Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Ms D Armstrong): We are joined by the following officials: Colin Armstrong, deputy director of water and marine policy and legislation; Tommy McCormick, the lead Bill official; and Michelle McNally, principal fisheries officer in inland fisheries. You are all welcome. If you are happy to do so, I ask you to brief the Committee. Thank you.

Mr Colin Armstrong (Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs): Thank you very much, Chair. We are joined by Seamus Connor, principal fisheries officer. We sent an update yesterday to say that Seamus would also be joining us, but it may not have got to you.

Thank you for the opportunity to brief the Committee on the inland fisheries provisions in Part 1 of the Bill. The briefing that we provided to the Committee in advance of the meeting sets out the detail of each of the clauses. I will take this opportunity to provide the Committee with the broad context of the Department's overall approach and the policy intent that underpins those provisions.

As the Committee is aware, Part 1 is intended to provide the basis for the Department to take a more modern approach to managing inland fisheries and aquaculture activities. The Department is seeking to extend the principles that already apply to sea fisheries, which were established under the UK Fisheries Act 2020, to inland fisheries. The policy seeks to align with the work that we are doing through the Water Environment (Water Framework Directive) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2017 to develop river basin management plans. Our aim is to ensure that our inland waters sustain healthy and resilient ecosystems, thriving wild fish populations and well-managed fisheries and that they can support sustainable aquaculture activities. Northern Ireland's inland fisheries are a significant public asset, comprising fish populations, aquatic habitats, rivers, loughs, canals and reservoirs. Protection, restoration and sustainable management are central to resilient fish populations, healthy aquatic ecosystems and long-term environmental and social needs. Our inland fisheries support recreational angling, commercial fishing, aquaculture, tourism, rural livelihoods and public well-being. They are an important part of our cultural heritage. Those benefits depend on having healthy fish populations and a resilient water environment with good water quality, suitable habitats and river connectivity.

Major inland waters, including Lough Neagh and Lough Erne, are central to Northern Ireland's inland fisheries. Lough Neagh, the largest freshwater lake in the UK and Ireland, is particularly significant because of its scale, its commercial fisheries, its ecological importance and the value of the habitats and species found in its rivers. Lough Erne is important for recreational angling and supports a brown trout population, an abundant coarse fish population and species of conservation interest. The cross-border Lough Melvin catchment supports a diverse salmonid community, including Atlantic salmon, char and three genetically distinct strains of brown trout: gillaroo, ferox and sonaghen. Northern Ireland offers a wide variety of recreational angling across inland waters — including game, coarse and pike angling — as well as stocked trout and wild fisheries. The public angling estate is the Department's network of publicly available fisheries for which it owns and leases the fishing rights and provides angling opportunities to its permit holders. It supports access to a range of waters for anglers, visitors, clubs, young people and others who do the sport. Aquaculture activity is particularly relevant to Northern Ireland's inland waters and includes freshwater fin fish farming; hatchery activity; rearing, holding, stocking and movement of fish production; recreational angling; and fisheries management.

The decline and vulnerability of inland fish populations is a central issue that we face in fisheries management in Northern Ireland. Our migratory species, such as Atlantic salmon and European eel, are of particular concern because they depend on both freshwater and marine environments and are affected by pressures across their life cycle. Other native and priority species such as trout, lamprey, pollan, Arctic char and dollaghan are sensitive to water quality, habitat degradation, reduced connectivity and changing environmental conditions.

The aim in bringing forward the provisions in Part 1 of the Bill is to support the conservation and recovery of native fish populations through sustainable, evidence-based and proportionate management of fishing and aquaculture activities, while recognising their social, cultural and community value. I do not intend to go into the full details of each clause, but I will touch on the ones that are under consideration today.

Clause 1 establishes a set of policy objectives relating to fish and aquaculture activities and provides definitions for each of those objectives. Those are broadly modelled on the 2020 Act. The aim is to provide a clear policy framework and to guide future fisheries and aquaculture management and decision-making. The objectives are interconnected. They will be considered together when setting priorities, developing policies and taking decisions that affect fish populations, fisheries, aquaculture and the wider water environment. The weight that is given to each objective will reflect the issues, risks and opportunities that are being addressed.

