Who we are and what we do
Our 2025–2026 Annual Plan outlines our key priorities and initiatives for the year ahead. You can download a copy of it from the link below.
You can find out more about what we delivered to support a thriving seafood from the link below.
Our Corporate Plan
Our annual plans are informed by our 2023–2028 Corporate Plan. It sets out our ambitions and our priority work areas:
- Ensuring a safe and skilled workforce
- Facilitating and promoting international trade
- Responding to the climate change emergency
- Improving fisheries management
- Enabling supply chain resilience
- Improving data, insight, and innovation
- Championing industry reputation
You can download our 2023-28 plan below from the link below:
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We’re here to give the UK seafood sector the support it needs to thrive. When the seafood industry thrives, the whole nation thrives because:
- Seafood is packed full of nutrition;
- When managed responsibly, seafood is sustainable;
- The seafood industry creates long-term job opportunities and drives business prosperity and,
- It builds and sustains communities.
We work with the seafood industry right across the UK from Shetland in the north to Cornwall in the south.
We work with fishing vessels and their crew, seafood processing businesses, aquaculture producers, and restaurants and fishmongers reliant on the industry and the top-quality seafood we fish, farm and process.
Our unique, non-competitive position means we work in partnership with stakeholders across the UK to navigate challenges and seize opportunities.
We were set up by the Fisheries Act 1981 and our sponsor is the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). We also work with the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish devolved administrations.
We have around 90 staff with a range of knowledge and expertise. We have offices in Edinburgh and Grimsby and homebased staff working across the UK.
We are led by our Executive Team and our work and is overseen by the Seafish Board.
Most of our funding comes from a levy on the first sale of seafood products in the UK. This includes imported seafood. Go to our Seafish Levy page to find out who pays the levy, which products are due levy and how to pay the levy. We fund some projects with money from UK fisheries funding schemes.
Following our Strategic Review in 2021, we are consulting with the industry on changes to the Seafish levy. These will be the first changes since 1999 and will help us to deliver the support the industry wants from us. Find out more on our Seafish Levy Review page from the link below:
Measuring our impact
We are a small organisation and assessing the contribution we make can be difficult, but we will measure our impact by observing the performance of the industry based on the following measures:
- Contribution seafood makes to UK gross domestic product increases.
- Volume of seafood exports increases.
- Increase on proportion of seafood imports that are destined for value added processing
- Halt the current declining trend in seafood consumption.
- Volume of shellfish aquaculture produced across the UK increases.
- Decline in carbon emissions from the UK seafood sector (catching, aquaculture and processing).
- Volume of seafood landed into UK ports increases.
- Percentage of marine fish stocks (of UK interest) with biomass al levels that maintain full reproductive capacity increases.
- Number of seafood businesses with access to sufficient, skilled labour increases.
- Year on year decline in the number of preventable incidents on fishing vessels.
- Positive media coverage on the seafood industry increases year on year (baseline to be set in 2023).
- Positive stakeholder sentiment about Seafish increases year on year (baseline to be set in 2023).
Get in touch
Go to our Contact page to get in touch with us and find out how we can support you.