawning and to protect a cod fishery on the Clyde. Part of the problem is that the original measure, the original swalling cod closure, made no provision for the gathering of monitoring data to evaluate its success. We do not know how effective the cod box closure has been. It is a precautionary measure, if you like. It seems like a good thing to do. I think that that is right that this really important spawning congregation of fish on the cell of the Clyde in the cod box is important to protect. We have no real scientific data as to how effective that has been in protecting, conserving, recovering the cod stock in the area. I think that that is an important point. There is no provision for monitoring of the success of the measure. Can I also just pick up on something that other witnesses had raised, which was about spurdog. Again, you may say that you may be about to tell me that there is not much science on this either. I do not know, but it would be interesting to know about your view about the impact that you feel spurdog might be having on the species, but there has been a debate in other parts of the west coast, for instance, about a spurdog fishery being viable in the future. I just wonder if you can offer any observations about spurdog. Well, a spurdog is certainly very abundant in the Clyde. There used to be a fishery for a dogfish in the Clyde. We do not have any data on the diet composition of spurdog in the Clyde. It is an arm-waving proposition that a spurdog is responsible for the lack of recovery of the Clyde. There is no hard evidence for that. Professor Heath, do you think that the Scottish Government decisions have disproportionately impacted one fishing method over another without the clear scientific evidence that you discuss? Well, I cannot comment on the impact on individual fisheries out of my expertise, but I do not see any evidence to support the idea that creels, for example, disturb the scawning activity of cod. That seems to be something for which there is no evidence at all. Thank you. Thank you, convener. Just on that point, from a pure layman's point of view, we heard earlier on from Simon, and I am going back to the point that you have just made, about creel fishermen not having any effect on spawning at all, but he seemed to be talking about the fact that noise was a big disturber of spawning fish. I will come back to that. What research and data monitoring do we need to have to make sure that we have the proper evidence to be able to protect the cod recovery measure? I know that it is a big question. If we go back to the original purpose of the cod box closure, it was to reduce the fishing mortality on the cod. The measures that we would need in place to monitor the success of that would be survey and sampling data that would gather information on the numbers at age of different age classes of cod in the region, so that we could calculate the mortality rate from year to year of the cod that is caught in the spawning box. We simply do not have those data. There is an annual survey of the whole of the west of Scotland in March, which is conducted as part of the wider stock assessment process for all whitefish species in the west of Scotland. There are four or five all halls per year conducted in the Clyde as part of that, and that is just insufficient to monitor the success or otherwise of the spawning box closure. On research on the effects of noise, that is a separate question. It is about shifting the goalposts of the logic of the cod box closure towards not just protecting cod from being caught, but protecting cod from disturbance to their spawning activity. The science to support that is completely lacking, as far as I can see in the Clyde. To me, protecting the spawning is the same as protecting the fish from being caught, because if the fish are not caught, they are not laying eggs, but if they are laying eggs, the eggs are being disturbed. The effect will be the same, surely? It is not about laying eggs, it is about the survival of the fish. The original purpose was to prevent cod being caught. Ultimately, the future of the stock depends on fishing mortality, on the mortality rate that is inflicted on the cod by fishing. That is about the survival of the fish. The other part of the story about egg production is about promoting production of young fish, of recruits, of young of the year. That is a separate logic. I understand that, but at the end of the day, what you are trying to do is produce more young fish. If noise, as we were told earlier on, has a real pushback on allowing cod to settle, then they will move. If they are moving, they are not laying eggs, so therefore the eggs are not there in the first place to hatch, so therefore you are not going to get young fish to survive, because the eggs were never laid. However, it is understanding whether or not the shift from catching to disturbance is really such a dichotomy, or whether both of them are equal is important. However, the assumption there is that if you produce more eggs, you are going to get more young of the year. However, the other assumption is that if you move them, they are not laying eggs at all. No, I do not think that. I do not think that there is any evidence for that. According to the evidence that we were given this morning, noise is a problem for fish that are laying eggs. If the fish do not lay the eggs, you do not get the young, so it is a dual problem as far as I can see. However, it is not necessarily the case that if they lay more eggs, you will get more young. I understand that. I get that, but if they do