Our achievements from 2024 to 2025
In the second year of our corporate plan, we collaborated with industry and partners to deliver against our priority work areas and support businesses working across the UK and throughout the full seafood supply chain, from catch to plate.
Here’s a summary of what we achieved together.
Ensuring a safe and skilled workforce
We helped to save lives and build careers through our safe and skilled workforce priority work area.
We invested £1m from government contributions in safety training and career development for the catching sector.
We delivered almost 5,000 safety and skills training places. This included:
- Nine man overboard safety training courses with 109 attendees
- 459 onshore training courses
- Over 1,700 funded seagoing training places, including 89 new entrant fishermen
We also engaged a large community of people in our Home and Dry fishing safety initiative. We grew our audiences to:
- over 5,000 followers on social media
- 8,000 visitors to the Home and Dry website
We also reached more than 850,000 people through our annual Home and Dry communications campaign, “Safety is Better Shared”. And 91% of fishermen who engaged with the campaign took a safety action as a result.
Facilitating and promoting international trade
We supported trade growth through our international trade priority work area.
We provided regulatory advice and guidance to help UK seafood businesses. We answered 220 enquiries to help businesses trade with the EU and 22 other countries around the world. We also supported seafood businesses to navigate complex trade issues. These include challenges around importing lobsters to the UK and issues with export health requirements for crabs landed into the EU by UK vessels for direct shipment to the UK.
We also established our new Trade Facilitation Forum. This brings together seafood businesses, regulators, and researchers to discuss the regulatory changes and emerging challenges that could impact seafood businesse’s ability to trade.
We showcased UK seafood at international trade expos in Barcelona, Japan and China. 39 businesses used UK pavilions supported by us and government partners Defra and the Department for Business and Trade. We welcomed over 1,590 visitors to the pavilions, and we served over 5,150 samples of UK seafood.
Responding to the climate change emergency
We have a strong response to climate change and we’re providing data and insight to help with both mitigation and adaptation.
We rolled out access to our seafood carbon emissions profile tool (SCEPT). More than 100 seafood businesses are now signed up to use the tool, including large retailer Tesco. It is now using SCEPT as its emissions tool of choice for seafood.
We also delivered collaborative research on climate change adaptation and the implications for the wild capture sector.
Improving fisheries management
We supported a sustainable seafood industry by helping to improve fisheries management.
We developed the draft Nephrops Fisheries Management Plans (FMPs) for West of Scotland and the North Sea. We also helped develop stakeholder- led management measures - including minimum landing size for lobsters and a permit for whelk fishing – to support FMP implementation in England. We supported businesses across the seafood supply chain to progress stakeholder-led Fishery Improvement Projects (FIPs) for Nephrops and king scallops.
We delivered fishing gear training to share knowledge on the best ways to deploy fishing gear and help reduce bycatch and minimise impact on the seabed. We delivered our online basic fishing methods course to almost 350 people. We also delivered a two day in person fishing gear training course for regulators, policy makers and seafood supply chain businesses at the flume tank in Denmark.
Enabling supply chain resilience
We’ve been working with businesses and partners to drive supply chain resilience across the seafood sector.
We have continued to support the seafood supply chain to seek change in the management of pelagic fisheries in the North East Atlantic through our work on chairing and facilitating the North Atlantic Pelagic Advocacy group (NAPA). This included securing two-year extensions to the two NAPA FIPs – for herring and mackerel, and blue whiting.
We also helped shine a spotlight on the seafood industry in the north-west of England and improve cohesion amongst the different business operators through our campaign about the thornback ray.
Data, Insight and Innovation
We gathered data and insight to support informed decision making and worked to promote innovation within the seafood industry.
We collaborated with Cefas and Defra to deliver the Seafood Innovation ‘25 conference for 180 delegates. They included representatives from various seafood sectors, research institutes, government, private finance, and NGO’s, from the UK, Canada, Iceland, and New Zealand. Attendees heard from 32 speakers and panellists about exciting innovations across the seafood supply chain.
There were presentations from 24 funded innovation projects and nine project exhibitions.
We used our mapping and data analysis expertise to help improve understanding of the impacts of spatial squeeze on the fishing industry. Our work to support the catching sector in this area included:
- A range of new detailed offshore regional maps, for all UK waters, demonstrating the industries competing for marine space
- A new online webmap and processes to convert and display the latest spatial fisheries 'track' data
- Economic data analysis, using MMO and Seafish 'fleet survey' data, to highlight the value of sea areas
- A range of illustrations to show the technical challenges of fishing using different gear types in wind farms
- Convened groups of fishing industry representatives to discuss the challenges and help define work areas
We spoke with more than 900 fishing, aquaculture and processing business owners to gather data which could be used to support policy and business decisions. Through this research we continued to build our economic data sets for the catching and processing sectors. For the first time we also delivered economic analysis on the UK aquaculture sector.
We delivered our UK Seafood in Numbers publication and campaign to showcase this data. Over 200,000 people saw our posts on social media and press coverage reached an audience of up to 596,000. Our industry webinar attracted an audience of more than 60 key seafood businesses.
Championing industry reputation
We’ve also been championing industry reputation to highlight the positive impacts of seafood and the seafood industry.
Last summer we launched Seafood for Life, our new industry reputation initiative. We connected with numerous businesses across the seafood industry who have a great story to tell.
At the beginning of this year we started our ‘always- on’ strand of Seafood for Life activity. Since January we’ve been regularly sharing positive information about a range of key topics including health, career opportunities and innovation.
Optimising our communications and engagement
We’ve been sharing our knowledge and expertise with the people that matter.
We convened a variety of forums including four meetings of our Industry Panels and 10 meetings of our Advisory Committees in Scotland, Wales, South West England and Northern Ireland. And we brought people together at many other events and initiatives, from conferences to stakeholder meetings and working groups across our industry priorities all over the UK.