Meeting of the Parliament 18 November 2025
My Western Isles constituency can boast a long and proud fishing heritage. If a fishing vessel has an SY or CY registration, she is likely to be one of the smaller, locally owned vessels that form the economic backbone of many communities from Lewis to Vatersay.
It would be fair to say that fishing communities across Scotland have faced challenging times, not least because of the empty promises that were made to them during the Brexit referendum and the lowly position accorded to fishing in the UK’s negotiating priorities with Europe before and since then by successive Tory and Labour Governments.
Scottish fishing vessels have seen employment fall by some 15 per cent between 2015 and 2024, and the fishing sector in the Western Isles has experienced a drop in employment of nearly a third, with 274 fishing jobs in 2023-24 compared with 376 in 2019-20. Therefore, when I attended the annual general meeting of the Western Isles Fishermen’s Association in Uist recently, it came as little surprise to hear fishers’ reaction to the recent news that the UK Government intends to award less than 8 per cent of the UK coastal growth fund to Scottish fishing communities. Indeed, people’s views on that subject were made very clear to me by several people at the meeting literally before I got in the door—and little wonder.
The UK Labour Government’s decision to give Scotland’s fishermen 7.78 per cent of the UK’s £360 million coastal growth fund is justified by Labour on the basis that it represents Scotland’s so-called Barnett share—that is to say, the figure is reached by looking at Scotland’s share of the UK electorate; it is not based on our share of UK fish landings, as previous allocations have been. It is difficult to see—despite some of the arguments on offer from members today—how any UK Government that had thought about it could see any justification for moving away from counting fish to counting people as the basis for such allocations.
The difference between the two calculations is pretty enormous, given that some 70 per cent by tonnage of the fish landed in the UK in 2023 was landed in Scotland. The Scottish Government had sought funding of £166 million—a 46 per cent share—based on precedent, but that was ignored by the UK in favour of a Barnett-based share that gives Scotland only £28 million. The UK Labour Government’s decision has directly cost Scotland’s fishing communities, including those in my own constituency, some £138 million—and that is before we open up the question of how much Scotland previously received in EU funding pre-Brexit.