not lay the eggs in the first place, then the young are not going to be there. It is a chicken and egg, is not it? Nobody is suggesting that they will not lay any eggs as a result of noise? There is no science to suggest that at all. We need to take some scientific evidence to make sure that we know what we are talking about here. I cannot take away from the fact that if you get the eggs laid and the young fish hatch, they will be predated on and we get by-catchers. I understand all of that. However, if the cod is being moved because of noise, they will not be necessary. If a bird lays an egg in a nest and gets disturbed, it leaves the eggs and the eggs do not hatch, either way you are getting the same level of loss as far as I can see. I would like to get more evidence on what the reality of that is. I do not think that you can be quite spawning by cod to the egg laying by birds. An individual female cod lays about a million eggs a year. A 60-cm cod in the Clyde lays about a million eggs a year. It only takes two of those to survive, to age three, to sustain the stock. The vast majority of the eggs that are laid every year never make it to spawn again themselves. They are lost to water currents, to being eaten by plankton, to being eaten by other fish, such as sprat, for example. The number that survives to make it through to being a grown-up spawning cod in the future is a very, very, very tiny fraction of all those that are laid. The small changes that you could achieve in the number of eggs that are produced as a result of reducing noise are entirely swamped by those natural processes that affect the survival of those eggs and carry through to the number that become adults themselves. That is their strategy. Their evolutionary strategy is to produce vast numbers of eggs on the expectation that very, very few will survive. I am finding this all really fascinating. There seems to be a sticking point, though, in terms of data and science. There is some science there, but it is often disputed, as we heard in the previous panel. What would you see within your field the Scottish Government doing? What opportunities would you feel would be there for them to help with more future research? How can you see that working with fishers to collaborate with the scientists in the field to improve all the research data and monitoring? Maria Scotland's science is doing the best that it can with the resources that are available. It has a vast territory to cover in Scotland with a myriad of issues to address. I guess that Clyde looks quite small on its radar in terms of some of the really big problems that it has to face. However, it has been extremely supportive of science in the Clyde from the academic sector, but it has been quite serendipitous. We have a hit-list of projects that we see as important, which we have drawn up as part of the Clyde Morning Planning Partnership research advisory group system, but finding money for those is—we put in grant proposals and some get funded and some don't. It is a bit hit-and-miss as to what goes ahead. What we are lacking is a sort of systematic permanent enduring monitoring funding system to support the gathering of data in the Clyde. However, you could say the same for almost the Moray Firth or the Firth of Forth or Shetland or Orkney or in all sorts of places around Scotland to require that sort of input, and there just aren't the resources there to do it. In terms of collaboration with the industry, there are lots of opportunities for doing that and those are being exploited. Elaine has mentioned, for example, the collaboration between St Andrews University and the Fisherman's Association in surveys there, and we will grasp those opportunities wherever we can. I know Elaine reasonably well and we get on quite well and we have talked in the past about, for example, setting up a monitoring system for a stock assessment system for scallops in the Clyde. Again, that fell because of lack of funding. We just couldn't get the funding together in the end. That is the bottom line for that, because there just aren't the resources to support the level of activity that is needed to address all the aspirations for the marine management of the Clyde. That is really helpful. Thank you. You feel that more sustained, lengthy investigation rather than perhaps only short-term gathering of evidence is needed? You might get away, I suppose, with episodic intensive activity. For example, if you did an intensive study every four or five years, that might be sufficient rather than a more draining, demanding, continuous, perhaps lower-level effort over many years. I think that the strategy there needs to be thought through. It is really great to get the picture of the challenges around gathering data and funding and all of that for clearly issues not just in the Clyde but across the marine space in Scotland to get a better sense of what is really going on. I almost wish that you had been the first panel, because I think that you have given a much better context for our line of questioning. With a bit more detail, what are your views on the use of remote electronic monitoring in terms of the research with cameras on fishing vessels to assist with data collection on cod recovery and on the impact of different fishing methods? How, in your view, could the Scottish Government encourage more fishers to make use of this tool and play a key part in research and monitoring? I think that new technology has got a lot of scope, both in monitoring fisheries but also monitoring the environment. In terms of monitoring fisheries, it