The U.K. government’s recent promise to remove regulatory red tape across industries has brought fresh hope to Scotland’s salmon industry that authorities will heed its calls to simplify the permitting process for new farm sites.
The overly complicated process of securing new farm site permits has been a stated problem of Scotland’s salmon industry for several years now.
In 2022, Russel Griggs, the current chair of the South of Scotland Enterprise, conducted an independent review of how Scottish salmon farms are regulated, after which he delivered a series of recommendations to the Scottish government.
Noting that since 2020 around 60 fish farm applications had missed their consent decision deadlines, he advised consolidating the four regulators that each operate under different time frames for approving applications into one entity that’s solely responsible for leading the consenting process.
Griggs’s recommendations were accepted by the then-Scottish Cabinet Secretary Mairi Gougeon, but not much has happened since, Salmon Scotland CEO Tavish Scott told SeafoodSource.
However, with the U.K. government now acknowledging that businesses across many industries are being hindered by red tape, Salmon Scotland has reiterated its call to have Griggs’s proposals implemented.
“If they were to really drive forward the recommendations that Griggs made in respect to that one-stop shop [framework], I think it would be advantageous both to the government and to the sector. It would make sure that Scotland is seen as open and ready to do business,” Scott said. “It doesn't stop any of the opposition. It doesn't stop people having the right to object to the applications. That's, of course, how it should be here in the United Kingdom.”
Scott underlined that the nation’s salmon-farming industry does not have an issue with the regulations in place to oversee the sector. The issues, instead, lie with the regulations’ inefficiency.
“We’ve got to be good environmental custodians of the areas we farm in; otherwise, we wouldn't be allowed to continue. We're rightly regulated on that. Good regulation also helps us sell fish. It's part of the package that we use for both sales and marketing,” he said. “It just needs to be done in the right way – whereby the regulators and government recognize that the most important people in the room aren't the fish producers; they’re the supermarkets, the buyers, and the consumers of fish. That's the bit I think government and regulators miss.”
Another thorn in the salmon industry’s side, as well as other stakeholders in the U.K. seafood industry as a whole, is the fact that the U.K. government has still not implemented digital export health certificates (EHCs), leaving seafood businesses with a pile of manual, laborious paperwork that, according to Salmon Scotland estimates, is costing salmon farmers alone around GBP 3 million (USD 4 million, EUR 3.6 million) a year in order to ship to the E.U.
“Frankly, we’d all like Defra [the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs] to move quicker on electronic health certificates. That's pretty much everyone in the seafood industry; we're all saying the same thing. We had genuinely hoped that with the change of government in London last summer that these things would be moving more quickly,” Scott said. “There's a quick win achievable with health certificates. Let’s make progress with those because it gives us all some progress. We'll support that. We'll applaud that.”
Additionally, waiting times still pose the most significant issue for exporters of time-sensitive seafood, so Salmon Scotland would also like to see Defra set up border control points on the west coast of Scotland to ease the movement of transported goods.
“For all of us in seafood, there hasn’t been the pace we would have liked out of the new government on these things. While we appreciate that Defra has got some major issues with the farming industry to deal with and we're probably a bit further down the pecking order, the salmon industry does provide the number one food export for the whole of the U.K. That makes us pretty significant,” Scott said.
In the meantime, the industry has been going to great lengths to try and meet its sustainability targets, with around GBP 1 billion (USD 1.3 billion, EUR 1.2 billion) spent on fish health and welfare alone in recent years. Scott also highlighted there’s constant investments being made in introducing hydrogen and electric power and retrofitting feed barges to cut down on noise and emissions. Concurrently, large sums are being spent in automating processing and packaging systems, according to Scott.
“In the broader context, seafood has to be part of the solution to the world's protein needs, and salmon is evidently a really good part of that. That's why our numbers continue to rise,” Scott said. “There are lots of consumer trends that are very positive for salmon. What the government needs to do is recognize how significant salmon is as part of this country’s seafood trade and then make sure it does its bit to unblock those areas that are causing us challenges – so we can grow sustainably.”
