Mr. Jeremy Percy:

I take the Deputy's point entirely in terms of the overarching concerns about quotas. If one looks at the landings of quota species in the north-east Atlantic over the last 30 or 40 years, there has been an alarming decrease in landings. We are now using 19 times the effort to catch the same amount of fish as we did 100 years ago, so of course we have very significant concerns. As I mentioned in my preamble, we have a situation in which the quotas of the small-scale fleet have been unnecessarily restricted, through no fault of its own, by overfishing in past decades. The answer to the Deputy's question on the big picture is that we do have very significant concerns about the amount of fish and, therefore, quota available. However, within that quota system, there is sufficient fish to go around. If one takes into account the requirements of Article 17 to consider social, economic and environmental criteria within whatever quota member states have, it might perhaps suggest to them whether they want to allocate quota to make relatively few people very rich or to provide a good living for very many more.