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Rhaid o'r ddweud fod yn gyllid gweithiau yng nôl iawn i ddim yn ei ddim yn ei ddim yn ei ddim yn ei ddim yn ei ddim yn ei ddim yn eu ddim yn eu ddim i ddim zegom, runtall aethan, ein hred gwrs wedi arbesê cynllun o 19% cyflet i gael entry today cyd-un, 많은 maen nhw i amdd perpetuswyr hefyd – llwy fノ bethau tybl invitedig, a chyn làr yn golygonwyr y dynnu cyflet fel sy'n dynn savings-in, rydw i ddim digwydd am fedpent yn hyfer y DVD i arив o bwanol cereinol eich hayять, a'u zesuar archonjdwyr yn cender SV-8. Fy modd mewn cobl ddwyntfellus ar gyfer ei blwzar, nid wrth unrhyw gyda chi'n in shore. Mae'n edrych yn ystod i fod yn d evidenceen fyw i'r ddangos ar gyfer ein bodi'r argymar, a reag i ddweud diwrnod o'r rhaid fydden nhw ym 15% yn ysturb. Rwb i'r Bhagol, mae'n rhaid i'r ddweud eu hywr cwmperhensif, i greu casun ym gweithio i gyd mewn yr in shore, i ddweud yr in shore i ddweud yr in shore i ddweud diwrnod ym parent, y Treaddwyll ac rhaid i'r ddweud i bobl yn gwheithio i gyd o'r oedd oeddymiad wedi gael ei wneud â'i limit. Mae i mi ddeliadau eraill yn ygafodau mewn i gyflinwc yn aglannu i gyflinwc yn sylwg yn digwydd miadig yr hyn oedd yn cael ei wneud gyda i gael y cymmerau cyfrydiau i wneud canwciol i gael eu lleidgweithio i gael ei ddeliadau i gael ei gael ei gael. Unwmateb. Oeddo fi'n creu amddaneidiau yn beth mae'n gwirioneddau gyda â mi ddeliadau i gael ei gael The honour is yours, convener, and thank you, Balie, for coming along. Can you just, for the record, say, why do you think that a modern inshore coastal limit is needed? Unless we introduce spatial management on a scale, then we are not going to be able to achieve good environmental status. One of the things about the modern inshore limit is that it could also facilitate and incentivise a transition towards more low-impact fisheries, is another obligation that we have under the fisheries act. What I mean by that is if you create an area where you can exclusively use for creole fishing, line fishing and net fishing, then people will adopt those techniques, whereas if you allow those people using those low-impact gears and you ask them to compete directly with the more industrialised fisheries, the odds are that the bigger boats and the more industrialised fisheries will monopolise the resource space. Unless you introduce a limit on spatial management that is at least on the scale of the former three-mile limit, I do not think that we can do the things that we are committed to do, like incentivising lower-impact fisheries or achieving good environmental status. You have just indicated why, as you feel that measures are needed, can you ask why or whether you think that there would be in the longer term some benefit to the crealing industry if the measures you are proposing are not taken? There are some assessments that have been done by the Scottish Government, a document called Assessing the Options for Change, which was a review of the potential for what would happen if we introduced a three-mile limit. Some work by the New Economics Foundation as well as Professor Alan Radford have all indicated that if we transition to fishing grounds in the inshore to crealing, we could employ more fishermen and we can do this without catching any more fish or, in this case, shellfish. The reason for that is that creel-cut shellfish attracts a premium, so the same, say, nephrops or langosteen that was caught by a trawler, if it was caught by a creel boat, would fetch four times as much. That means that, without catching a single extra nephrop, you could employ four times as many fishermen. Yes, it would benefit the creel sector, and it would benefit the environment and benefit our coastal communities as well. I would appreciate it if you could talk a bit about the Fisheries Act 2020, and you have also mentioned good environmental status. I would appreciate it if you could explain what is meant by an ecosystem's approach as set out in the Fisheries Act 2020 and how does good environmental status relate to that. Could you touch on, and you have already begun to, but a bit more, on whether or not, in your view, Scotland's fisheries management is compliant with an ecosystem's approach? Yes. An ecosystem's approach, as it is described in the Fisheries Act 2020, is that the collective pressures are kept with levels that are compatible with achieving good environmental status. That is the legal definition, and it is a little bit clunky, so maybe in simpler terms what we are talking about is that instead of managing individual species, which is currently the way that we manage most fisheries, we manage the actual environment of where those species live. For example, at the moment, we are managing nephrops under a system called maximum sustainable yield. It is a single species management for nephrops to keep our catching limits under that which the nephrops can sustainably cope with, but that does not look at the environment. It does not look at the social or economic consequences. Again, if you swap prawn crailing or nephrops crailing for nephrops trawling, the environment would benefit considerably and we would generate more revenue, but under single species management plans, that is not taken into account. So, an ecosystem-based approach would look at the whole ecosystem and the impacts social, economically and environmentally of any particular fishing method in any particular area. In its response to the petition, the Scottish Government states that it has a tailored approach on inshore management. Can I ask for your thoughts on what that means, for example, is it tailored to achieving ecosystem management and good environmental status for the foreseeable future? I do not think so. I think that it is really up to the Scottish Government to explain what they mean by a tailored approach and how that would achieve good environmental status, but all the indicators that I can see are that there are no plans or proposals currently on the table from the Scottish Government that are capable of achieving good environmental status. I reiterate that good environmental status has several indicators, one of which is the sea bed and ethnic habitat indicator, which states that only 15 per cent of the sea bed can be highly disturbed. There is nothing currently on the table that is capable of getting us anywhere close to that. You spoke about this being a variation on the previous three-mile limit. Can you explain what your understanding is of the implementation of the previous three-mile limit? The original three-mile limit is more than a three-mile limit, so there was a basic strip right around the coastline of Scotland that was the three-mile limit, which was genetically known as the three-mile limit, but we also closed most of the firsts and the fourths. The first of Clide, Sound of Dura, Moray Firth and so on were also closed, so we could close the big wedges of inland seas that we have and we allocated them the same legal criteria that we did for the three-mile limit. The three-mile limit explicitly prohibited demersal, toad, gear and beam trawling. It is interesting that, in the interim, scallop dredging developed and scallop dredging is a type of beam trawling. A lot of people argued that scallop dredging was never prohibited by the original three-mile limit, but I would argue that it should have been because scallop dredging is towing a beam and beam trawling was prohibited. It is worth saying at this point, too, that there were a lot of exceptions. There were exceptions for small boats under a certain tonnage and there were exceptions for towing certain types of gear in certain areas that had historical entitlement. Over time, more and more bylaws were passed that allowed more and more mobile gear in the inshore. It was a very complicated and convoluted system. In the end, one of the arguments for getting rid of the three-mile limit was that it was too complex and there were too many exceptions and exemptions to the rule. For the basic premise of the three-mile limit, it was that you should not tow mobile demersal fishing gear across the seabed within three miles of land or in the inshore waters. You said that the limit was removed because it was too complicated, but the Cameron report suggested that it was removed because it could not be justified in grounds of conservation and recommended the removal of the restrictions for the benefit of the fishing community. The Cameron report cited quite a lot of reasons for removing the three-mile limit. One was that it just was not being complied with and one of the arguments was that it would not make any difference if you remove it or not. It was also almost impossible to enforce. You have to remember that at the time we had a coal-powered fisheries enforcement vessel, no GPS, no vessel tracking and no even VHF radio. There were a lot of grounds for removing the three-mile limit cited in the Cameron report. To be honest with you, the one that I would dispute the most is that there was no conservation benefit. In this day and age, as we are in a middle of a biodiversity and a climate crisis, we are starting to understand more and more the implications of the consequences of trawling and dredging in shore. I would like to add to that that the Scottish Government explicitly acknowledges the single biggest impact on our marine environment is trawling and dredging. I think that all the facts now would refute what the