would be great to have more data and work towards a fully documented fishery, of what was being caught, what was being landed and what was being discarded. That would be fantastic. However, there is much that we can do to have autonomous vehicles monitoring the environment, doing ecosounder surveys—hydroacoustic surveys—of the biomass and the distribution of fish and plankton in the sea. We have recently done some surveys in the North Sea with unmanned surface vessels. They are small, remotely controlled vessels with its scientific equipment aboard them. They can be controlled from Australia, if you want, by satellites. That is a new approach to gathering data more continuously than we are able to do with big, expensive ships. That is a lot of scope. Thank you for that, and thank you for expanding on the potential for satellites and other things, but it is clear that we need to be moving in this direction if we want to have a successful fisheries in the future. Yes, yes. It is all tax resources, of course, but... Thank you. It doesn't come free. I just wanted to ask you, because I had to leave the room briefly. I apologise if I missed this, but we talked earlier about an ecosystem approach, and I wondered what an ecosystem approach looked like. You balanced the sustainability of cod stocks, but you also combined that with the economic viability of the fishing industry. Can you cite some examples, Professor Heath, of how that has worked in the rest of the world? The ecosystem approach to fisheries is about breaking away from conducting stock assessments on a single species basis. For example, for decades, stock assessments in the west of Scotland and the North Sea have been done species by species. We have a stock assessment for cod, and we have some TAC that is set for cod. We have a stock assessment for whiting, TAC set for whiting and so on, but that does not recognise the fact that all those species are part of a network of who eats who in whom in the sea. Everything is connected together in the sea from the smallest plankton to the biggest whale. Eventually, they are all connected and interconnected by the network of predator-prey relationships. The ecosystem approach to fisheries is about recognising that everything is interconnected and that no fish species is an island. You can extend that further to recognising that people are connected to the sea as predators on the marine ecosystem. That is the next frontier for the ecosystem approach, which is to treat humans as part of the ecosystem, as well as the animals and plants that live in the sea. One final thought. We have seen failures that have been highlighted to us in the laying of the first prohibition order. Subsequently, that order was changed and is now in place. Do you think that that has led to a lack of trust from fishermen and the scientific researchers like you? Has it led to a loss of trust in how regulations are brought forward? You also touched on resourcing marine Scotland. Is the situation likely to get better unless we see significant increases in the resources that marine Scotland has to ensure that the policies that are put in place deliver what we want to see in the fisheries and sustainable rural communities? To answer the last question first, I think that resourcing of marine monitoring and marine research in Scotland is severely limiting. The capacity to develop state-of-the-art approaches is very much hampered by the lack of resources. To go to the first part of your question, there is widespread support for the original logic of the closure box to protect cod from being caught. The leap in logic towards what we have recently seen in terms of trying to promote egg production in the hope of increasing the number of juveniles in the system, the lack of science took everybody by surprise and has been quite unhelpful, seems to me. Professor Heath, thank you very much for joining us. You are very much in the spotlight being on your own and we appreciate you putting aside the time to answer some of these questions. Thank you very much. We will briefly suspend until 11.15 where we will have our final panel. Thank you. Welcome back everyone and I welcome to our meeting our third panel consisting of environmental NGOs and I welcome to the meeting Russell Cheshire, trustee of the community of RNC bed trust, Alec Watson-Crooke, projects manager for sustainable inshore fisheries trust, Callum Duncan, the convener for the marine group, the Scottish Environmental Link and David Nairn, our seas coalition and Phil Taylor, head of policy and operations, the open seas trust. We have until approximately 11.55 for questions and I will ask Rachel Hamilton to kick off. Good morning panel. We have taken evidence that the cod box is destined to fail and it is questionable whether the Scottish Government actions can recover cod. Can I ask the panel does the current cod closure provide adequate protection for spawning cod in the Clyde and I'll start off with David Nairn, please. Question and thanks for the opportunity to attend the meeting. I just start out by saying that the overseas coalition isn't actually an NGO and it's a strongly labelled there but it's a kind of broad and steady coalition of 128 members, such as the coastal business community groups, fishermen's organisations, shellfish farmers, turbo operators and the stuff that I do, which is marine monitoring and habitat restoration in the Clyde. We're a diverse group of people and we're not run by a committee as such. All those members, we have a high hierarchy where all those members can contribute to the organisation