Several worst-case scenarios have been avoided, but the unexpected inclusion of technical measures brings with it much uncertainty.
The end of year TAC negotiations are always a tense time, but 2025 was more pressured than most, with the North Sea fleet staring down the barrel of an unhelpful and confused ICES headline scenario that would have been unsurvivable for many businesses. In the end, we have a 44% cut in the Northern Shelf cod TAC that will be extremely painful for many, but not ruinous. We can only hope that the promised improvements in the scientific basis of next year’s advice will not bring us back to that worrying place in 2026.
Further south, we can be pleased to see pollack returning to a targeted fishery, after 2 years of zero TAC that many felt was not warranted. The bag limit for recreational anglers – long acknowledged to be a significant contributor to pollack mortality – is also welcome. The outcome for spurdog was also positive, with a reduction in the TAC to protect the stock coupled with a removal of the maximum landing size, to increase the fishery’s commercial viability. This is just what the industry has been recommending for some time and should be considered a victory for collaborative management between fishermen, scientists and officials. Bycatch only allowances for cod and haddock are more difficult, however, and so fishermen working the Irish Sea, Celtic Sea and Channel waters will have another challenging year ahead.
The most concerning aspect of the annual negotiation outcomes does not concern TACs, however: it is the inclusion for the first time of technical management measures in the written record. To the surprise of seemingly everyone, the EU requested that technical measures relating to trawl mesh sizes be introduced in the Channel, Irish Sea and Celtic Sea fisheries, ostensibly for ‘conservation’ reasons, as part of the regular quota discussions.
When the UK left the EU, our departure from the much-maligned, deeply politicised and plainly failing Common Fisheries Policy, and the assumption of regulatory autonomy in fisheries management matters was perhaps the only benefit that our fishing industry saw. We understood that we would have the freedom to make our own rules to govern fish resources in our own waters, as an independent coastal state should. The mechanism for this was to be the ‘Fisheries Management Plan’ programme. Begun under the last Conservative government and adopted by Labour, this has been a genuinely ambitious and widely popular effort to bring together scientists, fishermen, fisheries managers and civil society, to manage a national resource for long-term collective benefit, on the basis of solid scientific evidence ahead of all other considerations. It may have been somewhat slow to get started, but it has also been genuinely well-intentioned, inclusive of all views, and pragmatically decisive when it has needed to be. It is not a perfect system, but it is better than anything else that has yet been tried.
New mesh size regulations are exactly the sort of management measure that we would expect to be consulted on under the FMP system. They have significant financial and opportunity cost implications for fishermen and bear scientific and economic scrutiny. It was startling to learn, therefore, that the collaborative process that we all thought we were working within had been set aside in favour of a bargain struck between civil servants over a few days in London and Brussels.
More troubling still, it seems that the rules will be more lenient in EU waters than in UK waters. The key line in the Written Record is that larger mesh sizes must be used “in accordance with each Party’s catch composition rules”. Since the UK does not apply such rules, British fishermen will have the huge expense of buying new nets that are designed to ensure that they catch fewer fish. Meanwhile, their direct competitors in the EU will enjoy a far more lenient regime that allows them continue to use smaller mesh sizes, as long as their catches do not contain more than a particular percentage of certain fish species. If the UK was blindsided by the EU’s push for management measures to be incorporated into the TAC talks then – by not only acceding to their demands but agreeing on harsher rules for ourselves alone – we seem to have poked ourselves in the other eye to finish the job.
If the UK’s domestic fisheries management rules are going to be decided in the annual negotiations with the EU, our understanding of the entire FMP process is undermined. The European Commission could replace British fishermen and scientists in fisheries management matters. Their months of consultation, research and debate could be discarded in favour of trade-offs and brinkmanship. Evidence-based management and collaboration might be out and the political deal-making back in, with Europe very obviously dominant.
It is not hard to see the dangerous route that this could lead us down. Less than a week after the EU-UK negotiations were concluded, the EU’s North Western Waters Advisory Council published an open letter in which: “The NWWAC recommends that the Advisory Councils must always be involved in developing technical and remedial measures, even when their preparation does not follow the regionalisation process, and are, for instance, decided in the TACs and quotas negotiations including in the EU-UK consultations.” If this EU ‘stakeholder’ body, which includes European fishing industry associations, environmental NGOs, and European civil society groups in its membership, is going to take on an enhanced role in deciding the UK’s domestic fisheries management then we are very far from being an independent coastal state. It would be premature to say that we are crawling back into the CFP via the back door, but such a possibility looks a lot less improbable than it did a few weeks ago.
We must not jump the gun, though. One bad outcome doesn’t set a precedent. It would be disingenuous to claim that the fishing industry is about to be abandoned and ignored as it has been in the past. There has been regular and meaningful dialogue with government, officials and scientists throughout the last year. The new Fisheries and Coastal Growth Fund, and the clear intention of those responsible to develop and deploy it in a strategic manner for long-term benefit, are genuine and substantial positives. The crucial thing will be to avoid snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by weakening our regulatory autonomy at this crucial juncture.
What happens next? It seems clear that, over the next year, the workings of the EU-UK Specialised Committee on Fisheries are going to assume much greater importance. How robustly our officials and our government defend the UK’s right to self-determination in domestic fisheries management matters in that forum and in the 2026 negotiations will be watched very closely.