Cameron report concluded in the 1970s. You talk about facts. What research backs up the year justification to say that the Cameron report was wrong on the grounds of conservation or that removing it did benefit fishing communities? What research has been done since then? There are several pieces of research that are one that is probably worth bringing in, which is the Clyde ecosystem review, which shows that the inshore sea of the Clyde was previously closed until the 1960s. That was one of the wider forests or forests, and then the three mile limit was removed in the mid-1980s. Since then, we have seen catastrophic declines in almost all dimersal fin fish inshore landings. At one point in our past, we were employing many tens of thousands of fishermen catching dimersal fin fish. I believe that now there is not a single fisherman left in Scotland who makes his living exclusively catching dimersal fin fish inshore. Inshore fish populations have catastrophically collapsed since the removal of the three-mile limit. I think that that has cleared enough evidence. On the three-mile limit, where the restrictions exist on fishing similar to those proposed in your petition, where topography makes it harder for smaller fishing boats to adapt to being displaced further afield, do you have examples of that? Can you give us what you believe might be the impact? I think that this is a two-way straight. We have to remember that the boats that suffer displacement worst are the smallest static gear boats that would be the creole boats. The vast majority of Scotland's inshore fishing fleet are under 10m creole boats. By making them compete directly with trawlers, there is already very extensive displacement, which is giving us poor socioeconomic environment outcomes versus not having that displacement. It works the other way. If we were to introduce a three-mile limit, the smallest trawlers would in turn be displaced. It is arguable that for each trawler that you would be displaced, you could have—or each two-man trawler, so an equivalent creole boat, you could have four equivalent creole boats for every two-man trawler that you would be displaced. Yes, there would be displacement. We would need to implement some kind of a just transition. There is no doubt about that. I think that we have to do that regardless of whether or not we introduce a three-mile limit. The Scottish Government has an obligation to meet good environmental status. That cannot be achieved without comprehensive and extensive spatial management, so whether we call it a three-mile limit or not, somebody somewhere is going to have to be displaced. The fishing industry is overcapacity to achieve good environmental status. That is just a simple fact. On my point about where you could possibly demonstrate that there is a similar example somewhere else in Scotland, for example in the Murray Firth. What impact has that had in terms of the different topography? The thing about the different topography is that there are different seabed type support and different kinds of fishing industry. At the moment, we have relatively extensive closures, but I believe that the figure is only a few per cent—like 3 per cent—of ground that is capable of being trawled on. It is actually closed to trawling. Most of the fish's closures that we have are ground that trawlers do not use. That is why it was amenable to the fishing industry to allow those closures to go ahead. There are other examples of places where closures have been put in place. Lime Bay in England is a very good example. I believe that in Wales, there is a one-mile limit on toad gear and a three-mile limit on any vessel over 10 metres. I believe that in Norway, we are looking at a 12-mile limit for almost all toad submersal gears. Lime Bay in England has a fantastic project that has been running for over 10 years, where it excluded scallop dredging and trawling. That has allowed the development of a very buoyant and robust small-scale fishing industry. There was a recent study that was done that said that the fishing in Lime Bay reserve is not only sustainable but that it creates the highest level of happiness within fishermen that has been measured around the country. I think that considering that the fishing industry is under pressure everywhere, that is the kind of thing that we should be looking for, both to incentivise new entrants into fishing and to facilitate sustainable fishing. We need to take displacement very seriously. In the off-the-wash, the topography has demonstrated that it has displaced smaller fishermen and they have had to go further out to protect their livelihoods. There could be arguments based on both sides, but your argument is that we should have a transition, which we will discuss later in the questioning, but we have to make a sacrifice almost. Is that what you are saying? That argument does not stand up with the example in Norway, the Norwegian fleets, where they are not placing restrictions for conservation efforts. They are replacing it to ensure that they restrict gear conflicts. I think that gear conflict is part of what is going on in Norway, but there is huge social and economic and environmental benefits when you remove mobile, commercial gear and manage static gear well in the zone. It is probably worth emphasising that at this stage. If you are going to displace mobile gear, you need to manage the static gear better, so nobody is proposing, like we introduced a female element, an absence of improving the management of the static gear. However, the question comes down to do we have to displace any fishing industry at all, and if we do, which fishing industry should be displaced? There will be huge benefits from displacing troll, and there would be far fewer benefits from displacing quail. Arguably, if we have to displace anybody, it should be those activities that give us the poorest social, economic and environmental outcomes. Unfortunately, it is not the same people that benefit from the displacement that pay the price for the displacement. Accordingly, we need some kind of a just transition to facilitate that. I have one more small question on that. I am not sure if other members will mention it at all, but we have a spatial squeeze right now. The renewable energy offshore energy sector is also making it challenging to understand how we see the future of fishing. Do you have concerns about the spatial squeeze as well on top of the way that you are wanting to bring in restrictions through your petition? I think that one of the reasons that we are proposing this is because of the spatial squeeze, and I appreciate that, on the face of it, it might appear like this would compound spatial squeeze and it would for certain sectors of the fishing industry. There is no doubt about that. The problem with spatial squeeze is that we are potentially going to lose a significant proportion of our fishing rounds over the next 30 years, and that is going to cause displacement of fishing activity. When it comes to just flat competition, you know, survival of the fittest between the various fishing sectors, the biggest boats normally win and the mobile boats normally win. Now, that is the opposite outcome that the Scottish Government has committed itself to. We are obliged to incentivise wherever possible low-impact fishing methods, which have a reduced impact on the environment. If we allow spatial squeeze to take place in the absence of introducing management or mitigations, we are going to get the opposite from what we have committed to introducing a spatial closure to mobile gate and the inshore will actually help mitigate spatial squeeze. It will allow us to employ more fishermen, and that is the interesting thing, not fishermen with the same gear, so it is not the same fishermen, not unless we facilitate a just transition. Creating a three-mile limit should allow us to employ at least the same amount of fishermen if not more fishermen, so it is a mitigation for spatial squeeze. Just going back to the discussion around the original three-mile limit and with reference to the Cameron report, is it fair to say that that report's conclusions that the original limit could not be justified on conservation grounds were not based on an ecosystem's approach? They did not factor in the impact on the seabed and related species, and that research and evidence in this area has moved on. We now have a greater understanding of the importance of ecosystem's management. Good morning. That is a perfect assessment of the situation. Initially, when the Cameron report came out, we did not really understand the ecosystem's approach, and we certainly did not try and implement it. However, at the moment, the Scottish Government has legal obligation to implement the ecosystem's based approach. If we were to do that now, we would come to very different conclusions than the Cameron report came to in the 70s. Looking at the argument that has been made here by some of this is about introducing a variation on what was the historic limit, which as you know better than I do, was brought in historically to keep out steam-powered vessels from coastal areas. From what you are saying today, the variation seems to be around trying to find a spatial management that works. That seems to be a bit of a holy grail. That comes up in this committee very often—spatial management. Can you say how the variation would work from the historic system and what the spatial management