Joel Relon

There's been a significant increase in Scottish catch, but catches in Wales and in England have actually gone down.

And the reason for that is the Scottish industry is by far the biggest.

And so you've got the kind of biggest fleets are catching more things like mackerel, which are caught by those big boats, but actually catches of the...

fish which is normally caught by smaller vessels, maybe more English vessels, has actually gone down.

So you've got a two-part story here.

Some people doing well, but others not doing so well at all.

And certain English fisheries have actually, not fisheries, fishers, have gone out of, not business altogether, but they've had to lay people off because they're not able to do as much as they were before.

So I think it's partly to do with the reallocation of quotas and so really leaning into those larger vessels.

So certain parts of industry have been able to do well.

But also it's to do with the fact that catching the fish is only one part of the story.

You also have to be able to sell it.

And who buys our fish?

It's Europeans.

There's not a big market for shellfish, those kind of things, in the UK particularly.

A lot of it goes to Belgium, France, Netherlands, countries like that.

And because of Brexit, it's become harder to export fish.

Some things are banned outright.

The EU has banned exports of bivalve mollusks, as they call them, which is an oyster or a muscle to you and me, because they say British waters aren't hygienic enough.

And also there's an issue with the paperwork at the border, which means slower export processes, which means fish just might perish.

So you can't get everything abroad as quickly as before.