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Almost 40% of England’s seas are designated as marine protected areas. Their purpose, the government says, is “to protect and recover rare threatened and important marine ecosystems … from damage caused by human activities”.
And yet in the four years to 2024, trawlers using vast nets, including those that scour the seabed, caught more than 1.3m tonnes of fish within them, according to official figures that campaigners say show they are “little more than lines on a map”.
“The government claims vast areas of UK waters are protected, but the reality is a national scandal,” said Chris Thorne, senior oceans campaigner at Greenpeace UK.
“Protection means nothing if these hulking industrial trawlers are allowed to devastate crucially important areas. MPAs should be safe havens where our incredible marine life and ecosystems can recover and thrive. Instead, they remain protected only on paper and precious ocean life is being pushed to the brink.”
A report last year found North Sea cod, Celtic Sea cod, Irish Sea whiting, Irish Sea herring and North Sea and east English Channel horse mackerel were all at critically low levels, yet continued to be overfished. Just last month the supermarket chain Waitrose suspended sales of mackerel after a warning by the Marine Conservation Society that it too was being overfished and at risk of a population collapse.
According to Greenpeace UK’s analysis of UK and EU fisheries data, during the four years examined more than 1m tonnes of fish were caught by pelagic trawlers – vessels that use enormous nets up to 240 metres wide and 50 metres long, scooping up everything in their path.
A further 250,000 tonnes were caught by bottom-towed gear, including bottom trawlers, which drag heavy, destructive nets across the seabed, obliterating marine ecosystems.
Since the MPA system was established in the early 1980s, 78 areas around the UK’s coast have been designated as protected. In 2020, a new law gave new powers to the government to restrict fishing for conservation purposes in UK coastal waters.
But, six years on, bylaws to ban bottom trawling remain in the consultation phase, and massive trawlers prowl some of the UK’s most sensitive marine ecosystems, despite major concerns about fish populations.
The Guardian asked the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs why trawlers were allowed to extract so many fish from supposedly protected areas, and whether the fact they were defeated the point of the designation. Defra had not replied by the time of publication.
