Not so appealing… Scottish salmon farmers launch legal appeals to undermine SEPA’s weak attempts to control sea lice

Showing their true colours, Scotland’s salmon farming companies have just appealed en masse against the Scottish Environment Protection Agency’s sea lice regulatory framework, which has been over ten years in the making.

As readers will be well aware, WildFish campaigned for many years for stronger regulatory oversight of the Scottish fish farming industry to control the impact on wild salmonids of sea lice emanating from marine fish farms.

In 2015, WildFish lodged a formal Petition with the Scottish Parliament, calling on the Scottish Government to strengthen Scottish legislative and regulatory control of marine fish farms.

That WildFish 2015 Petition triggered two more Scottish Parliamentary Committees, the Environment Climate Change and Land Reform Committee (ECCLR) and Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee (REC), to conduct enquiries and issue reports, both published in 2018, both concluding that stronger regulatory control of salmon farms was needed to protect wild salmonids as a priority – “the status quo is not an option”.

WildFish’s specific concern was the lacuna in the law (that WildFish had pointed out on many occasions) that the Aquaculture and Fisheries (Scotland) Act 2007 addressed sea lice control on fish farms only for the purpose of securing the animal welfare of the farmed fish, but did not address the impact of the massive release of sea lice from fish farms on wild salmonids.

Although the Scottish Government denied for many years that the lacuna existed at all, it relented and charged SEPA in 2020 with using its powers under the Controlled Activities Regulations to apply conditions to fish farm licences to control the impact on wild salmonids of sea lice emanating from the fish farms.

At a snail’s pace, and following exhaustive consultation exercises, SEPA came forward with very weak plans to introduce amendments to fish farm licences, at last requiring some inadequate site-specific limits on the number of adult female sea lice permissible on farmed fish.

So poor were SEPA’s plans that last year WildFish and the Coastal Communities Network submitted a formal representation to Environmental Standards Scotland on SEPA’s plans, which we consider fail to meet legal obligations under a range of international, assimilated (ex-European Union) and domestic law. ESS is now taking our complaint forward.

WildFish has now lodged a detailed representation on the fish farm companies appeals against SEPA’s proposed new controls – on the basis that some control of sea lice is better than none at all.

And we hope and trust that Scottish Ministers will ultimately kick the salmon farming companies’ appeals into touch.

However, what all this really shows is that the decision WildFish made to launch Off The Table, our public campaign aimed at persuading consumers and the catering industry to stop serving Scottish farmed salmon, has been entirely justified.

We now call on all our fellow environmental and fisheries groups in Scotland and across the world to recognise what we’re all dealing with here and support us.

There can be no compromise on salmon farming, or with any of the salmon farming companies.

By: Guy Linley-Adams

Solicitor