Mr. Andrew Kinneen:

The Deputy raised the issue of landing obligations. There are challenges for us, as regulators in this area, because monitoring and getting the assurance in place that everybody is not dumping unwanted fish at sea are very challenging. Again, there may be technical solutions to that. We are trying to encourage fishermen not to catch the fish in the first place. If they develop more selective catch methods, they avoid the problem of having unwanted catches of fish for which they have no commercial use that they must manage when they come ashore. If they cannot manage to be more selective in their catches, we will have a lot of problems. We will have problems managing the catch that has been brought ashore. We have been trying to encourage fishermen to record discards so that we have an idea of what is being dealt with. We cannot say this has been a success despite our efforts at persuasion. There have been port meetings held by the SFPA and our parent Department to try to explain this quite complex regulation to the fishermen. I would say that there is a lot of work to be done in this area. We could not claim that this is an area of high compliance at the moment. We see this regulation as something that is of great benefit to fishermen if they can take it on board and take control of it themselves - not seeing it as a cat-and-mouse issue but one where they use their intelligence to catch the fish they want to keep. Our strategy in this area is to be persuasive.