solution would look like? I think that we have to be very clear that its demersal toad bottom contact gear that is causing us to fail our obligations to achieve good environmental status. Any new variation of a three-mile limit would have to include dredge gears and any gears that were extensively dried along the seabed. If they were exempt—I am not sure that they were, but a lot of people argue that they were—if they were exempt in the original three-mile limit, they would have to be included in this one. I think that another variation that is probably worth considering is that the three-mile limit was quite a blanket approach. It was a three-mile strip right around the whole coastline of Scotland, but really our fishing industry does not reflect that kind of blanket approach on this day and age. On the west coast of Scotland, 90 per cent of all creels are still deployed within the former three-mile limit area. As such, on the west coast of Scotland, there is a very good case that a three-mile limit would be appropriate on the west coast of Scotland. When it comes to the east coast of Scotland, much of our creel sector is working as far as 12 miles offshore, some even further. When you look at the three-mile limit, you would want to do equivalent spatial management on that same scale, but you might want to do it as a series of boxes up the east coast. I am sure that if we took the ecosystem-based approach, we would be looking at the seabed, the habitats, the spawning rounds and where the existing activity is taking place. We would be able to draw the boxes based on scientific information, but it would not be a three-mile strip on the east coast of Scotland. We are certainly not arguing for that. Bally, I would like to get a little bit more detail on the stuff that you have already started touching on. You have already said that it does not necessarily extend around Scotland in a blanket approach. I heard recently that, for example, it might not be needed in Shetland because the seabed is so already abraded by a dynamic sea. I would also be interested to hear are there other ways that we could set the limit other than distance? I have heard something about measuring by depth and you were talking about that a bit in a way that creelers go out 12 miles, but only three on the west coast. We would have to use a set of principles to decide what fishing activity would be most appropriate where. That would be what would give us the best chance of achieving good environmental status, what would protect our private marine features the best and what would give us the best socioeconomic and environmental returns. I am sceptical about arguments that say that seabed can be abraded because it is already stormy or something along that line. Once the seabed gets below maybe 20 metres, there are very few storms on the planet that are capable of detrimentally impacting the seabed to the same extent that scallop dredging or prawn trawling would do. I do not want to appear like I am anti-scallop dredging and prawn trawling. When it comes to an inshore limit, we need to look at managing the creel sector as well. There are certain environments where creel should be restricted. I would like to make that clear that even within a three mile limit we have to look at managing fishing activity based on what is necessary to achieve good environmental status. That is our legal commitment and that should be our aspiration. What I understand is what you are trying to get at here with some form of limitation. I think that that is helpful when you talk about that we need a set of principles about what gear could be used where. What we are trying to do is to create abundance, bring back an abundance that used to be there in terms of our white fish and the inshore, which could then, in the future, bring back a thriving sector. I am interested in enforcement, because that came up with the previous limit. You mentioned yourself that it was difficult to enforce. Given budgetary constraints and the fact that that limit was removed historically, do you think that we could enforce it? You mentioned that we have much more technology that could help us with that. There are a lot of countries around the world who are already doing very comprehensive, modern and progressive fisheries management, so we could learn from them. For example, as I say in line bay, they have had a policy of no sculpturing or trawling for over 10 years, and they do not seem to have any problems policing it. In this day and age, you can track your Amazon package and your Uber and all the rest of it, so I cannot understand why it would be particularly difficult technologically to manage the fishing industry with very complex and nuanced fisheries management. It sounds like it is quite a bold ambition to introduce comprehensive and extensive spatial management, but it is really worth emphasising that we committed to doing this in 2010 in the Marine Scotland Act. We said that we would achieve good environmental status by 2020, and we are nowhere near it. Almost 50 per cent of our fish are fished above maximum sustainable yield outwith the scientific advice. That is a breach of the 2020 UK Fisheries Act, and it is a breach of achieving good environmental status. Most of our, not most, but 58 per cent of our seabed is still highly disturbed. Yes, policing the fishing industry to its degree and having a sense of spatial management is quite bold, but allowing ourselves to continue on the trajectory that we are is, I would say, far bolder. Just to clarify, when you are talking about spatial management, what your meaning is that the management of one gear can work in one place and another gear can work in another? Is that part of it? Yes. Spatial management basically says that you have a space, and you say that this is suitable for trawling in, dredging in, keeling in and lining in, and then we may look at the social, economic and environmental consequences of that management and say that we should allocate more space to lining or more space to netting and so on and so forth, but you are taking an ecosystem-based approach, an area-based approach. Again, it is something worth emphasising that we recently introduced the UK Fisheries Act, which committed this to producing the joint fisheries statement, which in turn committed to producing fisheries management plans. Now, uniquely in Scotland, we have not produced fisheries management plans for any of our shellfish fisheries, which means that the vast majority of fishermen are working in relatively unmanaged fisheries, so Scotland was unique in the UK in not introducing fisheries management plans for shellfish. The vast majority of Scotland's fishermen are employed catching shellfish, so we are very much behind the times on this. Spatial management is the only way that you can manage shellfish fisheries. The reason that the Scottish Government argued that we should not introduce fisheries management plans for shellfish was because we did not have enough scientific data on how to manage the shellfish stocks. That is fair enough to an extent, but the Fisheries Act also compels us to take the precautionary approach, and it says that, in the absence of scientific information, we should act on a precautionary principle. That would mean that we should introduce area-based fisheries management plans, in the absence of single species-based fisheries management plans. That is spatial management by definition. We can call them area-based fisheries management plans, we can call it spatial management, we can call it a three-mile limit, but, at the end of the day, unless we introduce this kind of you-can-fish area, you cannot fish there, and we do it with a view to achieving good environmental status, we cannot meet our international obligations. I know very little about fishing. Some total of my fishing knowledge was a day out on a hand-dive Scotland boat, so I am going to come to this from a different perspective. It would seem anecdotally that the three-mile limit works because there was more fish in the past, but what is the science behind the basis of the three-mile limit? If you set up a three-mile limit, what is the science to tell us what you are trying to return the fish stocks to? Those are very good questions, and they are actually quite tricky. We have some historic baselines for landings. For a good example of the Clyde, which I will keep referring to because we have carried out something called the ecosystem review in the Clyde, and we have looked at the historic fish landings. We can see from that that the relative abundance in the past was fantastic compared to now, almost 100 to 1. Literally, there has been a 98 per cent decline in commercial fish landings in the Clyde. That does not equate to a 98 per cent decline in fish in the Clyde, but it shows that the fish are not there to catch any more. We know that once upon a time there were fantastic volumes of fish in the inshore, and we know that when the three-mile limit was removed, those fish disappeared and we no longer have them. It is just an inference to say that if we removed the pressures that are modifying the habitat and which have the bike action that stops the fish from recovering, the fish would recover. It is speculative to some degree, but I think that it is a reasonable speculation. Evidence-wise, the Scottish Government produced a report in 2015 called Decision on the Options for Change, which concluded that