and from that we have three main asks. We have a transition to low-impact fisheries and preferential access for non-destructive or less destructive fishery techniques, tracking and monitoring all inshore vessels. We have a new receipt to protect marine stocks, including the cod here. We're just saying that we need a new coastal inshore limit, roughly, loosely, based around the old three-mile limit. To answer your question, I welcome the new regulations for the cod box and the ethos behind it. I don't actually believe that it's going to help the long-term benefit of cod in the Clyde. We can't just ring mark an area in the southern part of Clyde when we know that all the juvenile cod swim on the north end of the Clyde. The whole of the Clyde is used as a nursery area for juvenile fish. We're protecting, as we'll spawn, perhaps, in one of the cod areas of Campotown, but we come up to other areas of the Clyde, and we're absolutely destroying the habitat with bottom-toed gear. Until we address all that, I think that the regulations are doomed to fail. The derivations have no evidence to suggest that those derivations still out, but bottom-toed gear has had any effect on the cod at all. I welcome the marine spatial planning frameworks initiative to have an ecosystem-based approach in the Clyde, and it's time that we recognise that. That's going to be addressed within our fisheries framework. I think that it's too early to say whether it's destined to fail. As the committee has said this morning, there's so much to unpack on this issue. Just to say before I answer the question, we, within the Scottish Environment Network, have consistently, for many decades advocated for ecosystem-based management. That's why we advocated for the Marine Scotland Act for there to be a marine planning system for a well-managed NPA network. Most recently, we've set out steps that we think are needed to recover the health of the seas in our ocean recovery plan. As part of that, we're emphasising the importance of ecosystem-based fisheries management as well, spatial management of fishing. We recognise that there is too high a footprint of some of the more heavy bottom-gears near shore. We're very much advocating a spatial approach to managing fisheries all around Scotland, but along the lines of what Mike Heath was saying before, we really need to look at that kind of ecosystem-based approach depending on what parts of the sea we're looking at. In the Clyde, I can say that we did support a proposal for a regulating order for the Clyde, and I know that that didn't go forward, because we see the success of that in Shetland. The answer to the question is that I think that the cod box in isolation isn't enough, but I think that on the same page as what Mike Heath was saying, there is still a role to have that cod box. The reason why it might not have worked in the past was because it allowed exemptions for gears that could potentially take on a mature cod, but it's doing that in the context of not having other spatial measures that look at where the juvenile pod aggregate, as the mass evidence highlighted, is mentioned up north-east of Arran, up in the Seelogs. Very quickly, to respond to some things that were said in the earlier session, we're never perfect science, but we have best available science. Best available science says that there is a by-catch issue in the Clyde, and that protecting and enhancing critical fish habitat helps. The process for removing the exemptions for the box could have been handled better. I understand the discussion about disturbance versus actual catch. From a precautionary approach, we were concerned about disturbance, but we think that the outcome could have been much smarter, in which we could have had some kind of zoned approach to give areas that creelers were confident that they could use. The whole process highlights the concerns about a lack of that spatial framework, and that's very much what's needed going forward. It's not destined to fail in these monitors, but the whole process highlights the need for that wider spatial framework. I'm just going to check with the convener if there's time for... David Niven, we'd like to come in and respond to this. Hi, Niven. I'm sorry, can you hear me? I called you, Niven. David Niven is not appearing in front of us today. We've got a far better replacement than David Niven. David, go ahead. There was just one question. What I'd like to say is that I live in the Clyde, right? I look out the window and I've watched three trawlers burning, ripping up and down the Largs and Huntersdon Channel in an area that we're trying to restore habitat. I'm actively engaged in restoring the seas out there. I'm engaged in monitoring. When I go out, I've got lots of pictures of by-catchers. I totally support Professor East's figures about the by-catch amounts that are getting chucked in. That's the estimates that are probably getting reported. We watch a lot of by-catchers getting chucked into the sea, but I'd also like to say that I'm involved in hydroacoustic monitoring of the Clyde. There was mention in the committee before that one of the reasons why, to exclude the keel fishing, it was all that there was still disturbing on the lekin sites for the cod. However, we have a lot of data on that. We're completely happy to offer the committee and to offer marine medium Scotland. We know the very high resolution of the data that we have. We can offer that to the committee, to marine Scotland and work with Mike Heath that can show that the keel boats aren't producing anywhere as near as the