For most of my 20 years working in and around the fishing industry, small vessel representation has been the elephant in the room. From DEFRA to the MMO, MCA to SEAFISH, but particularly across the sector, it has long been understood that large swathes of the inshore fleet have no meaningful representation. That is not to say there is none, some producer organisations and specialist organisations like the South Devon Shellfish Association do a good job of representing all their members, but on the whole thousands of owner operators around the coast simply don’t belong to groups that offer them support nor someone to represent them. But I have in recent years been encouraged that this gap in representation has been talked about more openly in ports and harbours, on social media and that Government organisations are actively trying to engage better, with more coastal pop ups during consultations and workstreams, but industry must play its part.
For 5 years I had worked as the fisheries liaison to Lyme Bay for the BLUE Marine Foundation. This put me in weekly contact with a lot of the fishermen across the four ports, they gave up their time throughout, and continue to fill my personal knowledge gaps. Time and time again I heard about things that were ‘happening to them’ sometimes fishermen didn’t even know about changes before they happened, let alone engaged at a time policies and workstreams’ were being developed. Frustration was commonplace.
But I think the pivotal moment for most of us came when senior DEFRA officials and their team came to visit for a couple of days in 2019. They told me they wanted face to face no holds barred discussions, and my fishermen were up for the task! We met in backrooms of pubs and cafes in the ports and the discussions were lively. But what planted the nugget was how much the officials got out of it. There were of course things they had heard before, but some individual experiences and issues fishermen raised had not been cutting through to their level. I picked up from them how vital to good policy this type of information is, but it took a while to work out how we could achieve that on a permanent basis, to get those voices in the room and heard by those taking decisions.
Everyone thought it was a great idea to try and form a representative body from across the four ports and find funding to help staff and advocate for the local fleets. We knew what was needed, but there wasn’t a template for doing it. BLUE were keen to help support the local fleets set up their own organisation, by fishermen for fishermen. We are grateful for their support in this journey and for allowing me to work with the fishermen to help set this up.
It was really important to me that this organisation was truly representative, and the fishermen felt the same way. Everyone knows how difficult it is to get more than 3 fishermen in a room at the same time but when you can the ideas flow and passion for this industry is palpable. So this journey progressed through 2021 with lots of one to one conversations with fishermen on quaysides. All four ports have ad-hoc fishing organisations and they too sat and talked through what this new organisation might look like and what its goals and aspirations should include.
In early January 2022 these amazing pathfinding fishermen convened a workshop to decide everything from the organisations name, to who would sit on the board. What ensued was a day of back and forth discussing structure, goals, routes to them, and the plan was hatched and honed.
The day long workshop was orchestrated and outputted in a report, it was circulated to all who attended for approval and the real journey then began. From registering the CIC at Companies House to tax and VAT registration, opening bank accounts and preparing bids, it has been full steam ahead since then.
Thanks to the Governments fisheries fund administered by the Marine Management Organisation (MMO) the new CIC was awarded a grant at the end of 2022 to deliver the vision the fishermen have over the next two years which will provide an FTE employee to run the CIC and get it up and functioning and begin a number of projects.
I am so grateful to the grants team at the MMO for their help and support. We thought that our ideas and application met the fund requirements but being able to lift the phone along the way and get clear answers was vital to understand a process none of us had worked with before. For those who follow our path, some advice, put everything down on your lists, leave nothing off and then work with the MMO to create a successful bid. They are there to help and advise and while not everything we asked for was funded, we fully understood why some aspects weren’t and we discovered things we hadn’t thought of that could be.
I strongly believe that this grass roots, bottom-up approach is vital to a successful fishing organisation, but I fully understand that this may be a daunting task for fishermen sat around the coast to get off the ground. This was a steep learning curve for me and the fishermen. None of us had set up a CIC or used FASS for this type of project before, even opening bank accounts for a CIC is not as simple as you may think! So we want to share all our documents, from the workshop agenda and output report through to the details of our FASS bid so that others can literally cut and paste the things they like and want to do and not have to go through the hard yards we did. This cooperative and collaborative working across the small-scale fleet around our coasts is more important now than ever and for anyone who knows our fishermen, you will not be surprised that they are eager to help others where possible to do the same.
It’ is my absolute honour to serve the fishermen of Lyme Bay as their first Chief Exec and I could not be prouder of their individual and collective efforts to get us to this point. So my final but most personal and hugest thank you is to them, the fishermen who kept the faith put in the time and have made all of this possible.
Mandy Wolfe, CEO, LBF CIC.
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