the introduction of a three-mile limit in most areas around Scotland's mainland coast would create more jobs and allow ecosystem recovery. That is one piece of evidence. We have the LAM last bay around Arran, and the marine protected areas that have restricted trolling so far have all shown significant increases in abundance of most of the species, which are both commercially available and which we also want to protect as priority marine features. The best way to argue this is the inverse. That is to say that we know for a fact that allowing trolling and dredging inshore is decimating many of our shipper stocks and our priority marine features. It is a reasonable evidence to say that unless you stop that pressure, and the Scottish Government has recognised trolling and dredging as the single biggest pressure on those environments, we cannot recover those environments. Some of the language that you use is decimating. You say that 58 per cent of our seabed is severely damaged. Where do you get that figure from? Is that 58 per cent within the three-mile limit or within the 12-mile limit? It is within the Scottish Sea area. I believe that it is the marine assessment that came up with the figure at 58 per cent. It is not highly damaged but highly disturbed. That means that the fragile species that live in the seabed are being decimated. I think that decimated is not the wrong word to use. I know that the Scottish Government took issue with the petition and, as it used the word, decimated. In the past 30 years, we have had a 92 per cent decline in cod abundance in the west coast of Scotland. We have a zero-tack, which means that the International Commission for Exploration of the Sea has said that we should not be allowed to catch any cod at all on the west coast of Scotland. If that is not reflective of a decimated fishpot population, I do not know what it is. I could give you examples here and use it all your day, but I will give you a couple more. There has been a 90 per cent decline in circulared reefs in the Highlands since the last marine assessment. That is just in one decade. There has been a 99.5 per cent decline in blue mussels in the Moray Firth area. There has been a 52 per cent decline in flame-shell beds in the Argyll area. Those are all just within a 10-year period. We have no herring quota left on the west coast of Scotland any more. Herringwar wants the pivotal keystone species that supplied most of the employment and facilitated much of the ecosystem activity in the west coast of Scotland. We have a zero-tack for herring now. If those things do not reflect a decimated ecosystem, I do not really know what does. You are suggesting that all down. Your petition is all about mobile gear fishing. Surely you are not suggesting that mobile gear fishing is responsible for this. We know that ecosystems are complex. You have said that yourself. There are lots of different effects and causes for that. We have global warming. We have plankton and sanddeals becoming more abundant further north. We are seeing a reduction in seabirds. Your petition suggests that it is all down to mobile gear within a three-mile limit. Surely that is not at the moment scientifically based. It is just an assumption that you are making that we should have a blanket three-mile ban. You have said yourself that there are some places where you maybe would not need a three-mile ban on the east coast or whatever. It is a blanket ban or it is not a blanket ban. Further to what Jim has mentioned, is there any science to back up what you are saying? Yes, I think there is. First of all, back to the Clyde. There was a very good study that looked at the history of fishing in the Clyde and how that related to the declines in the fish stocks. In the Clyde, we can conclude that much of the declines that we have seen are direct reflections of habitat modification and bycatch associated with trawl and dredge fisheries. I am an example that Professor Heath gave on a previous rain committee hearing, was that although trawling only catches 1 per cent of cod in the Clyde, that turns out to be two thirds, two out of three of every single cod in the Clyde get caught each year as a bycatch in Nephrop's trawl. Those are not landed, they are bycought. The Scottish Government already recognises that the single biggest impact on the marine environment is the impacts of towed demersal gear, and that is the single biggest metric that is stopping us achieving good environmental status. The reason that we are trying to achieve good environmental status and the reason that one of the metrics says that only 15 per cent should be highly disturbed is because it is already being concluded by society at large that extensively disturbing the seabed is not good for the ecosystem. If you disturb 58 per cent of the seabed like we do, highly disturbed, this is not like a little brush by with a soft net, this is highly disturbed seabed, 58 per cent of Scotland's seabed is highly disturbed, and the significant proportion of our demersal fin fish are caught as bycatch and dumped overboard, then that has consequences. The consequences are that we have seen a 98 per cent decline in demersal fish landings that need to be inshore. There is some science to back that up, and many countries introducing inshore limits and restrictions on trawling are showing that this is a general consensus that you have to remove those pressures from the environment if you want the environment to recover. Is there any evidence that suggests that cod move north because of colder waters? Yes. Is that not a factor? Again, or just focus on it, it appears that you suggest that disturbance in seabed is wholly responsible for the decline? Yes. I think that there is a general consensus that cod are moving north at something like two miles a year, although that does not account for the declines in the cod abundance. Jim Fairlie. I would like to, sorry, just to come back on the cod, so again to the Clyde example. In the Clyde, there was a recognised spawning area 20 years ago, and I believe that the committee has heard some evidence on that in the past. That spawning area was recognised that we should protect it in order to protect the cod. For 20 years, we allowed scallop dredging and trawling on that spawning ground during that spawning season. In the interim, we are allowing trawlers to catch two thirds of every cod in the Clyde in each year. I think that there is a reasonable inference that that is why there is no cod in the Clyde. Jim Fairlie. I get that this was quite a difficult question session for you, Mally. However, in terms of the scientific research that has been done, has there been scientific research or is it anecdotal? Is your petition suggesting that we close it off for a 10-year period to see what happens? In that interim 10-year period, you have already talked about what happens to the communities that are relying on the fish that are happening at the moment. In that 10-year period that you want to close it off for or whatever length of period of time that it is going to take, you want to see the fish stocks increase. One of the questions that I asked you is what are the fish stocks going to be recovered to when you start fishing all over again after that because you have already displaced other fishing boats out of the system. I am trying to get to that from the point of fairness. How do you actually make what it is that your petition is trying to do fair for everyone who is in this system? I think that the evidence is clear that the Scottish Government has already committed to achieve good environmental status and they have already committed to fishing below maximum sustainable yield and in line with the scientific advice, and we are not doing that. The question is, how do we do that? They cannot achieve good environmental status without reducing the amount of seabed that is disturbed, which they cannot do without reducing trawling and dredging. If you want to fish below maximum sustainable yield, you may have to catch less fish as bycatch. It is simple. That is the evidence. The evidence has already been conceded by the Scottish Government and the Scottish Government have already made the commitment to achieve those things. The petition is a mechanism by which we might contribute towards achieving that. In answer to the second part of your question, which is how do you make it fair, I think that we have to recognise that there will be people who will be displaced and we have to create some kind of a just transition. One of the beauties of something like a three mile limit is that you can employ more people in static gear fisheries than you can in the same equivalent trawl fishery. It is a simple consequence of the premium value that the product attracts. We can transition much of the existing mobile capacity into the static sector within a three mile limit. A three mile limit would be dramatically under capacity. That, to some degree, would mitigate some of those job losses. In future, once we are fishing below maximum sustainable yield, we have to ask ourselves which method gives us the best social, economic and environmental outcomes. If you have a trawler trying to catch fish versus a handliner trying to catch fish, you will probably find that the handliner offers better social, economic and environmental outcomes. We should therefore allocate the fishing opportunity on that basis. We have covered that coil. There is just