amount of noise that the mobile sector is producing. You've also got to remember that the mobile sector is actually working on top of the lekin sites, whereas the keel sector is around—do you know these keels? Because of the spatial squeeze in the Clyde, they're pushed to the periphery. We've had a PhD in the MSc and various honours projects, and we've produced several papers on science in the Clyde. The less science is being done by community-led organisations, but the scope is held aside. I'm just offering that to make sure that the committee is aware that that data is available to them, if and when, if they will need it. The real Phil Taylor would also like to come in. Thank you very much and thanks for the opportunity to talk. I just wanted to respond to Rachael Hamilton's question. Is it destined to fail? No, it mustn't fail. The legislation that we rely on—legislation from 67—to bring the statutory instrument to you, and that requires the justification. The justification is that the designation is used to recover cod. The Government then compels to recover cod using this site, and that aligns with its international commitments under the Sustainable Development Goal 14, but also other commitments under the Marine Scotland National Marine Plan, as well as everything that the Government says on the issues within future catching policy and strategy. I encourage the committee to spend so much time on that, because you are there to hold them to account on that commitment. I personally value that. I just wanted to respond to that sort of technocratic issue. It's not destined to fail, but it will fail if Scottish Government and Marine Scotland don't move forward with some of the ideas that Professor Heath came up with earlier. We need to push forward the communications and the stakeholder engagement to make that happen. It's really frustrating that we knew about that as of 2015 that it wasn't working. The cod spawning and protections weren't working in that particular form. We've had time to think about that seven years ago, so the time is now to drive it forward. I'm going to move to questions from Jenny Minto. Thank you, convener. I'm really just following on from Alex's point. I'm interested if you could give us some information as to how you thought the consultation progressed, but also recognising that we've got competing marine interests here. I'm interested to hear how those can be appropriately balanced in the future and what consultation you see going forward to ensure sustainable fishing in communities. I'll start with Alex. Alex, not hearing. Maybe not. Fel, can you come in and respond? Yeah, I'll start. My view is that the consultation was extremely poor. I think that I agree and really sympathise with some of the stakeholders that we've heard from this morning about that process. I think that the suggestion that there was a sort of expectation in the initial consultation and then that wasn't followed through, that really shows a sort of a poor approach to public decision making, I think, from Marine Scotland, because a consultation should be a consultation. We shouldn't be putting consultations on the table, which we have prebate decisions in them. That's completely inadequate in democratic terms, and we really need to push back against that, I think. In terms of how do we manage the stakeholder landscape, I think that that's a really important question, and I think that again is one where, again, I'm buoyed by the fact that the committee is spending so much attention on this issue, and I would ask that you sort of help through part of that, because it's clear that there's a lot of contention around this stuff. It's clear that there's distrust, you know, that's across the board, I think. In all sorts of very damaging ways, just one, for example, on the compliance issue, it was suggested that there's a very high degree of compliance in the Clyde. It was actually a case in Llanlash Bay, the no-take zone, of a fisherman pleading guilty to deploying nets in there just a couple of months ago. This is really quite negative stuff and damaging trust, and we need politics to help us through that. I think that the inshore fisheries group structure, which provides a place for fishing to talk but no one else to really have input, open seas has submitted lots of evidence, lots of requests and things to those groups over the years. Nearly all of it has been not responded to or inaccurately responded to. There's really no way for the community to engage in those kinds of ways. We are an NGO, sorry, I'm not the community, we're a charity, but we need better structures for that, and we need support from the politicians to help create those better structures. We need a forum where stakeholders can come around. Just on the restructuring, it was some of what Jenny was suggesting, if I'm misinterpreting or misrepresenting, but it is worth noting that of the science that's been done in this area, of the socioeconomics that have been done in this area, Scottish Government published their own consultants looking into the nephrops fishery in 2020. I've just got the numbers here in front of me. They show that if there was better spatial management of this fishery, which is ultimately what we're talking about here, better spatial management of Creel versus Troll, but also the management of the two of them, there would be a £6.4 million increase in GVA and there would be, there would move from seven Creel vessels, Elaine was talking about the reduction in Creel vessels earlier, from seven Creel vessels to 69 Creel vessels. That's the Government's