Mr President, Commissioner Fischler, the Committee on Fisheries accepts that in extending the rules concerning restructuring and structural assistance in the fisheries sector for one year, changes need to be made in the pilot reduction rates in order to maintain current levels. It welcomes the tightening up of provisions concerning the transfer of fishing vessels to third countries. Amendment No 6 to Article 1(3) asked the Commission to produce a list specifying which transfers are permissible and which are not. We hope it will be acceptable to them. The committee also welcomes the possibility of financial assistance being made available where any Community legislation imposes technical restrictions, but feels that Parliament should be kept informed of such cases – that is Amendment No 10. From this point, the Committee on Fisheries has difficulties with the Commission proposal in that it goes beyond an extension of the rules to making three substantive changes to them. These are: removing the possibility of an increase in capacity on safety grounds; allowing financial assistance for fleet modernisation and renewal only where objectives have been met purely by reduction in capacity; and allowing such financial assistance to any segment of the fleet only where every segment of the fleet has met its objectives. In voting the report, the Committee on Fisheries rejected each of these three changes. The motivation was mixed, relating both to the desirability of the changes themselves and the desirability of making them in the course of a one-year extension of the programme. For example, both the Committee on Fisheries and the Committee on Legal Affairs took the view that requiring every segment of the fleet to have reached its objectives before any segment could benefit from financial assistance ran counter to the principles of natural justice. Similarly, the proposal that financial assistance could be given only where objectives had been met purely by a reduction in capacity seemed unfair to those fleets where capacity and activity reductions had been combined. There are also doubts about making such a change in circumstances where there is increasing agreement that a variety of measures are needed to reduce fishing effort. Amendments Nos 4, 7, 8 and 9 are intended to maintain the status quo in relation to both these requests. The most difficult point has concerned the removal of the possibility of capacity increases on safety grounds. The Committee on Fisheries is highly committed to fishing safety. There is serious concern that shipowners simply will not make safety improvements unless they are given additional capacity for this. It was also argued that abuses of the provision should be prevented by proper controls and that such a change, if to be made at all, would be more properly done in the reform of the CFP as a whole. It is largely on the capacity issue that I part company with a number of my fellow committee members. Of course, we must find ways of ensuring that vessels are safe, but we can no longer afford to take risks with conservation either. The perilous state of cod stocks in the North Sea is but one example. Amendments Nos 2, 3 and 5, approved by the Committee on Fisheries, reject the changes on the capacity rules altogether. Amendments Nos 11 and 12, submitted by the Group, however, accept the Commission's approach in principle, but seek to allow capacity increases on safety grounds by way of exception for existing vessels under 12 metres. The justification for this exception is that taking away the possibility of financial assistance is likely to bear hardest on the sector and put safety improvements more seriously at risk in circumstances where they are likely to have only minor effects on capacity. I know that many of my colleagues – for reasons that I respect – will wish to take a different view, but I urge everyone in deciding how to vote on this report to bear in mind just how imperative the need for conservation has become.

Political group: ELDR