one thing that I want to ask you. The 58 per cent that is severely damaged or decimated, where do you get that figure from? Can you point to the committee where that research is done and where you get that figure from? I believe that it comes from the marine assessment, but I will have to come back to the committee on exactly where that quote comes from. I took it from the briefing note that was supplied to the committee from the open seas. I absolutely do not doubt your sincerity in any of that at all. I have read in the petition that there are some really bold claims in there, opportunities to optimise the social, economic and environmental returns, increases in fishing jobs and the revitalisation, apologies, of coastal communities. As somebody with a coastal community, as my constituency, I know that infrastructure, tourism, support for small businesses, extending ports, helping fishers and farmers to decarbonise investment and renewable energy and helping discussions between those different industries with the spatial squeeze is a very complex area. When I see statements like that, I think, okay, so where is the evidence to really support that statement? For me, I do not think that there is a silver bullet really that can help all that. I see that this is something that may be thrown something else into the mix, so where is the evidence to support that statement? What will it do for coastal communities? How will it help all the complex issues that are going on? Again, I would like to reiterate that the Scottish Government has already recognised that much of that is true, because we have committed to achieving good environmental status, and we have committed to fishing below maximum sustainable yield. In order to achieve that, you have to have extensive spatial management. The extensive spatial management will lead to improve fish populations, improve environmental health and improve jobs and is already implicit in the Scottish Government's commitments and the Sustainable Development Goals and the UK Fisheries Act. It is implicit in all those things that we have to have extensive spatial management of Scotland dredge gear and more static gears in order to meet our commitments. Those commitments are based on the fact that the Government has already recognised that those are basic requirements for ecosystem health, and a healthy ecosystem will produce more jobs and more robust coastal communities. However, there is more direct evidence, so the Scottish Government commissioned a report in 2015 called Session of the Options for Change, which showed that the introduction of a three-mile limit around Scotland would produce more jobs and supply better ecosystem health and also supply associated jobs such as diving and angling and so on and so forth. There is huge potential jobs that can be created for coastal communities indirectly by introducing good environmental health into our marine ecosystem. Furthermore, the New Economics Foundation in 2016 produced a report on the Scottish nephrot fishery on applying social economic environmental criteria. I will give a bit of background to that. The common fisheries policy obligated us under article 17 to use social economic and environmental criteria as the basis for allocating fishing opportunities, but a lot of people found that quite complicated and they wanted to know how to go about doing that. The New Economics Foundation wrote a report on how that would be progressed in the Scottish nephrot fishery. It concluded that swinging the bias towards more creole fishing would employ more fishermen, it would have a reduced impact on the environment and it would generate more revenues for coastal communities. I think that we can infer from that that there would be more jobs as a consequence. Lastly, I think that the Scottish creole fishery from the Federation produced a document called Correcting the Misallocation of Nephrops in the Scottish Shores Fishing in Endshore Waters, which clearly demonstrated that every time you take an equivalent two-man small-scale trawler out of the system, you could replace it with four two-man creole boats. Without extracting a single extra nephrot, it would potentially be far more employment not just directly in the fishing industry but also indirectly in angling, diving, marine tourism and such like. I think that it's a given. Some of the things that you've covered, we could probably sit here all day at that one question because it's a great question about how there's the co-dependency synergies trade-offs wherever, but the Scottish Government have committed to developing a new national marine plan for Scotland by late 2025. Are you hopeful that that will cover some of the issues that the question that Karen asked there? I think that the existing marine plan doesn't really deal with fisheries much at all. It deals with other marine spatial planning, excluding fishing. So I think that if we're going to have a new marine plan that deals with some of these issues, then it's incumbent upon the Scottish Government to demonstrate how using that mechanism they will achieve good environmental status. I mean this is one of the foundational principles, both legally and environmentally, that we have to achieve. We have to achieve good environmental status and it's a clearly defined thing. So if the marine plan is going to be the solution to this problem, then it's incumbent upon the Government to demonstrate how, within that context, they are going to achieve good environmental status. Personally, I don't think that you can get anywhere near good environmental status without introducing very comprehensive spatial management at least on the scale of the three-mile element. Thank you. Jenny Minto. Thank you, convener. You touched on this earlier in some of your comments, Bally, about the possible risk of the three-mile limit resulting in more creel fishermen. So I'm interested to hear your views on how you can measure that and what measures you can bring in to control that. Okay, so that's a very good question. I think it's one of the best arguments I've heard against. The three-mile limit is that, in the absence of comprehensive management of the creel sector, you could just be swapping one unsustainable fishing sector for another. When we suggest introducing extensive spatial management, it's not in the absence of management of the gear that then is incumbent in that space. It's really important that we recognise that we need fisheries management plans and the Government has committed to this ecosystem-based approach to developing fisheries management plans. We haven't done it. We've just published what we're going to do with fisheries management plans and they're all single species fisheries management plans. An ecosystem approach to fisheries management plans would be area-based fisheries management plans, so you and me have one for the south-west of Scotland and so on and so forth. Once you had a basic fisheries management plan, you would then have to look at all the individual exceptions because we have a lot of priority marine features, we have spawning grounds and so on and so forth. So within area-based fisheries management plans, you need local fisheries management plans right down to the resolution of individual sea locks and individual priority marine features. That can be done. We're just not doing it. We proposed in the inner sound of the sky several years ago that we pilot this approach and that we try to develop and community manage fisheries that are based on geographic spaces, which would be the equivalent of an ecosystem-based fisheries management plan. Unfortunately, the Scottish Government put very hard against that and we have no examples of ecosystem-based fisheries management going on in Scotland to date, but it would be a requirement of any specially managed area that we introduce ecosystem-based fisheries management plans and that would then tell you how much gear is sustainable, what gear and where and when. We would have to do that. I'm not for a second suggesting that a three-mile limit would solve all our problems. A three-mile limit in the absence of fisheries management would be a complete waste of our time. For example, if you're an established creel fisherman you may have 650 creels and you think, oh, three-mile limit great, I'll increase to a thousand. So how are you proposing that there would be perhaps limits to the number of creels? That would have to be based on the geographic areas carrying capacity. Now, this has been done so in the Lion Bay project in the south of England Plymouth University has established what is the carrying capacity or the various ecosystems and that specifies the exact amount of creels that you can deploy in any given area and then who gets to deploy them is based on historic entitlement and track record or whether or not there's over or under capacity. I mean, we really have to manage the ecosystem at that resolution if we are going to implement ecosystems management. So you could have a national cap on the amount of creels at the moment and I think it's really worth emphasising here because this is one of the issues that's led us to where we are today. At the moment we have no effort controls or catch limits in our inshore fisheries and that means you can have as many trawlers as you like trawling in the same place over and over again. There's no limit to the amount of trawling or creel that you can have in any given place and