own science backing up the support for a socioeconomic transition, which would also achieve some of these environmental goals, and we need to bear that in mind that the restriction in these ways doesn't always have a negative impact on socioeconomics in the long term. It has an impact on businesses and we need to figure out how to support those businesses in that transition, support those businesses in diversification. Of course, we're in a massive structural change with the announcement yesterday from Kate Forbes, so these kind of massive changes in economies shouldn't be something that we're afraid of, but we need politicians to help us navigate that process, I believe. Thank you. I've had Russell indicate you'd like to come in, then Alex and then Duncan. If you could try and address the question directly, we've got five or six questions to come, so hopefully all the points you're picking up on your contributions will be covered anyway, but if you could address the actual question, that would be much appreciated. Russell? Sorry, convener, thanks for the opportunity to speak. Can I just have a brief resume of what the previous question was on? So I was interested in the fact that we've got competing marine interests here, and how we can appropriately balance the competing interests. Right, thank you for that, Jenny Winter. I think that the issue there is that we're looking from a base of competing interests. The sea is a public resource. The interests should be working together with each other. At the moment, we seem to have this situation where a large sector has taken over much of the Clyde, which sounds a bit emotional, but if you look out there, most of the boats are prawn trawlers. Their catch is something in the region of 70 to 80 per cent of what's taken out of the Clyde. I've heard from Mike Heath about by-catch and the quantitative cod taking from there. If we can change the way that the fishing industry operates, so transition away from high-impact bottom-dragging methods to other lighter-touch opportunities, that sector will benefit, the Creel sector will benefit, other people like commercial sea anglers will benefit. At the moment, we've got two or three boats in the Firth of Clyde, whereas they used to be 90 odd. It's working together, making space for each other, and we need to shift the way that we're looking at the whole system at the moment. Hello. We're on audio only, unfortunately, due to some technical issues. There are competing interests. It's really important that Marine Scotland and the Scottish Government convene appropriate stakeholder forums where those things can be thoroughly discussed, where decisions are taken absolutely with the ecosystem-based approach in mind. Here at SIFT, we have looked previously and, in fact, have released a couple of reports around reform of inshore management governance. It is this governance that needs to be highlighted and considered by the committee when we think about getting the right people around the table to make the right decisions. Our most recent paper on that looked specifically at the inshore fisheries groups and the lack of engagement with other marine stakeholders and the lack of rigour in the development of fisheries management plans by the RAFGs. I'm more than happy to share those papers with the committee following the meeting. That would be helpful. I'm getting my names all mixed up to Calum Duncan. My apologies. We've put a very detailed response into the future fisheries management discussion process a few years ago, where we had that space to think about what the future of fishing looks like in Scotland and how we get there. What we said in part of that discussion was that it was an opportunity to take stock of all the effort in Scotland, what the fleet looks like, what stocks are being targeted. We have a think about where Scotland wants to get to in terms of a just transition to climate and nature smart fishing further down the line. It's quite hard to have that discussion partly because of resources, partly because of structures. As the inshore is concerned, as Mike was touching on and others have here, you have a vast coastline with comparatively fewer resources. I've made the point to the predecessor committee on that, comparing the number of fisheries compliance vessels of Sussex Ifca compared to the whole of Scotland, for example. We look at the inshore fisheries conservation authorities in England, not without their issues, but the clues in the name are inshore fisheries and conservation authorities. I absolutely endorse much of what was said in the previous sessions. The online format is a bit different from in-person, because we are in different sections. I would have been happy to say that in plenary. We need the process where there is not the distrust or the concern that, if there is not engagement in this area, something will happen over here. There needs to be that integration. There is an opportunity there with regional wind plans, reform of fisheries management, but it has to happen meaningfully, and resources have to be put in to do that. I know how stretched resources are, but that is a simple fact. On the competing interests and the distrust, I think that, in terms of communities in keeping it local and climate-centric, the communities are basically not being allowed to engage within the marine spatial planning framework, as such that have been excluded from the delegate authority. Until that is allowed to happen, there is always going to be a certain distrust. It stems back, if I get an example, during the future of fisheries