A full judicial review into the UK government’s decision on how to allocate the UK fishing quota has been given the green light by the High Court.
Greenpeace has accused the government of allocating nearly the entire UK fishing quota to domestic industrial and foreign corporations, at the expense of local, low impact fishermen.
Mrs Justice Andrews granted permission to Greenpeace to argue that this decision by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) is unlawful because it contravenes new European fishing law, the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP).
Sarah North, Greenpeace Head of Oceans campaign, said: “The government is currently starving our local, low impact fleet of fishing quota, sending some of them to bankruptcy or food banks. Meanwhile just one Dutch controlled vessel continues to get a mammoth amount of fishing quota because the system of allocating quota hasn’t changed since the 1990s.”
The reformed CFP requires EU Member States to set out the criteria they will use to decide how fishing quota will be allocated to fishing businesses.
But Greenpeace said that DEFRA has not changed its criteria for the way it distributes fishing quota publically since the new CFP came into force in January 2014.
It said that currently local fishermen receive 6% of the English quota, while a single UK flagged but Dutch controlled factory fishing vessel, the Cornelis Vrolijk, receives nearly a quarter of the English quota and foreign controlled corporations receive 43% of the total English fishing quota.
The organisation added that recent correspondence with Elizabeth Truss, the Environment Secretary, has made clear that the government will not be changing its allocation of fishing quota in response to the reforms in the CFP.