there's no limit to the amount of shellfish those trawlers or creelers can extract from a place. It's complete madness in the 21st century to have such an absence of management of our fisheries. So yes, we would have to have effort limits and catch limits for sure. Thank you and if I may just very quickly one final question. Clearly because you're a creel fisherman we've been focusing on that but I'm interested to hear about what discussions you've had, what perhaps agreements you've had with other types of fishers about the three mile limit. I think you're going to find that anybody who is looking to be displaced by a three mile limit is not going to be very much in favour of it, not at least until we can tell them how we can facilitate a just transition. Again the Scottish Government has committed to this equal systems based approach so I think it's up to the Scottish Government to tell us how they're going to achieve an equal systems based approach in good environmental status and do it in a just manner. From my point of view I think we could subsidise the decommissioning of the smallest trawl boats because those are the ones who are going to be impacted the most and that we should help facilitate these guys wherever they want to come into the creel sector which would be under capacity in the event of extensive spatial management. That would be my personal suggestion but really I think it's up to the Government to tell us how they're going to achieve good environmental status and how they're going to achieve a good equal systems based approach and then figure out how they're going to do it in a just manner. I don't think that's my responsibility. Thank you. Thank you. Jim Fairlie. Just following on from Jenny's question there, is it gear that is your biggest issue, the type of gear that is used in these inshore fisheries? You don't specifically mention gear in your petition, so is it gear that is the issue? Gear and the management of that gear. I think that those two things cannot be separated because you can have sustainable trawling, don't get me wrong, but you just can't have very much of it and you can have nowhere near as much of it as you could have sustainable crealing and you can have unsustainable crealing. I think that we have to recognise that it's not just the gear, it's a combination of the gear and the management of that gear and at the moment we have no inshore fisheries management plans in Scotland, we have none. It's free for all, for all intents and purposes. There are no effort controls and no catch limits. There are no inshore based fisheries management plans. If we had those, we might not need a female limit, but if we had those and we tried to achieve good environmental status, we would have to introduce special management. The two things cannot be separated, you can't achieve good environmental status without reducing the impacts of demersal gear. The Scottish Government has recognised that the impacts of demersal gear on the ecosystem are the single biggest factor stopping us achieving good environmental status, so you can't achieve good environmental status without looking at the gear and the management of the gear. I'm very mindful of Jenny's point that there are other people that are in the same waters at the moment and there's going to have to be some balance there. Harry Ann Burgess Which question are we on? You had a supplementary in question 8. You started to talk about all the different components that would need to be in the mix, so it's not just the three-mile limit, there's other elements that need to be there. I wondered if you could talk about other ideas for minimising gear conflict that could perhaps work alongside a three-mile limit or alongside the spatial management measures that you mentioned, such as the inner sound pilot and territorial rights and that kind of thing. It really comes down to fisheries management plans. A fit for purpose fisheries management plan applied the ecosystems approach and sought to achieve good environmental status, because those are the foundational principles that we should be working towards. It would dictate who could fish where and what gear they could use. One of the interesting things is that as you transition towards more selective gear and gear with a reduced impact on the environment, often you end up with a higher employment ratio because those gears attract this premium. In order to reduce the detrimental impacts of extensive spatial management, you would want to facilitate a transition as much as possible from people from higher impact gears to lower impact gears. That way you can actually generate more employment without taking any more resource out of the system. There's a whole array of things that we can do to make that work better and to mitigate the negative consequences. We've always got to remember that if we want to achieve good environmental status, we can't do it without reducing sea bed disturbance. If we want to reduce sea bed disturbance, we can't do it without reducing the amount of trawling and dredging. If we want to reduce the amount of trawling and dredging, we either have to transition those guys to a lower impact fishing or we have to decommission those elements of the fishing industry. Some may argue that that's not just, but that all leads back to the commitment to achieve good environmental status in the first place. To somebody in the Scottish Government, it's got to demonstrate how it's going to achieve good environmental status. Our petition says that we can't do it with extensive spatial management, and a variation of female element would be a really good place to start. Obviously, in the Bute House agreement, there's the highly protected marine areas. You have been talking about 58 per cent of highly damaged sea bed. The intention with that is a landlush bay approach of a no-take zone. One of the things that's come out today is that it's not a blanket three-mile limit and that there's a more nuanced approach. It seems to me that we would need some places around the coastline where there's really no-take zones. I'd be interested to hear your reflections and thoughts about how we could fit that into the spatial management mix. Again, I think that everything is context here, so highly protected marine areas in a context of a fishing industry that's over capacity where there's spatial squeeze, there's no fish use management plans, are potentially just compounding the problem. If we believe the Scottish Government's report that 50 per cent of our fishing effort is already above maximum sustainable yield, therefore by definition unsustainable, I think that the introduction of highly protected marine areas in that context has a potentially detrimental effect. By that, if we're already at over capacity and we remove 10 per cent of the opportunity from the fishing industry, but not 10 per cent of the fishing industry, then we just compound the extent to which everything else is over capacity or we make the viability of the existing fishing businesses more marginal. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't have highly protected marine areas. It means that if we want highly protected marine areas to work and to be beneficial, it has to be part of a comprehensive fisheries management plan. Hypothetically, if your fishing industry was under capacity, it really would not be harmful to create no-take zones or highly protected marine areas, but if your fishing industry is over capacity, which by the Scottish Government's own study says that it is, then introducing highly protected marine areas is only going to make things worse. I don't think that the argument is for or against highly protected marine areas. I think that the argument has to be if you want to introduce highly protected marine areas, it should be part of a comprehensive fisheries management plan and we should look at mitigating the negative consequences of doing that. Just a very quick response. Do you think that HEPMAs could be excited on offshore wind farm where fishing opportunities are severely restricted anyway, so it wouldn't add then as much to the spatial squeeze or additional fishing pressures? It's not simple because there are consequences for these fish wind farms and there's already a big study going into the impacts of electromagnetic interference and the migration of shellfish and until we can see the results of that, I couldn't give you an informed answer because if it turns out that these cables are interfering substantially with the movements of shellfish, then they obviously wouldn't achieve what was meant to be achieved by highly protected marine areas, but it would be nice to see some of the areas that are already close to fishing because of military sites or other designations being included in these highly protected marine areas. Otherwise, we're losing not 10 per cent of our inshore area, we're losing 10 per cent of our fishing grounds. Okay, thank you. Rachel Hamilton. Okay, so first of all I just want to, you know when you get back to us to the committee on the 58 per cent figure that you used, is that could you clarify whether that's areas where trawling happens or the assessed areas, please? You don't need to answer now, but just to add to that. I also want to ask you a little bit about the backing that you've got for your petition. It says that it's you on behalf of the SCFF. Do all your members support your petition? Yes, but I should clarify