management workshops. We went up to Glasgow and were basically shouted out at the workshop by the fishing interests there. The fisheries organisations in the cloud say that there is an open door coming sweet to us at the IFG. They will say that publicly, but privately, when we say that we can become an IFG meeting, we are not allowed to attend. Those doors are not open. We are not operating in a silo, and we have been put in a silo and, basically, until something changes there, there is going to be this distrust generally between the communities and the commercial and vested interests on the cloud, which includes the mobile gear fishing. I am just going to move on slightly to the do you feel that the Scottish Government was justified in the evidence and reason that it gave for putting in the cloud box in the first place? Can we go to fell on that one, please? Thank you. I would again point out one of the convincing raised earlier, but the justification for the cloud box is given in the consultation as the report between the Scottish Oceans Institute and the Clyde Fisherman's Association. That is the justification that was given in the consultation in October 2021, so a good number of months ago. That has yet to be made public, that has yet to be shared anywhere. There was a meeting with Marine Scotland where I asked if they could share any kind of summary of it. It turned out that the chief scientist from Marine Scotland who was there hadn't seen it, but that the chief policy person had. That is very worrying. It is completely against the ARHU's convention on transparency around environmental decision making, but it is also very worrying in terms of structures of government. In terms of whether it is justified in the first instance, clearly the cloud population has collapsed on the west coast. People are very happy to talk about the newfoundland cloud collapse, but for some reason we never really talk about it in a Scottish concept despite having suffered a similar fate. Recovery action is completely justified. We need to recover that. We have legal duties to do so, as I mentioned earlier. Whether that is the right location for it or not, I simply cannot tell you because the evidence that is being used by public authorities to justify that is not being made available to environmental groups like myself or even the public. I will move on to a question from Alasdair Allan. Throughout the day, a number of witnesses have talked about what has not worked. I am keen to know what are the areas where there has been success in research that might help us build the kind of spatial planning that you have talked about. That is possibly a question for Phil Taylor. I am happy to start, but I do not want to hog the space. The spatial management that he just alluded to in the question is clearly the core part of it. There was some great work done by Marine Scotland Science, presented to the Northwest Waters Advisory Council, which was the EU body that managed some of these fisheries, about the sort of ecosystem modelling that Mike Heath spoke about as well. If we are just talking about cod, there is a need to reduce the amount of juvenile fish that are killed and mortality of the juvenile fish as they come through the age classes trying to get to age 3 so that they can contribute back to the population. There is a need to improve the habitat structure, which they then use both as nursery grounds to hide. They really need to hide when they are very small, so they need that diversity. CUS is one of those habitats, as many others, and also to forage themselves. Those approaches have worked in Norway. I am reluctant to always point back to Norway because it happened so much within fishing, but within Norway you have just one example, the Skrygog fishery, which you may have heard of. It is sometimes the Skrygog on a restaurant menu in high-end restaurants. The big cod that comes in and the line corp and the meat is treated well is the idea. We do not have anything like that. We do not have those kind of inshore fisheries for cod like that. It is really disappointing. It is a real opportunity. Ultimately, if we were able to recover the cod population, it would be a good thing for the fishing fleets communities and for the food system around the Clyde. There is a parallel there with what is going on. I could point to the committee in the direction of the Lamlash Bay no-take zone and the South Arran NPA. Research work from Dr Elliott and others in 2016-17 has shown that juvenile gadoid cod like fish, cod itself, haddock, are starting to return in good numbers to those areas. Because of a lack of disturbance, because a large part of the South Arran marine protected area all trawling is excluded, the fish have an opportunity to grow to a meaningful size, which will allow them to reproduce more healthily. The committee is probably aware that, in marine life, a youngish fish of five, six, seven years old might produce 150,000 eggs per annum, whereas a much older fish, 18, 19 years old, could produce a million eggs. At the moment, the chances of a fish living to 18 or 19 years of age are extremely remote, so we must implement proper fisheries management and marine protected area management throughout not just the Firth of Clyde but the rest of Scotland. We have the Clyde sea sill, which covers most of what we are talking about today. That has been in place since it was designated in 2014. There is no effective marine management plan in place. After seven years, we need Marine Scotland to get a move on so that fish and the rest of the marine ecosystem can