Thank you for your letter of 24 June, seeking this Department's considered response in due course to the issues raised by your predecessor, Lord Selborne, in his letters of 11 March to the then Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and Secretary of State for Scotland. I was also grateful for your kind congratulations on my appointment.

  The Fourth Report for 1996-97 of the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology also included at Appendix 1 copies of Lord Selborne's letters. This letter represents the Government's reply to those letters and the Committee's report.

  The Government is committed to achieving sustainable management of fisheries based on scientific advice. We fully agree with the Select Committee that, in order to achieve this, firm control of fishing effort is required in order to tackle over-fishing at its source. One of our first announcements on taking office was therefore that the Government will honour its obligation to implement the Community's new Multi-Annual Guidance Programme (MAGP IV). This requires Member States to achieve 30 percent reductions in effort for stocks at risk of depletion and 20 percent for stocks which are overfished. Reductions can be achieved by a mix of decommissioning and effort management measures and it is a high priority for us to complete our national implementation plan.

  The Government also agrees that effective enforcement is an indispensable condition for any successful fisheries policy. The Government has firmly committed itself to improving standards of enforcement both across the Community and within the United Kingdom. In their exchange of letters at the Amsterdam Summit, the President of the European Commission gave a firm undertaking to the Prime Minister that the Commission would be examining improvements in enforcement and submitting a report to the Council with proposals as necessary during 1997. We have already implemented tighter controls for the regulation of the North Sea herring fishery and announced to Parliament other measures to ensure that our fishing fleet abides by the rules. These include, subject to clearance with the Commission, the introduction of a prohibition on the discarding of stowed fish. I have recently held high level talks with the leaders of the fishing industry at which John Sewel, Elliot Morley and I emphasised our determination to address the problem of blackfish and our intention to bring forward in the autumn a package of measures further to improve enforcement. Satellite monitoring will be an important component.

  Technical conservation measures also have a role to play. New EC conservation measures will apply to fixed nets from the end of 1997 and we have strongly supported the EC Presidency in giving priority, now that the MAGP IV negotiations are concluded, to completing negotiations on proposals to improve the EC technical rules that apply to mobile fishing gear.

  Lord Selborne's letter described the key to securing sustainability as lying in initiatives that seek to protect regional seas in the first instance. The Government agrees with this and will maintain active UK participation in the North West Atlantic Fisheries Organisation, the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission and other regional bodies as well, of course, as the Common Fisheries Policy.

  The Government welcomes the progress made at the Intermediate Ministerial Meeting (IMM) of Fisheries and Environment Ministers at Bergen in March. Most of the action needed to follow up the Bergen conclusions has to be taken forward within the framework of the Common Fisheries Policy, where the responsibility for making proposals rests with the European Commission. We are therefore pursuing with the Commission the initiatives they need to take to implement the IMM conclusions, as well as considering the national initiatives that we should take. During our Presidency of the EU in the first half of next year, we envisage reviewing the progress made in the first year since the IMM.

  Lord Selborne drew particular attention to the state of North Sea cod stocks. It is certainly the case that North Sea cod stocks are now at "uncharted low levels" and all fisheries managers are aware of the poor state of these stocks. Even at these low levels there are still some 400 million individual cod in the North Sea of one year of age or more and I understand that the latest scientific information is that there has been a good recruitment of juvenile cod to the fishery. But this is no cause to be complacent. We need to have total allowable catches (TACs) which will help the stock to rebuild as well as ensuring that there are effective reductions in effort under MAGP IV. We also need to have technical measures which protect the juvenile cod. There is a significant problem in doing this because in the mixed fisheries in the North Sea it is impossible to manage one stock in isolation.

  So far as the technical measures are concerned, Lord Selborne pointed to the continued use of an EC minimum landing size that is set significantly below the size at which cod typically reach sexual maturity. Managers, however, have to recognise the fact that the "cod" fishery in much of the North Sea is in fact a mixed cod, haddock and whiting fishery. To set a minimum landing size at the level Lord Selborne appeared to suggest would result in by far the largest part of a catch of cod in the mixed fishery being discarded dead into the sea unless the minimum mesh sizes of the nets currently in use were also changed. But if mesh sizes were increased so as to catch cod only at maturity, it would have a direct impact on the rest of the catch and few haddock and virtually no whiting would be caught since these are a smaller bodied species of fish. As a result such mesh sizes would lead to the economic collapse of most of the UK's North Sea whitefish fisheries. This is a real (and frustrating) technical problem with no easy answers. We are continuing to look for solutions and our fisheries scientists will be meeting their German counterparts in August to take a new look at it and to try to find a way forward with this particular aspect of our strategy for protecting the cod stocks.

  There is a great deal to be done to achieve our objective of sustainable management of fisheries. The Government has wasted no time in setting about this task and will continue to give it priority. In doing so, the Government welcomes the constructive contribution that the Select Committee has made to raising awareness of the need for action.

22 August 1997