The Seafood Ethics Common Language Group

The Seafood Ethics Common Language Group (SECLG) provides a safe meeting space to discuss the key ethical issues faced by the international seafood industry. The group looks at social welfare issues that affect the UK seafood supply chain, whether in the UK or seafood imported into the UK. This covers human trafficking, labour abuses, child labour, debt bondage, forced labour, migrant workers, and modern slavery. It is an opportunity to share new ideas or best practice case studies from around the world.

The group is led by our industry and we take responsibility for running the SECLG. The Group has met twice a year since 2014. The SECLG brings together seafood industry representatives from major supermarket chains, smaller retailers, processors, foodservice and the catching sector.  Other people who attend are not-for-profit voluntary groups, welfare charities, consumer groups, government and social research scientists.

SECLG meetings and bite size meetings

There are generally two meetings a year. The presentations and minutes from the most recent meetings are below. Presentations and minutes from previous meetings are available from Karen Green.

Due to Covid-19 we are running shorter online bite-size SECLG meetings in 2020 and 2021

Next meeting

The next meeting will be in August 2021. For further information, please contact: Karen Green

Previous two bite-size meetings

Recruitment challenges for the seafood sector (10 June 2021). This meeting looked at the responsible recruitment of local and migrant workers, changes to migration patterns and recruitment practices, and how to ensure the remediation of worker-paid recruitment fees. See the presentations: 

• Responsible recruitment and labour supply chain due diligence. Hannah Newcomb, Responsible Recruitment Toolkit.
• Recruitment into the UK fishing industry – new direct recruitment initiative and regulatory changes. Mike Park, Scottish White Fish Producers Association.
• Repayment of recruitment fees to workers - emerging best practice and lessons learned from Issara's experience in recruitment fees repayment. Jarrett Basedow, Technical and Operations Director, Issara Institute.

Standards and at-sea labour practices (25 March 2021). We are seeing the growth of voluntary labour certification standards to demonstrate socially responsible labour practices on vessels in wild-capture fisheries. This meeting looked at how these voluntary standards and initiatives have developed and are evolving, and how they could be benchmarked in the future. See the presentations:

• New FISH (Fairness, Integrity, Safety and Health) Standard for Crew. Mike Kraft, FISH Standard.
• Update on the Responsible Fishing Vessel Scheme (RFVS). Mike Platt and Melanie Siggs, Global Seafood Practices.
• FisheryProgress Fishery Improvement Project (FIP) social policy and Social Risk Assessments (SRA). Kristin Sherwood, FishChoice.
• Global Sustainable Seafood Initiative (GSSI)/Consumer Goods Forum (CGF) Sustainable Supply Chain Initiative (SSCI) At-Sea Operations Framework. Thomas van Haaren, CGF.

Terms of Reference and archive

SECLG bite-size meeting notes 

• Standards and at-sea labour practices. 25 March 2021
• Increasing transparency on fishing vessels. 28 January 2021
• Facets underpinning a socially resilient seafood industry. 12 November 2020
• Dynamics around setting and benchmarking at-sea baseline social criteria. 2 September 2020
• At-sea social criteria. 8 July 2020
• ILO 188 compliance: best practice. 27 May 2020

• For more information on this work and to download Seafish briefing papers, visit our Social Responsibility in Seafood webpage 

Our social responsibility work

• Social responsibility is a key work area for us. As well as running the SECLG we also support the seafood industry in a number of key areas to help eliminate unethical practices from UK seafood supply chains. To find out more read our Social Responsibility in Seafood briefing note 

Contacts