here that SCFFs represent trawlers and divers, but we only represent about 200 of Scotland's almost 2,000, so we only represent about 10 per cent of Scotland's trawfisher, so I would be wrong to give you the impression that all of Scotland's trawfisher support this measure. To be honest with you, I think that the support for it or not for it is neither here nor there. I think that what's important is that can we meet our international legal obligations without it? Of those 200, are they active Fisher people? How is your organisation funded? A mixture of members' fees, which we have not levied in this last year because we have a nice grant from the Esme Furban Foundation, which is paying me a part-time wage. I'm actually a full-time fisherman and I represent and advocate for the interest of trawfishermen as a part-time basis, and that position has been funded by the Esme Furban Foundation. I'm interested in going back to some of the points that you make about the socio-economic benefit that the intention of the petition could have. Would the price of nephrops increase, do you believe, and price us out of the domestic market, and then foreign imports would be replacing that domestic market? It's very complex. I can only rely on the work of the new economics foundation, and Professor Alan Radford, who is an economics professor, was commissioned by Emeline Scotland to produce the original three-mile limit assist in the options for change report, but they concluded that the economics would be credible and that we would not saturate the market and that we would not overinflate the price of prongs such that it would negate the jobs. I can only rely on those guys, I'm not an economist. I believe that there was maybe a third piece of work that I haven't mentioned, which was carried out by Seafood Scotland, that said that we could increase the amount of live nephrops going to the market by 10 per cent. I mean, I'm not 10 per cent of the existing 10 per cent more of Scotland's nephrops could go to the live market without creating negative economic repercussions. I just wondered if what you would say to the Scottish Fishermen's Federation who argue that the three-mile limit is a protectionist approach that benefits only one type of fishing. I think it's half right and half wrong, so the protectionist approach, arguably yes, and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. We're talking about protecting the ecosystem, we're talking about protecting our legal obligations to achieve good environmental status. Whether or not it would benefit only one type of fishing, I would disagree. I think that's wrong, because we're talking about being able to net and handline and creel and then within creeling. There's lots of types of fishing within creeling. There's wras, there's welk, there's crab, there's lobstert and there's nephrops. In the future, if we can develop a higher abundance of dimersal fin fish in the inshore, we can actually use variations on creeling, trap-type fishing to catch fish. I think that the argument that it would only benefit one type of fishing is wrong. It would benefit a huge range of fisheries that have historically been marginalised by creating a big free-for-all within the inshore. I expect to have to produce, I would say, a financial impact assessment, whether it's negative or positive, alongside your petition. I think that it's incumbent upon the Scottish Government to produce a social economic impact assessment on whatever mechanism they propose to achieve good environmental status. At the moment, our petition is that the Scottish Government aren't proposing anything that could possibly achieve good environmental status. I think that it would be incumbent upon the Scottish Government to show how they would do that. This would have an impact on mobile gear fishers. I'm just wondering how you propose to mitigate or compensate them for that. I can think of lots of mechanisms whereby we can mitigate into some degree compensates. I would suggest that the increased capacity for more creel boats in the inshore would create an opportunity for some people to transition, so that would be a mitigation to some extent. For those who either didn't want to or were unable to transition, I think that we would have to look at some sort of compensation. Traditionally, in the fishing industry, we use mechanisms like decommissioning. We speculated in our 2017 proposal at the Scottish Fishers Conference where we suggested to the female limit in the first instance that we could start with a base figure of about £100,000, which would reflect the value of an under-10m trawler and would be at least the minimum that we would have to contribute towards facilitating those guys to go out and buy a creel boat. We produced a range of outcomes depending on how many boats would be requesting this type of compensation. The figures were between £10 million and £15 million. We should contextualise that the Scottish Government has committed £14 million recently to incentivise new entrants into the fishing industry, and it is not working very well because nobody wants to go into a fishing industry that is unsustainable and in decline. If we want to bring new entrants into the fishing industry, that £14 million would have been far better spent creating opportunity within the inshore. If I could just come back in there. We are talking in an economic sense here and we are talking about compensatory in a fiscal way, but there is also a lot of history, culture and heritage that comes along with that. We are even talking about the attachment that people have to that life and possibly family history as well. From that side of things, what sort of compensatory or mitigations could be in place for those people? The question has to be—we are starting with the wrong question—how do we achieve good environmental status? That is our legal obligation. Under the Sustainable Development Goals, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which we are signed up to, we have to fish within maximum sustainable yield. How do we achieve that? Under those same national sustainable development goals, 14B, we have to incentivise small-scale and artisanal fisheries. We have to show how we are going to do that. If we show how we are going to achieve good environmental status, incentivise low-impact fishing and fish within sustainable limits and take an ecosystem approach, those are all commitments that we already have. We have to demonstrate how we are going to achieve that. In fact, it is incumbent upon the Scottish Government to demonstrate how it is going to achieve that. Then, at that point, we can look at comprehensive inter-officious management plans and maybe we can identify who the beneficiaries and the victims are going to be and we can start to discuss compensation. However, if we are going to discuss compensation at this stage, you have put the cart before the horse. At the moment, we do not know who we would be compensating. We do not even have fish's management plans that tell us where we are over capacity and where we are under capacity. We really have to start by developing comprehensive inter-officious management plans. That would allow us to deal with spatial squeeze, achieving good environmental status and so on and so forth. I want to take you back to the closure of the Clyde Cod box. Members of the party in government right now called for fishermen to be compensated after the new measures were introduced to protect the cod stocks in the Firth of Clyde. You talked about decommissioning and you talked about a just transition. Will you support compensation for individuals who have been displaced? Just for the record, colleagues probably know this, but it would be helpful to understand what we are talking about in terms of numbers. I understand that it is around 2,100 registered fishing vessels, but how does that break down into creelers approximately? I know that there is 21 pelagic boats, but what is the mix with the other? I do not have the exact numbers in front of me, but I think that it is just to give us an idea for context. First of all, without fish's management plans, it is really hard to identify where we have over another capacity and then, in turn, who would be displaced, how many would be displaced and so on and so forth. However, it is reasonable to suggest that, if a three-mile limit and an extensive inshore spatial management were created tomorrow, the smallest trawlers would suffer the worst. For context, there are 85 under 10 metre trawlers on the whole west coast of Scotland, on the mainland of Scotland. I think that there are only 35 on the west coast mainland. There are 85 under 10 metre trawlers in Scotland, and those guys would arguably be substantially detrimentally affected by an inshore limit. After that, we have to say, well, how would the 10 to 12 metre sector be impacted and then how would the 12 to 14 metre sector be impacted? Again, without comprehensive inshore fish's management plans, we have no clue. One of the reasons that we find ourselves in this situation and one of the reasons that we are petitioning for this limit is because, in the absence of comprehensive inshore area-based or ecosystems-based fisheries management plans, we are acting blind here and we are clunky. The Scottish Government has complained that this is a blanket approach, but a blanket approach is allowing trawling and dredging inshore in an area where we are committed