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The UK and the EU have reached a new deal setting out post-Brexit relations on areas including fishing rights, trade and defence.
Under it EU boats will have continued access to UK waters until 2038. The UK will continue to agree yearly quotas with the EU and Norway and issue licences to control who fishes in its waters.
The UK government has promised to unveil a £360m “fishing and coastal growth fund” to invest in coastal communities.
“The irony is that the 12-year fisheries access agreement that has just been struck solidifies a system that continues to allow overfishing and which has seen the size of the cake getting smaller. The present deal is about getting access to the crumbs.
When it comes to sustainability, in 2024, agreement between the EU and UK meant that 54 per cent of the total allowable catches for the UK fleet exceeded scientific advice. Quotas for mackerel, the most valuable fish stock, have consistently been set over scientific advice since 2014 and as a result the stock has plunged from 7.3 million tonnes to 2.8 million tonnes.
In the Celtic Sea, one stock after another has been overfished, first cod, then whiting and now pollack. The relentless need to let fleets go on fishing means that the quota for Celtic Sea cod now exceeds the entire population of adult fish.
It is crystal clear that access should take second place to ensuring that all fish stocks are healthy, but this is not how either the EU or the UK currently play the game.
For the inshore fleet and for coastal towns all around the coast it would have taken the pressure off – and arguably given a refuge for more fish – if EU fishing fleets had been pushed back to 12 miles, the limit of territorial waters in international law, rather than six miles in this agreement, but this was never on the table, an indication of the weakness of the UK position.
What is clear is that these new access arrangements make it even more important that both sides take their commitments to sustainability seriously and rein back their catches to within scientific advice to allow stocks to recover – as legal challenges in both the EU and the UK are demanding – and that trawling is removed from all marine protected areas, to give marine life some resilience in face of the onslaught of all these fishing fleets.” – Charles Clover, Blue Marine co-founder and senior adviser and Jonny Hughes, Blue Marine senior policy manager.
