3 October 2025
Will our new ministers seize the opportunity to reset relations with fishermen, or will it be even more bad news for our coastal communities?
Defra has just finished consulting the public about proposals to ban various types of fishing in 42 Marine Protected Areas. This consultation was launched to coincide with the UN Ocean summit and the release of Oceans, an astonishingly successful and deeply unbalanced piece of influence film making, largely paid for by an Australian mining and cattle ranching billionaire who is now investing heavily in offshore construction projects. The intemperate language of some politicians and NGOs, seemingly determined to capitalise on the moment for their own ends, has led to fishermen being abused in public and a marked increase in the volume of hate mail that we at the NFFO regularly receive from environmentalists. This is far from the collaborative working for more sustainable resource management that we all used to aspire to.
The NFFO has no objection to management measures that restrict fishing in order to protect fragile features in MPAs. Where there is compelling empirical evidence that particular activity is causing quantifiable harm to identified features, it is only reasonable to consider proportionate restrictions on that activity.
That, however, is not what this proposal represents. Indeed, it doesn’t really seem to be about MPA management at all.
Across the 30,000km2 of seabed that the proposals relate to – that’s an area half as large again as Wales – there are many different types of features, in different conditions, sensitive to different types of disturbance, with many different types and levels of human activity nearby. Only one management measure is proposed for them all, though: ban fishing.
Some sites are recorded as being in favourable condition with current fishing activity, so why is a fishing ban needed? Some types of bottom contacting gear are reported as having low impact on the environment, so why ban them in particular? In some of the sites there is no bottom trawling activity at all, so why pretend that their current condition has anything to do with fishing, or that declaring such sites to be off limits to trawlers will improve them?
If the aim of this proposal was really to improve the condition of these sites, these things should be obviously irrelevant. That isn’t the real aim, though: the true objective appears to be simply to ban various kinds of fishing, as an end in itself.
This is no conspiracy theory: it’s just taking the promoters of the move at their word.
When he was Secretary of state for the Environment, Steve Reed MP said: “Tomorrow at the UN Ocean Conference in France, I’ll announce the government’s plans to ban bottom trawling across 41 protected areas of English seas spanning 30,000 square kilometres” He seems to have the number of sites wrong and he neglected to mention the other types of fishing that they are looking to ban at the same time, but his message is still clear.
When she was Leader of the House of Commons, Lucy Powell MP said: “We were all shocked by Sir David Attenborough’s film about the destruction caused by bottom trawling, which this Government will ban in protected British waters”. Announcing the outcome of a consultation 10 weeks before it has finished, on the strength of messaging that a celebrity was paid to read out, is not how fisheries management used to be done.
These senior spokespeople made it plain that banning fishing was their primary objective. Trying to use measures for the management of the MPA network to achieve this, rather than stating it openly as a policy that could be subjected to open and honest debate, has led to disproportionate and unreasonable outcomes and has required excessive reliance on precautionary principle to justify it, while neglecting other key objectives in the Fisheries Act, such as the scientific evidence and community benefit objectives.
This over-simplistic, binary choice – a total ban or doing nothing – and the way in which various individuals in and outside of government have leapt on it to create social division for their own ends, have been deeply disappointing. Rather than gathering evidence and working with fishermen to devise management options to balance social, economic, environmental and food production priorities, we have an all-or-nothing proposal with only a single option, justified by precaution in the absence of any proper effort to gather sufficient data. This is contrary to processes previously employed in managing MPAs and also that of devolved nations undertaking the same exercise.
Despite mixed messaging from politicians and officials about whether this is intended to be a ‘whole site’ or ‘features based’ approach to MPA management, in practice the definition of ‘features’ so as to encompass entire sites makes this a distinction without a difference in almost all cases.
The proposed bans will cause significant economic harm to many fishermen; to businesses up and down the UK and European seafood supply chains; and to coastal communities. The consultation failed to correctly characterise the economic and social impact of the proposals to such an extent that it presents a misleading impression of huge environmental gain in the long term, for minimal cost. Analysis conducted on behalf of the NFFO, using detailed financial and fishing activity records, suggests that a sample of just 55 vessels stand to lose fishing activity worth an estimated £15m per year, which equates to a lost gross profit of £2.3m. This is more than 400% higher than the MMO’s estimate of the total impact on the entire affected UK fleet (1,300 boats, in their estimation). Supply chain losses may be as much as 7 times greater than those in the fishing fleet alone and very significant numbers of jobs can be expected to be lost, at sea and on land.
The NFFO has done its best to make the case for more nuanced and effective management of our seas, based on evidence rather than celebrity endorsement. Many others, including some of the nation’s most eminent fisheries scientists have done the same. The reality, though, is that all the scientific facts and all the evidence about the enormous harm the proposals will do to fishing businesses and coastal communities will count for nothing if the political will to help us is not there.
Everything now comes down to the decision that our new Environment Secretary will take. Will she support our industry, or hammer another nail into its coffin? The choice she makes will define this government’s relationship with our industry for a long time to come.