Clause 2 requires the Department to:

It is important that, here, I touch on the Fisheries Act (Northern Ireland) 1966, under which the approach to policy development has been very piecemeal for inland fisheries. Decisions have often been reactive, and, in recent years, the Department has developed and published position statements when such decisions had to be taken in order to provide clarity to stakeholders on the Department's approach to using its powers.

The development of the inland fisheries policy statement will provide an opportunity to take a strategic approach to policy development across all the issues that face inland fisheries. It will also provide an opportunity to clarify how the inland fisheries policy statement will interact with other relevant policies, such as river basin management plans, the nature recovery strategy and the environmental improvement plan. It is proposed that the work that is taken forward under the inland fisheries policy statement will take an ecosystem-based approach, reflecting the dependence of healthy fish populations on clean, connected and resilient aquatic environments. It is intended that it will support the protection and restoration of habitats, spawning and nursery areas, river connectivity and natural processes where those are important to the protection and recovery of fish populations. It will also take account of cross-cutting biosecurity risks to inland fisheries and aquaculture from things such as fish disease, pests and parasites.

Clauses 3 and 4 are intended to place duties on the Department about how it will consult on and lay that inland fisheries policy statement and then exercise its functions. That is an important part of giving stakeholders and, indeed, the Assembly that role in the development of the policy statement when we get to that stage.

Clause 5 provides for consistency and alignment with terminology that is already used in the Fisheries Act 1966 and related legislation.

Finally, I turn to clause 6. Many of the issues that have been raised in stakeholders' evidence in the sessions that the Committee held and in the consultation that we undertook related to technical measures for the management of fisheries, and it is more appropriate to deal with those through secondary legislation. Clause 6 provides the Department with a modern suite of regulation-making powers that will be needed to make the necessary regulatory changes. It permits the regulations that have already been made under section 26 of the Fisheries Act to continue to remain in place and the Department to develop and take forward new legislation that reflects the policies set out in the inland fisheries policy statement. It is considered important that we first engage with stakeholders in the development of the inland fisheries policy statement and then bring forward a programme of secondary legislation for technical measures that have been developed in accordance with the policies that have been agreed in that policy statement.

In summary, it is proposed that the provisions in Part 1, when taken together, will deal with the piecemeal approach that has previously been applied and will provide a strategic policy and legislative framework that we can use to bring forward better regulation for the preservation and improvement of inland fisheries and aquaculture and provide for greater openness, accountability and clarity in respect of the work that the Department undertakes.

I hope that that briefing provided a useful overview and that we are able to assist you with your questions.

The Chairperson (Ms D Armstrong): Thank you very much, Colin, for that briefing. It was really helpful.

I have a question about the sustainable management of the inland waterways and competition fishing. You mentioned Lough Erne and international fishing competitions. What will be the impact of the proposed new framework on competition fishing when it comes to the catches and behaviour of anglers on the waterways?

Mr C Armstrong: The policy will not change or affect any of those activities as they are going on right now, but, through the policy and the regulations that we will bring forward, we seek to do things to improve the stocks that are there. That will create a better product, which can be used for marketing and tourism and enable Northern Ireland to promote itself on an international stage, because it has healthy waters with healthy fish stocks. That, in turn, will bring economic opportunities for communities such as those around Lough Erne and, indeed, other waters.

The Chairperson (Ms D Armstrong): Yes, that leads into the economic benefit. That is what I was trying to see.

My other question is about how to deal with salmon trying to migrate upstream to spawn. We took evidence about there being a lack of water at various points on the journey upstream. How is that being addressed?

Mr C Armstrong: The development of measures to assist salmon in their migration can be done better through our river basin management plans, which take a catchment-based approach. You will be receiving a briefing later in the year on the river basin management plans, and there will be measures in there to improve fish passability. What this work does is to help us set out the priorities and actions around individual species such as salmon, eels and other migratory fish, the Department's approach to improving fish passability, and using wider policy mechanisms such as river basin planning to improve that. The Bill will not in itself be used for the purposes of assisting in the removal of barriers.

Mr McAleer: Thank you very much for your presentation.

The Department consulted recently on the nutrients action programme (NAP), which has amongst its objectives to improve water quality. Will any of the proposals in the Bill duplicate or overlap with the NAP?

