Fishing Opportunities: 2025

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Wednesday 11th December 2024 Written Statements

[The Minister for Food Security and Rural Affairs (Daniel Zeichner)]

The UK has reached agreement with the EU and Norway on catch opportunities for 2025 through the UK-EU-Norway trilateral and UK-EU bilateral negotiations. Across these negotiations, the UK secured agreement on over 80 total allowable catches (TACs), providing access to £660 million of UK fishing opportunities. Alongside the coastal state negotiations on stocks including mackerel, this brings the total UK fishing opportunities secured for 2025 to 720,000 tonnes, worth an estimated £890 million based on provisional landing prices.

Further, since leaving the EU, the UK has a larger share of many of the total allowable catches set at these negotiations. It is estimated that the UK might have received around 600,000 tonnes of fishing opportunities if we were still an EU member state, in comparison to the 720,000 tonnes actually received. That is an estimated increase of 120,000 tonnes of fishing opportunities for the UK fleet in 2025.

In these negotiations the UK Government worked closely with the Scottish Government, Welsh Government and Northern Ireland Executive to secure outcomes that deliver on all our domestic and international obligations, improving the sustainable management of our fish stocks for the long term in support of the whole of the UK fishing industry.

UK-EU agreement

The UK has secured fishing opportunities of 150,000 tonnes, worth around £360 million based on historic landing prices, through agreement on around 70 TACs as well as agreement on arrangements for non-quota stocks. This is an increase of around 10,000 tonnes compared to 2024 largely driven by increasing scientific advice on sustainable catch levels for Northern Shelf anglerfish.

An initial estimate suggests that slightly fewer UK-EU TACs are set to align with scientific advice from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) compared to last year, due to a challenging advice picture for a number of stocks. The Government will publish early in 2025 a full assessment of the number of TACs set consistent with ICES advice across all annual negotiations.

The UK and EU also made commitments to work together through the Specialised Committee on Fisheries to address the management challenges of certain fisheries. This includes reviewing the effectiveness of measures to protect spurdog and continuing to progress work on technical measures to support the recovery of depleted stocks in the Celtic and Irish seas. The UK and EU also agreed to continue to work together through the SCF to support ICES in improving the science base for a number of stocks, including pollack in ICES area 6 and 7 (which will be benchmarked by ICES in early 2025) and sole 7hjk.

For non-quota stocks (NQS), the UK and the EU agreed a roll-over of access arrangements for 2025 to ensure continued access to fish NQS in EU waters. UK fleet landings for these stocks are historically worth around £30 million a year. We also agreed to roll over existing joint management measures and increase within ICES advice some catch limits for sea bass, and a roll-over of access arrangements for spurdog in the North sea and albacore tuna.

UK-EU-Norway trilateral negotiations

The UK has also reached agreement with Norway and the EU on catch limits for 2025 for six jointly managed North sea stocks, giving the UK fishing fleet access to opportunities worth over £300 million, based on historic landing prices.

The parties agreed TACs for six stocks. Four of the six stocks were set in line with, or below, independent scientific advice from ICES. For North Sea herring, parties aimed to set TACs in line with advice. However, the current management structure, to which the UK has long objected, means we cannot consider outcomes to be in line with headline advice. Finally, for Northern Shelf cod, the parties acknowledged the current advice structure means the sub-stock located in the southern North sea and eastern channel in quarter one brings down the advised catch limits for sub-stocks further north and therefore brings significant challenges for the whitefish sector in the North sea. The parties therefore agreed an approach to set the TAC using part of the headline advice in combination with an alternative catch scenario provided by ICES. This approach is forecasted to lead to biomass increases across all three of the stock’s sub-stocks and secures fishing opportunities that recognise the economic importance of cod in the mixed fishery.

The parties renewed their commitment to deliver long-term management plans (LTMP) for their shared stocks and agreed a request to ICES to advise on an LTMP for saithe. The parties also noted their commitment to start discussions on a new management model for herring in 2025, a significant priority for the UK. That model should also incorporate the newly-developed LTMP. The parties also agreed to start discussions in 2025 about moving the management of Northern Shelf anglerfish (monkfish) to a joint basis, and they further committed to continue to progress their joint work on the monitoring, control and surveillance of their shared stocks.

Multilateral coastal states negotiations

The UK has agreed TACs at the level advised by ICES on the three widely-distributed stocks we share with other coastal states in the north-east Atlantic: mackerel, blue whiting and Norwegian spring-spawning/Atlanto-Scandian herring. The opportunities will be worth an estimated £240 million to the UK fleet in 2025, based on historical prices. The UK will also have additional mackerel quota in 2025 as part of the multi-year deals with Norway and Faroes agreed last year.

Regional fisheries management organisations

The UK has continued to support the sustainable management of widely distributed and highly migratory stocks via regional fisheries management organisations (RFMOs) of which it is a member. RFMO negotiations this year have resulted in the agreement of a wide range of stock-related measures, conservation measures and measures to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing (IUU) activities. These negotiations have also delivered around 2,000 tonnes of fishing opportunities for the UK, as well as a new sharing arrangement for the reopened Canadian Northern cod fishery.

UK-Norway and UK-Faroe Islands bilateral negotiations

Bilateral negotiations between the UK and Norway and the UK and the Faroe Islands on access arrangements and exchanges of fishing opportunities are ongoing.

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