A pre-consultation meeting between the NFFO and the Government’s statutory advisors on conservation, JNCC, was held recently in the Federation’s York offices to discuss the designation of the Dogger Bank as a Special Area of Conservation, under the requirements of the EU Habitats Directive.
JNCC is scheduled to begin a formal consultation on the designation of 14,000 square kilometers of the Dogger as “shallow sand bank” as a protected area in the next few weeks. Designation is essentially about the boundary of the protected area and the scientific justification for choosing the site. A further process at a later date to decide on what additional restrictions and management arrangements should apply within the designated zone.
It is the enormous size of the proposed designated area and its current and potential use as a fishing area, as well as the location of many offshore activities, such aggregate dredging or wind-farms, that makes this site highly controversial.
It is widely accepted that the Habitats Directive is a flawed piece of European legislation, not least in its stipulation that socio-economic considerations may not be taken into account when designating a Special Area of Conservation, and the inclusion of “slightly covered sand banks” in the list of protected habitats. The former prevents a sensible negotiation on how the area could be shaped to meet both fishing and conservation objectives; it is also conceded that much of the Dogger Bank “has relatively low biodiversity” and is “relatively uninteresting from a marine conservation perspective”. Nevertheless, the UK and other member states face infraction proceedings and huge fines by the European Court if the provisions of the Directive are not met.
The meeting was very useful in that it flagged up:
the importance of parts of the Dogger for fishing activity
that budgetary constraints meant that JNCC were not entirely confident that their characterisation of the whole Dogger as a “sandbank” would stand up to scrutiny
that fishermen who have fished the area hold, collectively, many hundreds of years’ direct experience of dealing with the different seabed conditions on the Dogger. In fact, far from being a relatively uniform sandbank, the Dogger is comprised of a complex mix of seabed types, including sand, stone and sand, clay, mud, maerl, and rocky outcrops.
although the management regime that is eventually applied on the Dogger could contain a range of management measures from the light to complete closure, the fishing industry would be naive to believe that its activities would remain unaffected
In the event that fishing activity is displaced from the Dogger, apart from losing valuable fishing grounds that produce the highest quality North Sea fish, particularly plaice, the displaced effort would be associated with much higher discard rates. (The Dogger is an area characterised by low levels of discards). Potentially, there is therefore a serious lack of coordination between two EC policy initiatives – habitat protection and discard reduction.
Next Steps
These early discussions with JNCC are valuable because they flag up clearly what the fishing industry needs to do. Over the next few weeks the NFFO will be working with experienced skippers from vessels that use various gear types, to produce charts that define both seabed characteristics and fishing patterns. These will be submitted as part of the formal consultation process and will be the subject of further discussions with JNCC.
It is important to note that the German and Dutch authorities are carrying out similar exercises on the Dogger on their side of the median line. For this reason the issue is already a major focus for the North Sea Regional Advisory Council, on which the NFFO is an active member of the Executive Committee.
