Revised transcript of evidence taken before
The Select Committee on the European Union
Sub-Committee D (Agriculture, Fisheries, Environment and Energy)
Inquiry on
EU Regional Marine Co-Operation
Evidence Session No.3 Heard in Public Questions 27-47
Wednesday 5 November 2014
11 am
Witnesses: Dr Darius Campbell, Matt Nichols, Kate Clarke
1
Members present
Baroness Scott of Needham Market (Chairman)
Baroness Byford
Lord Cameron of Dillington
Lord Cunningham of Felling
Baroness Howarth of Breckland
Baroness Parminter
Lord Plumb
Lord Renton of MountHarry
Lord Trees
Lord Whitty
Lord Williams of Elvel
______
Examination of Witnesses
Dr Darius Campbell, Executive Secretary, OSPAR, Matt Nichols, Project Development and Communication Officer, North Sea Region Programme, and Kate Clarke, Executive Secretary, North Sea Commission
Q27 The Chairman:Very good morning to you.Thank you, all three of you, for sending us written evidence, but particularly for being here today.In terms of some of the housekeeping, this is a formal evidence-taking session of the Committee.A full shorthand note will be taken.After you have had a chance to correct it for any minor errors it will be put on the public record in printed form and on the parliamentary website.Because it is on the record it will be webcast live and will be accessible via the parliamentary website in due course.
You have been provided with copies of the interests declared by the Members of the Committee.If there are any interests specific to this inquiry then Members will make them at the start of their first intervention.For myself, I declare that I am the Secretary of State’s appointee to the Harwich Haven Authority, which is a publicly owned trust port.In addition, it is not an interest but I think it is probably best to get on the record that I was active in the North Sea Commission between 1997 and 2005, when I was a member of Suffolk County Council.Those are the formalities.
Just to start off with, one of the things that has struck us is that the marine strategy framework directive, maritime spatial planning directive and the CFP, and indeed the European Council pronouncements on energy the week before last, all talk about regional cooperation in marine areas.I wondered whether each of you could just, as an introduction, on the basis of your own experience, tell us what you see as the purpose of co-operation. Is it between states or sectors?Is it about co-operation between users?Is it all of these?Just begin to paint a picture for us.
Dr Campbell: I am DariusCampbell from OSPAR.We hear “regional”; we have been discussing what “regional” means.For us, “regional” means a region of the world, so we are talking right from the coast of Portugal and Spain all the way up to Norway and Iceland.For us, our focus for regional co-operation is on the environmental aspect.It is about making sure that the northeast Atlantic is clean and healthy and the biodiversity systems are healthy.We have that focus.Our focus is co-operation between Governments as they assess the state of the sea and they regulate and make national policy on that.So we have quite a specific focus.Obviously there are interactions with things that happen at what we would call the sub-regional level, say at the North Sea level.There is interaction with stakeholders, both upwards and downwards, but we can explore that as you like.
Matt Nichols: Good morning.My name is Matt Nichols.I am from the Interreg North Sea programme.We work with the North Sea region, so the seven countries in the sea area, and we also work with the sub-national level.So when we are talking regional we also mean regional in a country level.Co-operation is a tool, is it not?The co-operation we have been funding is about identifying specific problems faced by the stakeholders around the North Sea, and agreeing what the most effective action is.There is a lot of scope for pooling resources, for pooling knowledge, but there are also a lot of activities where we have to act together to get the right solution.Co-operation is the tool we need to get where we need on the North Sea
The Chairman: Could you just say a word or two about Interreg and what it is, in case any colleagues are not familiar with it.
Matt Nichols: Yes.Interreg is the European Union’s interregional co-operation programme.We fund projects on a number of themes, of which the environment and the North Sea are one.We also do transport, economic development and the knowledge economy.It is based totally on the fact that with co-operation between the countries around the North Sea, there are a lot of common areas, a lot of common knowledge, so we see better solutions coming out of working together around those countries.
The Chairman: It is projectbased.
Matt Nichols: Yes, 80 projects in the last period.It tends to be around €5 million per project.We are just starting up the new period with a slightly bigger budget, so next year we should see our first projects coming in.
The Chairman: I expect Members will want to dig down into some of that.
