Who owns the UK’s fish?
It should be an easy question to answer. Officially, it is owned by The Crown on behalf of the public. But our fish stocks are a public good that, strangely, are not managed for the public’s benefit. No rents are charged to those that exploit this national asset. And yet it is the UK tax-payer who funds fisheries science and marine management, who subsidises the duty free red diesel that powers the vessels, and pays for the grant schemes and the monitoring and enforcement (such as it is) through government organisations. There is no cost recovery in place and yet the catches landed by UK vessels have a firsthand sale value in excess of £1.1 billion annually. Put simply, the government has failed to regard its fisheries as a strategic public asset.
Fishing opportunities are managed by two mechanisms: those species controlled by quota; and the rest of commercially caught species, as non-quota. Non-quota species can be caught by anyone with a commercially licensed fishing vessel, but there will be restrictions such as seasonal closure, area closures and minimum landing sizes (MLS) as a means to manage these stocks. Quota species can also be managed by closures and MLS, but the key tool is quota limits within the total allowable catch (TAC) in tonnes of fish.
Fishing for quota broadly falls into two very different categories or types of fleet. The larger vessels (over ten metres) will have fixed quota allocations (FQAs) held by individual vessels and companies. The smaller vessels (mostly under ten metres) who are provided fishing opportunities out of the government’s retained and held allocations.
In 1999, when the UK introduced the FQA system for fisheries, it was supposed to provide a stable and predictable way of managing stocks. In those days the UK fleet comprised relatively small, regional, owner-managed businesses, that mostly controlled and operated a single vessel. FQAs were meant to be temporary because they were conceived as a mechanism to allow stocks to recover. As a result, little thought was given to their long-term impact on the fishing community. The FQAs were originally given by the Government to those who had a track record of landings during the reference period. But a private market for the sale of FQAs almost immediately developed.
The impact of this unbalanced the system. Smaller owners in coastal communities were lured by lump sums from larger operators to sell their quota and move to the under 10 fleet. Those original historically-based issuances of FQA holdings began to concentrate into fewer and fewer hands, as they bought up ever more quota. Some even acquired quota who had no history of fishing at all. Quota had become an investment. What originally seemed a fair allocation based on traditional lines, now enabled those who held the majority of FQA to sit back and rent it out often for annual returns; often in excess of 10%. A public good, had become a privatised asset.
Fish Producer Organisations (FPOs) were created under EU law (retained post-Brexit) as collectives of quota groups. They became in effect the new vehicle for the management of the industry – an industry over which government had lost effective control. Indeed a 2017 report by the EU’s Court of Auditors flagged that “lack of transparent distribution of quotas increases the risk that specific interests of certain economic operators are favoured at the expense of others.”
A poorly conceived quota regime, that was supposed to be a temporary solution to the problem of declining stocks, has turned into a long-term capital market. This, allied with a system of FPOs unchecked by Government, has developed over three decades into an inequitable system with huge power imbalances where the UK is no longer in control of its own fisheries.
In 2024, 91% of the UK’s fleet landings were caught by just 680 vessels – owned by the dominant quota owners. In the same year, the vast majority of fishermen who live in our most economically vulnerable coastal communities put to sea in 4,140 vessels to catch just 9% of UK landings. But that does not represent all the fish that the UK fleet caught, because 36% of catches by UK vessels were never landed into the UK. They were landed into EU and EEA ports!
Why should this matter? If British fishermen are getting a better price by landing more than a third of their catch into other countries, surely that means the profits are coming back into the UK? Indeed, that might be the case if the dominant FQA holders were in fact UK citizens. They are not.
Every tonne of Welsh quota is entirely under Spanish control, and even that which is landed into Welsh ports sees the vast majority of it loaded onto Spanish trucks and shipped to the continent. We know that eight years ago one Dutch company, Cornelis Vrolijk Holdings, was reported to have cornered nearly a quarter of English quota, since then its holdings appear to have increased. The government must question why so many foreign companies now control so much of UK quota with little discernible benefit to the UK public.
Even for domestic companies there has been a tendency for quota to aggregate into fewer and fewer hands. Government should be concerned that five families on the Sunday Times Rich List have controlled nearly a third of UK fishing quota. Though a relatively small industry, it is one that could deliver real prosperity to restore our coastal communities: it should not be delivering such vast wealth to such small numbers.
