Nothing underlines more sharply the changes that have buffeted one of the United Kingdom’s oldest industries fishing over recent decades than the choice of guests for this Friday’s opening of Grimsby’s refurbished fish market.
Top of the guest list celebrating the £1.2m upgrade are Steingrimur J.?Sigfusson, Iceland’s fishing minister, and Benedikt Jonsson, the country’s ambassador to the UK.
More than 30 years after the UK lost the cod war for the right to fish in waters around Iceland, decimating Hull and Grimsby’s fishing fleet, the two sides have long since buried the hatchet.
Icelandic fish is very important to us, says Steve Norton, chief executive of the Grimsby Fish Merchants Association. The distant water fleet declined after the cod war and our entry into the EU. But the processing sector is buoyant.
The number of professional fishermen in England and Wales has fallen from nearly 26,000 in 1948 to 13,377 in 1983 (including full-time and part-time fishermen) the year the European Union’s highly contentious Common Fisheries Policy was introduced. In 2010, there were 6,880.
These figures show the job losses in the sector, but not its tenacity in heartlands like England’s north-eastern coast, from Berwick-upon-Tweed to Grimsby.
As of January 1, there were 485 vessels with registered home ports on the north-eastern stretch of North Sea coastline, including 131 trawlers of more than 10 metres in length.
The sector’s survival through decades of bitter international wrangles over fishing, quota restrictions, vessel decommissioning and environmental protection, demonstrates its adaptability.
Grimsby is a case in point; today its processing industry handles 70 per cent of the UK’s seafood, yet 80 per cent of the fish comes from Iceland and most of the rest comes from Norway and the Faroe Islands.
Frozen fish is brought by boat to Immingham, then trucked to Grimsby for the daily market, where an average of £1m of business is done each week.
The private sector is investing; fish merchants Gary Cadey and Pete Dalton have developed Grimsby Seafood Village, a £2.9m complex housing merchants, with support from Handelsbanken, the Swedish bank, and a £1m European Fisheries Fund grant.
After many difficult years, spirits are rising. Andrew Allard, whose Jubilee Fishing in Grimsby built England’s newest large trawler, says: We are positive. The price is going up and there are stocks.
But restrictions remain a big worry. Dale Rodmell, assistant chief executive of the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations, says its members feel EU interventions have combined over-centralisation with micromanagement.
The latest issue is an 18 per cent cut in permissible days at sea imposed on nephrops prawn fishermen from January 1, under the cod stocks recovery plan.
It risks making the [nephrops] fleet totally unviable, says Mr Rodmell. Many north-eastern vessels mix white fish and nephrops fishing, with North Shields being the top nephrops port in England and Wales.
Offshore wind farms offer some prospect of additional income. Mr Allard says his boats, which employ 35 people, can only make a profit by servicing the oil and gas and renewables industries.
But farms’ proximity to key fishing grounds off the north-eastern coast has also raised great concerns, as has the proposed enforcement of new marine conservation zones.
The European Fisheries Fund, administered by the Marine Management Organisation, has £38m to spend from 2007 to 2013 to help England’s fishing industry adapt to changes set out in the Common Fisheries Policy.
Key projects supported include the Grimsby Fish Market upgrade and the £6m modernisation of Western Quay, in North Shields.
Fishing along this coast blends, sometimes startlingly, new and old. Some vessels bristle with computerised technology to which technology firm Succorfish is contributing yet cobbles, the type of boat in which Grace Darling, a Northumberland lighthouse keeper’s daughter, made her famous rescue in 1838, are also used.
Evolution has reinforced some traditional activity. In the past 20 years, Bridlington, for example, has focused on lobster and crab and is the UK’s leading lobster port. In 2010, a quarter of the £12m of lobsters that landed in England went there.
On the mudflats in Holy Island, Lindisfarne Oysters, an oyster farm founded in 1989 as a diversification from farming into aquaculture, is developing oysterbeds established by monks in the 1300s.
French equipment being delivered this week, an £80,000 investment supported by a £32,000 EFF grant, will improve washing and grading and increase production to 100,000 oysters a year.
Fish stocks are recovering rapidly, says Ned Clark, a sixth-generation North Shields fisherman and the NFFO’s north-east chairman.
Mr Clark, 59, and a fisherman for 44 years, is having to spend more time on politics than on fishing. What used to be such a simple job is now extremely difficult.
But he can see a future. We can move on from here; what we desperately need is a period of stability.
The Financial Times, 2012