Kate Clarke: Good morning, Lord Chairman.I am KateClarke, the executive secretary of the North Sea Commission.The North Sea Commission is a political organisation with members at the regional level from member states, and a third country, Norway, around the North Sea basin.The purpose of the North Sea Commission is to address common challenges around the North Sea and to promote the region as an economic entity.We are structured with five thematic working groups, and they work on specific thematic areas, one of which is marine resources.Also relevant here would be the energy and climate change group.We also have a group, for example, on transport.The commission has been in existence since 1989 and has a total of 36 members at the regional level.As we were discussing here, “regional” can mean a lot of different things.Here we are talking about what would be considered, perhaps, level 3 of government: not the national Government, probably not municipality level, but whatever is in existence in between.To answer the question, we see that there is a strong need for co-operation, and what we would argue is that there is a need to create a common understanding for issues and policies, and to give priority to the areas that are seen to be most pressing.We would like to remove barriers to allow for growth in the region, and we would like to commit to create a common commitment to environmental protection.We think that it will be important to identify areas of conflict and to find ways to work together to solve them.We would like to also find ways to create practices for standardisation for infrastructure and future investments.
Q28 The Chairman: I wonder if you could just say a little bit more about the UK’s involvement in the North Sea Commission, which at the time I was involved was quite extensive, predominantly county council type.However, I understand that that has dropped off significantly now.I am not sure whether England is represented at all anymore; I know Scotland still is.I wonder if you could just update us on that.
Kate Clarke: Yes.The Scottish membership is very strong and they play a very important role in the work.Highland Council is an important member.We also have Orkney and Shetland as members, of course.From the English side, we have lost a lot of members.With the lack of any regional body or level, it is a little bit difficult to know how to involve English local authorities.We have one member, which is Southend-on-Sea.In fact CouncillorJohnLamb, is also Vice-President of the North Sea Commission.He has been very active.
The Chairman: We may need to come back to that question too.
Q29 Lord Whitty: Your written evidence, and that of other organisations, has drawn up a number of examples of successful co-operation.I wonder if each of you could indicate the kind of project that you think has been successful and the lessons that you draw from it.Could you then comment also on two things: first, whether it is possible to upscale the kind of projects, which are relatively small; and secondly, whether the organisational structure, the superstructure, helps or hinders?At the moment it is quite complex to me, and it must be to your potential clients, if that is the right term, so could you comment on that?
Kate Clarke: We have been involved in a number of projects, of course, but perhaps the best way to approach this is to think about our thematic working groups.They work together through meetings with exchanging of best practice, and also through political lobby work.We issue, for example, a certain amount of political position papers, which involve a certain amount of research and bringing all the regions together.It is a complicated business because everybody has their own point of view.They have a national point of view; they have a regional point of view; they have a local point of view.These are very much based on what their local industry is working on, what investments they need, what infrastructure they lack.To bring all of these things together is, as you can imagine, quite complicated.However, I can take the example of the project we have been involved in through the North Sea Region Programme, which is called Clean North Sea Shipping.This was a project that brought together a triple helix, with research organisations, local government and specialists in shipping and ports.Large ports—Antwerp, Rotterdam and Hamburg—were also involved.The aim of the project was to consider how to approach the sulphur directive and the ECA for the North Sea region, which has the sulphur restrictions that will come into place in 2015.The project has ended with a set of recommendations.We also have some scenario building models, which are accessible on the website.They show how, for example, the emissions move across the North Sea in different weather conditions.We have been involved in this project through the fact that, for example, the region I work for is the lead partner, and has given regular updates to the steering committee of the North Sea Commission.Then the recommendations will be spread throughout the member regions, and hopefully taken on board.There are other examples of very good co-operation.I could also draw, for example, on the Wadden Sea Forum.I do not know if you are aware of this.It is a kind of mini-scale co-operation, if you like, between three countries: Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany.The forum comes together in order to facilitate different sectors bringing together their interests—conflicting interests in some cases.They build projects and they have, for example, tools on the website for integrated coastal zone management.It is a good example of a kind of co-operation that can actually work, albeit relatively small-scale.Regarding your question about scaling up, perhaps we should give some other examples before we come back to that.
