FTER years of arguments and campaigning, European Union have at last agreed to ban the controversial practice of discarding fish – but it will be phased in.

Negotiations ran late into last night because of strong opposition from Mediterranean fishing countries such as Spain, France and Portugal. The historic ban will come into effect in January next year.

Ministers agreed some exemptions to the ban – but doubt remains whether they will be accepted by the European parliament which wants to see an almost outright ending to the practice. It is a victory for campaigners, who have demanded the end of a practice that has brought the EU into disrepute.

The UN says Europe has the world’s worst record of throwing away fish. Almost a quarter of all catches go back overboard dead because they are not the fish the crews intended to catch. The decision reached early on Wednesday morning was driven by northern European nations, including the UK.

They saw off the Mediterranean countries, which were fighting to protect the interests of their fishermen. The ban will apply to pelagic stocks like herring and whiting from next year, and to white fish stocks from January 2016.

Spain, France and Portugal managed to cling on to some restricted exemptions, particularly relating to crews operating far from land in mixed fisheries where the cost of landing unwanted fish is deemed to be prohibitive. These crews will be allowed to discard nine per cent , shrinking to seven per cent. This figure is too high for the northern nations and the European Commission, which say the public expects that in a hungry world no fish should be thrown away.

Details of how exactly the discards ban will work in practice with the quota system or its projected replacement will be debated later. The British government, one of the campaigners for change, said it was disappointed that the ban was not absolute, but that last night’s result was an historic victory to end a “scandalous” policy.

It is one instance in which mass public pressure has clearly influenced the politicians, with almost a million people on the online campaign site Avaaz demanding an end to discards.

UK Fisheries Minister Richard Benyon said: “This is a historic moment in reforming the broken Common Fisheries Policy. The scandal of discards has gone on for too long.”

He added: “I am disappointed that some of the measures required to put this ban into place are no longer as ambitious as I had hoped but it’s a price I am willing to accept if it means we can get the other details right.”

UK fishing groups will broadly welcome the ban, but they warn that ending discards is not a ‘silver bullet’ for curing the many problems facing the fishing industries of Europe. A more regional policy is vital, say groups like the NFFO.