One of the main features of the European fishing industry over the past 30 years can be summed up in seven words: too many boats chasing too few fish.

This chronic overcapacity, allied with new technologies that make vessels ever more efficient, has led to huge pressures on stocks. For fishermen looking to cover the costs of their boat, conservation concerns come a poor second to economic reality. Some stocks, such as herring around Scotland or cod in the North Sea, became so depleted that special fishing limits had to be introduced. As fish became less plentiful and restrictions began to bite, so earning a living from the sea became increasingly uneconomic.

The EU began in the early 1990s to set fleet reduction targets to try to secure a better balance between fishing capacity and the quantity of fish that could be safely caught without jeopardising future stocks.

These had a limited effect. Between 1991 and 1998, the tonnage of EU-registered vessels fell by 4.5 per cent. The decrease would have been higher — 8 per cent — but for the entry into the EU of Sweden and Finland in 1994. Grants to encourage crews to decommission their boats, especially old ones, had some success in a fleet where only 16 per cent of vessels were under 10 years old. But these were often cancelled out by government funds to renew national fishing fleets.

In 2002 the EU agreed a reform of the Common Fisheries Policy, making a closer direct link between the size of each national fleet and the amount of fish that could be caught.

The new rules prevented any vessel that had been decommissioned with the help of government or EU grants from being replaced. Similarly, before a new boat could begin fishing, equivalent capacity would have to be removed from the fleet. Future aid was limited to modernisation measures.

The measures have reduced the size of the EU fleet over the past decade from 99,170 vessels to 87,426. However, the overall capacity remains fairly constant at about two million tonnes. Reducing the size of the fleet is not the EU’s only response to dwindling stocks. Earlier this year the Union’s Fisheries Control Agency began operating. Its brief is to coordinate national fishery inspection activities to ensure that fishermen respect the EU’s conservation measures fully.

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