Matt Nichols: I would say pick a theme, really.We have many, many good examples, and I think that is something to bear in mind from the start.It is a complex environment, definitely.That is why we were so positive to see that there is an initiative around maritime spatial planning.Somehow that could be a clarifying mechanism to bring together the information and the different opportunities.I will give you an example.There is a project called Ballast Water Opportunity.We have a problem in the North Sea, as with everywhere else, with invasive species coming in through the ballast water that is then discharged from ships.We now have an international requirement to find effective ways of disinfecting that water before it is discharged in order to avoid this problem.We need to find cost-effective, nonenvironmentally harmful methods of doing that.That has been somewhat of a challenge around the world, but in the North Sea region a number of research organisations got together.They have been piloting, through our funding, different mechanisms for doing this, and then testing the quality of the water coming out of the discharge, with a view to commercialising, eventually, the successful methods.The North Sea will not only have the environmental solution but have the business opportunity of then selling that on to the rest of the world.It is a very good example that once we have pinned down what a specific problem is and where there is a common need, we have some very good, effective mechanisms for taking action on those.Can they be upscaled?Yes, they can.We should bear in mind some of these things do go further.Some of the best projects are already having a knock on international policy.There could be more, and there again that is the value of the work being done by this Committee and the spatial planning.It would help greatly to have clear messages sometimes from the national level, saying, “This is the policy; this is the direction we would like to move in”.This would be a signal to some of the stakeholders that this is the initiative to be involved in and how they can make progress on their issues they are addressing.
Dr Campbell: From our perspective, again, it is different scales we operate at.I was at a meeting last week where we were talking about upscaling from the OSPAR level to the global level.Talking about co-operation, OSPAR itself obviously has a good history in co-operation.A lot of it has been built on consensus between the contracting parties, where they have taken action on various contaminants and pollution, et cetera.That is driven by the contracting parties’ own work.They lead the work; they develop the science.They do actually co-operate and lead the work, so it is not an external influence on them but they are together working in that way.That does not mean also there is not scope for upscaling from, say, local authority or sub-regional levels.A good example we have had in the past of OSPAR is where KIMO International, which worked with local authorities in the North Sea, were developing this system where fishermen could bring in the rubbish they were collecting in their nets and find a way of dropping it off at a port.That process was happening at the KIMO level.KIMO raised it with OSPAR and it became an OSPAR recommendation in 2010 at the ministerial.It is something that we are now also integrating into our regional action plan on marine litter, which is part of the marine strategy framework directive process as well.There is an example where local action has gone up to the OSPAR level and then been taken up, so it can happen both ways.It happens top-down, through the agreements that Governments make and then want to implement through local authorities or whatever, but it also happens bottom-up.That is partly through the observer organisations that are involved in OSPAR, which all have an international nature, but obviously also through the national mechanism where action can come up through a national Government and then join in to the OSPAR process.
Q30 Lord Williams of Elvel: Can you say a bit more about the mechanics of co-operation?I understand you have formed committees, you have working groups, you have different interests represented, and different languages.How does this actually work?The committee appoints a chairman or elects a chairman; do they vote?Working groups: how do you resolve the obvious differences and stop the rows?
Kate Clarke: I cannot seem to remember there being too many rows.Language barrier, in fact, around the North Sea is not a problem.Also, in the North Sea Region Programme, English is the common language.We do not have to have any interpretation or this kind of thing.Everything is done in English.All our work is done in English. As to how it actually works, we are a political organisation and each working group is led by a regional politician with two vice-chairs, who are also regional politicians.Then there is one adviser.The adviser is the person who does the daytoday work of the group.They push it forward and set the targets, organise the meetings and introduce the papers to be considered.The chairs and the vice-chairs will then carry out the work, take it back to their regions, discuss it with their local politicians, and carry it forward.The papers that are produced can also be taken into the various political bodies at the regional level.We mainly work at a regional level and we try our hardest to involve the stakeholders.We think this is an important part.This is also, perhaps, what makes our organisation a little bit special, a little bit different, in that we have the knowledge and the access to regional stakeholders.We can bring them into the different forums to discuss the issues and to get a different perspective.
Dr Campbell: We have a complex structure within OSPAR.Our official languages are French and English, so we have to have translation for our major meetings.We have five main committees within OSPAR.We have one that deals with radioactive substances, one that deals with hazardous substances, one that deals with biodiversity, one that covers human impacts on the environment and one that covers offshore industry.Through those major committees, a whole load of work is created underneath those, and that might be technical or policy work.All of these groups are led by the contracting parties, by election of chairmen, et cetera, and the secretariat facilitates that process.Yes, we have had some big disagreements, but generally consensus has worked for most things.However, there have been in the past positions where OSPAR has made a recommendation or a decision and there have been reservations from certain contracting parties, so that whole normal thing you would expect in international organisations goes on.