BITE BACK - The Marine Bill

Written by staff reporter Friday, 30 May 2008 00:00

With just a few small areas left totally undamaged, but that Britain’s waters are among the worst affected in the world.

The map clearly shows that only the seas around Japan come close to the level of impact shown around our corner of the northeast Atlantic. Ben Halpern, the leading scientist on the report, expressed how shocked the team had been at the extent to which man’s activities had reached every corner of the world’s oceans. The report also made clear that, apart from global warming, the greatest threat to the oceans came from overfishing.

This latest study confirms the assessment of the World Conservation Union (ICUN) that the northeast Atlantic, along with the Mediterranean, has the highest numbers of threatened species. Yet even with this knowledge, and the repeated advice of their own fisheries scientists, the government, both at a national and local level, has repeatedly refused to offer protection to threatened marine creatures. The Shark Trust’s campaign to get protection for the rapidly disappearing angel shark is a case where persistence has finally paid off, and it will soon be illegal to intentionally target or harm one within English waters.

But what of the four species of longnosed skate, which were rejected for inclusion under the Wildlife and Countryside Act at the same time? Just one of those four species – the magnificent common skate, which can grow to more than 3m long – used to represent around 30 per cent of the UK’s skate and ray landings. It has now been eradicated from virtually all of our coastline.

At the local level the same failures are apparent. Lyme Bay, one of our coastal jewels with its unique ecosystem, has just had Dorset County Council reject the idea of making just ten per cent of it an exclusion zone. So the interests of a few fishermen are protected and the trashing of the bay’s coral beds and the steady eradication of its pink sea fans is allowed to continue.

Embarrassing as that map must be to the government ministers who have repeatedly failed to make any serious attempt to get to grips with the situation, they now have the opportunity to put that right with the publication of the long-overdue draft Marine Bill. This needs to set out holistic, robust and long-term solutions whereby the conservation needs of our seas are given priority over the competing commercial interests wanting to exploit its resources.

A chain of totally protected marine reserves are needed all around our island to give underwater life places where it can recover (go to www.marinereservesnow.org.uk to help MCS’s campaign). Over-fishing, excessive mineral extraction and marine pollution all need to be controlled.

Jonathan Shaw: as our Fisheries Minister, let this report be a wake-up call. Do what your predecessors were too timid to do and use the Marine Bill to change the current thinking around completely, so that the health of our seas is the first consideration and commercial operations are allowed to take place only when they can be shown to be sustainable. Mr Shaw can be contacted on This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , and if you’d like to remind Gordon Brown as well, then go to www.number10.gov.uk/output/Page821.asp and email him there.

I’ve never seen a common skate, and probably never will, but I’d like to think that my children’s children might at least be in with a chance.