Decommissioning of Fishing Vessels Scheme 2007

I, too, thank the Minister for his very clear explanation of the scheme. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, for asking her questions, as I do not have to ask some of them now. I certainly look forward to the answers to them. Decommissioning fishing vessels is never a happy process; nor is seeing boats with a long association with particular families and particular communities coming into port and being broken up, as the Minister rightly said. However, we are where we are and, like the noble Baroness, we support this small, tightly targeted scheme—I think those were the Minister’s words—to deal with this particular problem. I have one question about the long-term management plan for sole in area VIIe, to which the Minister referred. Can he tell us whether it has now been approved at the European level by the Fisheries Council, or is it expected to be in the near future? I want to follow up a point made by the noble Baroness about the number of applicants and how they will be chosen. Like her, I am not very clear exactly how that is going to be done. The Minister suggests that 12 out of about 60 boats will be involved in total, which is one-fifth of them. The very useful regulatory impact assessment that we have provided refers to the four options for choosing and suggests that option 4 is the preferred option. However, I am not clear whether option 4 is written into the option or whether it merely implies that that option and all the others are still on the table. Option 1 is to do nothing. Options 2 and 3 are fairly simple—perhaps too simple—whereas the RIA says of option 4 that vessels will be, "““ranked in order using a system that takes into account the tonnage of the vessel, its fishing effort and catches of sole in Area VIIe in a continuous 12 month period in the two years immediately preceding the date of application, and the amount bid per tonne of capacity to be removed””." There are at least three criteria there: one is the tonnage of the vessel, one is its fishing effort and its catches in the past two years—perhaps that is two criteria—and the amount bid per tonne of capacity. I am not quite sure how those would be judged against each other and ranked if there are more applications for decommissioning than can be paid for by £5 million. This is an important point, and I should be grateful to hear what the Minister has to say. In relation to that, does the Minister, Defra or anyone else have an estimate of how many applications there will be? Is it thought that 10 or 12 vessels will be the level, or that it might be difficult to get to that level and that it might be more likely to be 20 or 25, in which case choices will have to be made? These are important questions on the practicality of how the measure will work in practice; but, having said that, we support the measure.