The postponement of the session scheduled for Monday was confirmed today by the National Federation of Fishermen's Organisations and by John Butterwith, the chief executive of the North Devon Fishermen’s Association.

Mr Butterwith said the postponement gave the fishinbg industry only around three weeks to try to halt the UK's unilateral decision to increase the minimum landing size for the species.

“We feel Mr Bradshaw is posssibly becoming aware that we have a good case and he is giving us as little time as possible to mount a counter-strategy,” he added.

The size change is to be enforced from April 6 and National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations chief executive Barie Deas has already said that he believes the catching sector has a very strong case against the move which would inevitably lead to more discards and discriminates against UK vessels.

Mr Bradshaw has claimed that commercial fishermen and recreational sea anglers will all benefit equally from the new landing size for bass .

Defending the new 40 cms minimum size, he has said that if female bass were allowed to grow to 42 cms at which size they began spawning, there would not only be more fish, there would be bigger fish.

“I think in the short term this will involve some pain for some fishermen, particularly inshore fishermen in the south west," he said.

“In the medium to long-term they will benefit from the increased landing size and the increased numbers of bass in exactly the same way as the recreational fishermen will.”

He said the vast majority of the beneficiaries would be British fishermen “because the bass are moving within our own waters” where foreign fishermen did not have access.

www.fishupdate.com is published by Special Publications. Special Publications also publish FISHupdate magazine, Fish Farmer, the Fish Industry Yearbook, the Scottish Seafood Processors Federation Diary, the Fish Farmer Handbook and a range of wallplanners.

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