The underlying UK fishery is a public asset. Yet we have allowed it to become privatised by a decreasing number of people, many of whom are based abroad, land their catch abroad, process their catch abroad, sell their catch abroad, offshoring their profits (and thus paying their tax) abroad. Yet they freely avail themselves of UK Government grants, red diesel and other subsidies. If transparency is important in apportioning public goods, then we need to know not just which companies hold quota, but precisely who are the beneficial owners behind those companies, how much they have paid to acquire ‘their’ quota, and what quota swaps they have engaged in. Yet there is no requirement to register who are the beneficial owners of the Byzantine network of companies that hold and trade quota.
Most people, including many politicians, would assume that fisheries operate under an equitable public sector asset-management scheme where a formal bidding process for quota brings revenue into the public purse in return for the right to exploit the public resource of UK fisheries. Most people would be wrong.
Allocation of quota delivers no revenue to the public purse. There is no auction or bidding process. No payments up front. We need to imagine a better way. One that will bring economic benefit, not just to government but to local coastal economies; one that will manage stocks sustainably and actually grow the sector.
Imagine if, instead of being left with the scraps, inshore local fleets were prioritised in the distribution of quota? Allowing “first dibs” to the under ten fleet would not endanger stocks because of the fleet’s limited capacity (currently only landing 9% of UK’s fish); but it would provide an economic boost to local coastal communities. In return it would insist that vessels were transparent, maintained fully operational Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) systems, and did not fish inappropriately in Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). The current “Days at sea” would be replaced with an annual-hours system so vessels could respond to changing species’ behaviour, and above all to improve vessel safety. The perverse incentive to stay out in poor weather, so as not to waste a full day at sea, is a further danger to life in an already dangerous profession. Annual hours would reduce that.
Overall catch limits (TAC) would be set according to the scientific estimates not simply on the basis of Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) which aims to maximise the catch in the present without depleting it for the future, but in order to increase the biomass over time, creating greater prosperity.
After the Under 10s’ bids had been allocated, the balance of the TAC would be apportioned to the industrial parts of the fishing fleet via a formal quota licensing process designed to deliver fishing opportunity through a sliding scale of weighted opportunity decisions. There would be no payment up front. Revenue would come from a levy system on landed catch. The levy would incorporate a points-based sliding fee scale in which public goods were prioritised. More points, for example where fish are landed in the UK creating local jobs, more points where the vessel uses low-impact, less destructive gear, where they provide seabed mapping data, and generally improve the sustainability of the sector. In short, a system of levies that are in harmony with and support government’s other social, environmental and economic policies. One more thing: there would be a cancellation of all fishing rights to anyone convicted of a criminal offence related to the fishing industry.
Moving to such a new regime would doubtless be contested by those who have come to regard quota as their property. It never was. It is a public resource, and the quota system was always intended to be a temporary solution whilst government transitioned to a better system of managing marine resources. As government failed in that task, the sector’s major financial players traded their way to dominance and began to exercise management control through the Fish Producer Organisations.
To ensure fairness, we may need to give due notice to the sector that this system is coming to an end, that in future there will be no rights to sell, swap or lease quota. Unused quota will simply return to the Government for redistribution.
The money raised through the levies on the industrial parts of the UK fishing sector (estimated to be in the low hundreds of millions annually) would be used to monitor and enforce the management regime and evaluate data deficient stocks. Accurate baseline data has been lacking for too long but is absolutely vital if appropriate scientific advice is to form the basis of sustainable catch limits and ensure that all stocks eventually become quota controlled.
Successive governments have failed to deliver Fisheries Management Reform that takes back control over UK fish. They have failed to insist that stocks are managed for the benefit of coastal communities creating jobs and economic prosperity in some of our most hard-pressed towns and villages.
A reformed Fisheries Management Plan could help eradicate the illegal practices current in the industry. It could deliver a healthier marine environment where stocks are expanding, catches are increasingly being landed and processed in the U.K. and fishing incomes are growing.
We have the largest fishery in Europe - and yet we have allowed it to be traded away by a coterie of the very rich, while the public have carried all the costs of fisheries management. It need not be like this. We have a new Prime Minister. It is an opportunity to turn a corner and breathe new life into communities across the country. Let us use the asset that is our national fisheries to regenerate those places who, for too long, have been on the forefront of decline.
---
Barry Gardiner is the Labour MP for Brent West.
All blog posts represent the views of the author alone and not necessarily those of Mainstream.