Mr C Armstrong: No. It will not overlap in any way with the nutrients action programme. The programme is a key measure of our river basin planning process and to the approach taken to reducing nutrients from agricultural activities on the water environment. It has gone through its consultation process. How nutrients from agriculture then fit into broader water quality measures will be brought together in the river basin management plans, and the relationship with that is through our inland fisheries policy statement. We will be able to show the connection between the impacts of water quality on fish and fish populations, which has often been isolated when it was just a stand-alone Fisheries Act. Now, we can bring them together and align the fisheries policy statement with river basin planning, which would provide connection into things such as the nutrients action programme. Hopefully, that is a more complementary and integrated approach to policymaking.

Mr McAleer: There is a low level of prosecutions for non-compliance. According to a Research and Information Service (RaISe) paper, even when people are prosecuted, the courts tend to impose fines that are well below the maximum. Will raising the maximum fine to £50,000 improve compliance?

Mr Seamus Connor (Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs): We deal regularly with enforcement, and a significant financial penalty increases the impact on illegal activity. From our perspective, if a perpetrator is continually getting low-level fines, that is obviously not having a huge impact on them. It is about raising that. We have to bear in mind the view at the time of the Fisheries Act in 1966, and we are a long way off that. Much more significant fines can be levied across the water, and we hope that that leverage will come to reduce illegal activity.

We come across only what we see. There may be illegal activity that we do not see. Part of the threat of enforcement is that we have to be lucky only once to discover someone; they have to be lucky all the time. The information on illegal activity that we see through other channels is interesting, and the PSNI is also alert. We definitely see a much larger fine as a benefit. The court judge who considers the case will have considerable leeway in how they apply the penalty.

Mr McAleer: I have one last point. How does the Department monitor and gather evidence from our waterways to ensure that enforcement is proportionate?

Mr Connor: Currently, we gather data on detections, which are breaches of the Act or fisheries legislation, and we tabulate that annually to see what is happening. We can also see roughly where the activity is taking place and whether it is to do with rod licensing, illegal net activity or a breach at an abstraction site where protections are in place to ensure that fish that migrate both upstream and downstream are not impacted on. We can look at the data to see the impact and level. Traditionally, prosecution has been the way to go. We have sought different routes depending on the severity of the breach. Fixed penalties are a simple method and one that people are used to in respect of parking offences and so on. There are also adult cautions. Prosecution is the ultimate sanction that the Department can take. The Department should look at a suite of measures, not just the prosecution element. There can be delays, and there is a lag, which means that what is being reported may take a few years to get to court and be finalised.

Mr Blair: Thank you all for coming today. I want to clarify an issue raised by the aquaculture sector in a presentation. There appeared to be either initial uncertainty or a change during the process of the Bill about the administration and issuing of fish culture licences. Were the licences going to be dropped and were then retained? If that is the case, what was the rationale for that?

Mr Tommy McCormick (Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs): When we went out to stakeholders during the consultation phase, the removal of the fish culture licences was proposed. However, the feedback from stakeholders showed that there were difficulties with the ownership rights. The Department took that on board and changed it to include aquaculture licences. It is a simple change.

Mr Blair: OK. The aquaculture licence replaces all of that.

Mr McCormick: It changes it.

Mr Blair: You have touched on my second question. Seamus mentioned abstraction, and that did not trigger the question because I had already noted it down. What reassurance can you give us about the Bill? We have had representations from sectors that want to abstract water for hydropower or aquaculture, but concerns have been expressed to us by those who care about the environment and about the levels of abstraction and the impact on fish stocks. What overall assurance can you give about how fish passage will be secured or improved? How will water levels that are threatened be monitored regularly?

Mr C Armstrong: The Committee heard the two different views in its evidence, from those who want to use the water and to do so sustainably and those who consider that not to be consistent. The work will help to identify the species that are at risk as a result of barriers to migration, which could be associated with impoundments for hydropower and other water abstraction. It allows us to identify the species that are at risk. That is one of the measures in the river basin planning process, because it is about the whole catchment and the continuity of the catchment. The river basin management plans are brought down to water body level, and that is where we will look at the best places to target for improving fish passability. The river basin management plans will set out the measure and the policy around that, but the actual decision-making on an application will be done through things such as the abstraction and impoundment licence; that is the regulatory control associated with that, which each hydropower operator will need to have. That is all set by the policies and the priorities that we will be setting out in the policy statement on what will be considered sustainable use of our water resources.

