The UK Government have once again short-changed Scottish fishing and coastal communities with their announcement of a paltry 7.7% of their £360million Fishing and Coastal Growth Fund despite Scotland’s outsized contribution to the fishing sector in the UK.
The UK Government’s Department for Rural Affairs (DEFRA) announced in October that Scotland would receive £28million in funding from this pot, which translates as just 7.7% of total allocated funds.
The Fishing and Coastal Growth Fund had been announced back in May at the same time as the UK-EU reset which extended access to Scottish waters. Given the importance of funding for coastal communities and the fishing sector in his constituency, I have written repeatedly to the UK Government to ask for more detail on when and how much of these funds were to be allocated to Scotland. They did not do me the courtesy of alerting me to their decision ahead of DEFRA’s announcement.
It begs the question – is DEFRA unable to do their sums properly? They must return to their spreadsheets and think again because the stats don’t lie – Scotland represents 50% of the UK’s fishing sector with over half of all UK based fishers working on Scottish vessels, where half of our fish landing ports in the UK are located in Scotland as well as 43% of UK fish processing jobs. £28million will just not cut it when fishing is worth around six times more to the Scottish economy than it is to the UK economy, according to the Office for National Statistics.
As MP for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East, home to the largest fishing port in the UK at Fraserburgh, and with Aberdeenshire accounting for around half of Scotland’s fishing GVA, this percentage of overall funds is particularly galling and unfair as well as having a disproportionately negative impact on the local fishing and coastal sector as they battle against a particularly challenging economic environment.
When we were still part of the EU, we received 46% of funds based on our share of the UK fishing sector. We were led to believe that Labour’s Fishing and Coastal Growth Fund would replicate this allocation. But once again we have been let down and marginalised by a UK Government that is making decisions far from the reality of coastal life.
Given the impact of this funding allocation on Scotland’s fishing communities, particularly those in the North-east, we must have the opportunity to question the UK Government on the rationale behind this bafflingly bad decision and the importance of changing it to match the vital and outsized importance of our contribution to this sector.
