Bigger, Newer, Boats May Not Opt For Decommissioning – Fishupdate.com
Bigger, Newer, Boats May Not Opt For Decommissioning Fishing Monthly Published: 07 April, 2003
A SPOKESWOMAN for the Scottish fisheries department said today that there had been 216 application requests so far under the countrys £40million vessel decommissioning scheme.
However this did not mean that 216 requests for a decommissioning deal would necessarily be sent back by the time the scheme closes on April 18.
The scheme opened on March 13 and today, Hamish Morrison, chief executive of the Scottish Fishermens Federation said that asking for a form was merely the first stage in a three-stage process, which ended in an offer being made assuming an application had been accepted.
The loss to the demersal fleet from the last decommissioning scheme, was he estimated, somewhere around 150 vessels taking not only decommissioning into account but vessels sold away and licences used for aggregation purposes.
And while the department was at present mining the qualifying group, he would not be surprised if there were insufficient applications at the end of the day to match the available finance.
Obviously the reason why the Executive has gone for this relatively large sum of money for decommissioning is hopefully to decommission some of the relatively new and relatively large vessels.
But I would think that most of these new boats have better resale than decommissioning value.