Mr Blair: I was going to ask you, Colin, whether the river basin management plans would pick up on some of the issues that were the topic of my question.

On the other aspect of the planning for the river basin management works, I may have heard or misheard the words "end of year". Is that the end of this calendar year or the end of the following calendar year?

Mr C Armstrong: We will be consulting on a draft for the fourth cycle river basin management plan by December this year. The regulations require us to have a six-month public consultation, after which we must bring forward a final, agreed fourth cycle river basin management plan by December 2027.

Mr Blair: You will be dealing with a whole new Committee then, if it is six months afterwards.

Mr C Armstrong: Yes. This Committee and this Assembly mandate will see the launch of a public consultation on a draft river basin management plan for the new cycle, but, ultimately, the new Assembly mandate will agree the fourth cycle river basin management plan and the outcome of the public consultation.

Mr Blair: There is a chance that the new Assembly mandate might be before your consultation is complete. That is for others.

I have a final question, Chair. It is one that I have raised many times. Some of you will have heard it repeatedly, but I do not apologise for that. The promotion of angling and increasing participation in angling are referenced in the 1966 Act, which states that the Department may promote angling and may provide a public angling estate. Has the Department taken a conscious decision not to strengthen that? That has been threatened by a depletion in activity around promotion and engagement.

It is no secret here that I have some history on this stuff. Whether it is the international competitions that bring tourism and that happen at Lough Erne in the Chair's constituency, or the community-driven angling at all age levels that, in his constituency, Declan has promoted and participated in, or the sort of care for the environment that I see from anglers on the Sixmilewater and other south Antrim rivers or on the Glenavy river and Crumlin river that flow into Lough Neagh, has the Department taken a conscious decision to omit the promotion of and increased participation in angling from the Bill? If so, what is the rationale for that, given the opportunities there — we talk about joined-up government — for improved mental health and physical activity, being outdoors and active, and protection and awareness of the environment? I find it hard to square the circle of why that promotion would not be more determined and more visible.

Mr C Armstrong: No, we have not taken a conscious decision around that. There has been no decision around that. I guess that you are aware that a review of the public angling estate is going through, where we are looking at the existing estate, its strengths, the opportunities and, indeed, the challenges that it faces. As I set out in my opening remarks, I tried to describe inland fisheries in its broadest context: the recreational angling, which is a key part of it, the commercial fishery and, indeed, inland fisheries as a conservation of importance for things such as the threatened and declining species that are not a target species for commercial fishing or even a target species for recreational fishing. There are those conservation species. That is inland fisheries in its complete picture.

The objectives that we are bringing here and then the policy statement will deal with the complete picture. That is one of the advantages of the policy statement: where the 1966 Act simply gave the Department powers, generally — there are a few places where it is — it lacked a policy statement that set out how the Department would use those powers and how it would prioritise resources and so on against those things. The inland fisheries policy statement will allow the Department, in consultation with stakeholders and the Assembly, to set out how it intends to use the powers that are in the Act and the prioritisation and weight that will be given to those things. As you can see, the policy statement is where it will be more appropriate to set the priority given to recreational angling.

Mr Blair: OK. Thank you.

The Chairperson (Ms D Armstrong): Aoife is on Zoom. Aoife, do you want to put any questions to the panel?

She cannot hear me. I will go to Áine, who has just joined us.

Ms Murphy: I have no questions at the minute, Chair. Apologies for coming in late.

Mr McAleer: John has just reminded me that I should have declared an interest as a director of Loughmacrory Community Development Association, which manages Lough Macrory for angling and other recreational purposes. Good job reminding me, John.

Mr Blair: It was not deliberate.

The Chairperson (Ms D Armstrong): I do not see any further questions, so I thank you very much for coming in. I am sure that we will be back in touch over the course of our deliberations. Thank you for being in this morning and for your briefing.

The Committee Clerk: Chair, the officials will wait. You can bring them back in after the Committee's closed session, if there is a need.

The Chairperson (Ms D Armstrong): We will have a closed session. We may want to raise some further points with you. Thank you for being with us.