to achieving good environmental status. You have touched on that already, but I wonder what the implications are for Marine Scotland and others in terms of enforcing the kind of solution that you would like to see. I think that it would be complicated and that is one of the reasons why we have not done it, but on paper we are committed to doing it. Again, if we want to take an ecosystem-based approach and achieve good environmental status, we have to develop comprehensive fisheries management plans. That means that there are going to be lots of complicated and nuanced fisheries regulations that are going to be right down to the local scale. To some degree, that will involve a degree of co-management. I think that Marine Scotland is going to have to let go of their reins to some degree and allow communities to develop fisheries management plans in line with scientific advice and facilitated by both scientists and Marine Scotland staff. However, it would be very hard for Marine Scotland to micromanage fishing at the scale that is required to achieve good environmental status. That is one of the reasons why Marine Scotland has not embraced the idea before now. However, it is not impossible—plenty of places do it—and, with modern technology, the Scottish Government is committed to implementing comprehensive vessel tracking by the end of this parliamentary term. That would facilitate to a huge extent the kind of management that would be required to achieve good environmental status. Balie, as you will know, the Bute House agreement of November 2021 committed the Scottish Government to introducing highly protected marine areas and to capping fishing activity in inshore waters. The consultation on the highly protected marine areas was only launched in December, and it is currently under way. The consultation on a cap on fishing activity has not yet begun, as far as I am aware. To what extent would those proposals address the concerns raised in your petition, based on the current pace of work by the Scottish Government on those commitments? Do you see any dangers if the committee were to close your petition today prior to any progress on the commitments from the Government being delivered? There are a couple of different things in there. The highly protected marine areas will contribute to some degree towards achieving good environmental status. Highly disturbed areas are what we need to have less of in order to achieve good environmental status. You would have to put the whole 10 per cent that we have committed to as highly protected marine areas are on highly disturbed areas in order for it to contribute just 10 per cent to those highly disturbed areas. We are needing 30 per cent to 40 per cent, so they will contribute to some extent, but they will certainly not solve the problem. In absence of other measures, capping the inshore fleet at its present unsustainable levels will not contribute meaningfully at all. As a mechanism from where we can reduce effort, yes, that sets us up to be able to start working towards achieving good environmental status. However, if you cap inshore effort at current unsustainable levels and then remove 10 per cent of the fishing opportunity without removing 10 per cent of the fishing fleet, it could actually make things worse. In terms of the second part of the question of if the committee was to close the petition, do you see any dangers in that? A historical precedent shows that Marine Scotland previously had commitments in 2010 to achieve good environmental status, and by 2020 it looked like we had categorically failed on almost every single metric. I think that we failed 11 of the 14 metrics by which we measure good environmental status. I do not think that there has been a root and branch review of what happened, what went wrong, what failures led us to not achieving good environmental status within the time that we had committed to doing it. I do not believe that any mechanism has been introduced to make sure that we are not going to just repeat that failure. My concern would be that, regardless of all the Government's fancy words about what they intend to do, history has proven that they have not done it in the past, and I can see no reason to believe why they would be doing it in the next 10 years. I do not believe that we have any further questions, so I thank you most sincerely for your evidence that you have given us today. It has been very thorough and under heavy questioning, so I am sure that the committee will all join me in thanking you for that. I will now take a brief suspension to allow you the witness to leave and come for a break. We now return to agenda item 1, and we have to look at, in terms of our next step, what decisions we are going to take on whether to close or continue the petition. I think that everybody has reviewed the spatial management of the marine environment. It is incredibly important, and we have heard a lot of evidence this morning. The Scottish Government has recently begun its review of the national marine plan, and the cabinet secretary did write to us in October explaining the review that it would establish, and I quote a clear policy framework that reflects our new shared priorities and commitment that considers potential co-dependencies, synergies and trade-offs between interests. In my view, I think that that commitment from the Government would allow us to close the petition, but for us as a committee to pay a regard to what we have heard in the petition today, in our future work programme. Any comments? Thanks, convener. I think that that is a good approach. I would just raise one concern that I think we should get clarity, because I did hear Bally when we raised that, I think that you asked him about the marine plan. I think that he said that the existing marine plan didn't really deal with fisheries, so I would want to get insurances that absolutely fisheries is in that plan, and that is what for the future plan that the Government is including fisheries in the mix there. The petitioner gave compelling evidence and answered our questions very well, but the scope of the petition for me requires a multi-approach strategy. I think that the Government needs to ensure that they are working on the issues that the petitioner raised, where there is a glaring deficit of meeting targets. For example, he said, without a comprehensive initial management plan, that we are blind, but he also mentioned that the Government should be responsible for ensuring that we are looking at the financial impact of the suggestion of the petition. Therefore, I think that there is a lot more work that the Government can do, and I would recommend that the petition at this point is closed. I think that we should keep the petition open. It is not clear to me what the Scottish Government's position is as it is still consulting on the issues. As the petitioner pointed out, we have had very strong commitments in the past that have not materialised into action, so I think that it would be premature to close the petition until we have a clear position from the Government on outcomes on those consultations. I agree with your position that we closed the petition at this stage. The evidence that Bally gave was absolutely tremendous and very detailed, but we are only hearing from that particular petitioner. I think that there will be other people in the fishing community who will also want to give as much evidence as has been given on that. As the Government is doing its reviews, we need to be mindful of that. Therefore, I would close the petition just now and take it in the broader picture that we are going to be looking at later in this term. The issues today and the petition were given a good hearing and we can maybe give a more comprehensive one to the wider issues in our later work as a committee. That would make the case, I think, for closing it for the moment. Likewise, I am inclined to agree with closing the petition, but I felt that the evidence that we heard today was great. We had a good in-depth question and session. I would not like to see that go to waste. I think that there is still a lot of work on going at the moment and until a lot of that work settles and we can get some proposed outcomes from that. Although we do propose to close the petition, we must keep in mind the session from today and add that to any business in the future. I agree with what Karen Adam has just said. We have very thorough evidence today and we need to take strong account of that. It is important that we hear from other groups of fishermen on the subject and that we agree with taking it forward and making an important part of any scrutiny that we further do on fishing issues around Scotland. The majority of the opinion is that we close the petition and incorporate consideration of spatial management, of inshore fisheries and our future consideration of the national marine plan. If that national marine plan comes to us as the lead committee, I can assure the petitioner that we will engage extensively with all stakeholders and engage with the petitioner and the SCFF when that opportunity arises. We can, but I think that the majority from what I hear is in favour of closing the petition. I do not think that we need to take a vote. As long as it is noted that I wanted to keep it open. Yes, your views are on record. The members in agreement that we close the petition. That is agreed. We will now move into private session.