recover to a healthy, abundant, biodiverse and productive level. At the moment, we are looking at effectively a monoculture in the Clyde. It used to be much more diverse, but it is a result of overfishing, possibly industrial pollution, possibly climate change, as others have said. A lot needs to be looked at, but allowing fish like the cod to recover will be a big step of the way back to a healthy, biodiverse marine environment in the Clyde. We have heard a lot about opportunities that could exist, and we have spoken about fisheries management. What specific opportunities might exist to improve fisheries management in the Clyde through the development of a fisheries management plan? I think that there are loads of opportunities. The specific policy opportunities coming down the line are, of course, the future catching policy. The joint fisheries statement should set out the plans and policies that the Government will take to deliver the fisheries objectives of the UK Fisheries Act 2020. That includes the ecosystem objective that includes the national benefit objective, the climate change objective and the by-catch objective. All the building blocks are there to use that policy opportunity to create a system that is better at providing public benefits and more sustainable. There is also the future catching policy, which the Government has promised since the publication of the future catching strategy, one of the sort of iron lines, and that was promised at the end of 2020. That, I guess, will be coming to committee in the coming wee wild. What those have the opportunity to provide for, or I believe that they have the opportunity to provide for a recovery. I think that we need to be looking at that. There is a 2030 strategy, so eight years hence. Opportunities for recovery of those stocks, such that we have a diverse ecosystem, which Ross mentioned, provides a diverse opportunity for fishing, food and enjoyment of nature. I think that diversity is really key, and as Ross said, it is really lacking at the moment. Just quickly, Harkley and Doris are looking at Norway for the inshore. The question just asked with some of the supplementary ideas that I have put in the previous one. Those policy commitments and legal consultations coming down the line must be looked at holistically, so there are still listed some. There is also the work to improve protection of prior to marine features beyond the NPA network. There is also the work to meet the welcome commitment for 10 per cent of Scotland's seas to be in HPMAs. There is the commitment to ensure fishing and to have that as a ceiling from which there is an evidence-based reduction from there. Again, the key watchword for me on that is integration. I have been in many conservation policy discussion spaces, and the fisheries policy discussion spaces often do not come together. That is getting better, and I do not mean that as a criticism. We have to recognise the fisheries benefits of biodiversity protection and the biodiversity benefits of fisheries protection and integrate those better. I try to look at the opportunities that are coming forward as a package to deliver that ecosystem-based spatial management that we are advocating for. Just a very quick yes or no question, if possible, for each panel that is starting with Alex. Do you believe that there is evidence to support the banning of crealing and dive fishing along with trawling? I think that we heard earlier from Professor Heath that there is very little evidence of crealing, damaging and the spawning stocks. I think that this is a really important part of what went wrong with the consultation process. It is absolutely clear that when we were discussing which exemptions should be allowed to continue for the spawning stock, that Marine Scotland did not look at each sector individually. It clasped it very much as all or nothing. That was a real mistake, and it seriously undermined the trust that is going forward. I hope that that can be reviewed. It is clear that that needs to be looked at sooner rather than later. It is evident that Marine Scotland needs to consider the exemptions that will take place next year, except that we are already well into this season. That is something that the committee should look at and directly challenge Marine Scotland on the evidence contributions that it has made. I will go through all the panel, but I think that it is one that you can do. Can I go to Russell, then to Calum, and to David Finch with Phil? No, crealing should still be committed. Is evidence there to control it? Can you do it smarter? I think that David Finch should still be totally pivoted, as well. If I can just say then quickly that it is obviously a knee jerk response to the mobile sector to ban it, and that is totally contrary to the progress that we want to make in the future, which is a transition to this kind of sustainable fishing method. We are cutting our nose off to spite ourselves here. No, and the evidence that the Government has provided has since been removed from its online website. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your time this morning. That has been very much appreciated and will help us in our considerations going forward. That now concludes our meeting today. At our next meeting, the committee will take evidence from the cabinet secretary and the Sea Fish Prohibition on Fishing First of Clyde Order 2022 and Consider the Instrument. Consider the Red Rock and Longay Urgent Marine Conservation Order. Consider two SI consent notifications and consider a draft report on the Good Food Nation Bill.