The Adam Smith Institute has recently proposed that the Government should replace existing fishing quotas with “permanent, tradeable property rights, allocating each fisherman a fixed percentage share of the Total Allowable Catch in perpetuity.”

This would be a profound mistake.

Wild fish stocks are a public natural resource. The Government manages access to them on behalf of the public, balancing the interests of commercial fishing with conservation, recreational fishing, coastal communities, food security and the wider marine environment.

Astonishingly, the Adam Smith Institute’s proposal gives no consideration to recreational fishers, despite them being major users of the same public resource.  Commercial fishers are not the only stakeholders with a legitimate claim to the UK’s fish stocks!

Millions of people participate in recreational sea angling in the UK, supporting coastal economies through charter boats, tackle shops, accommodation, hospitality and tourism. Recreational anglers are not merely participants in a leisure activity, they are important users of a public resource.  In the case of bass, scientific assessments estimate recreational fishers catch more bass than commercial fishers.

Granting permanent fishing rights is effectively a privatisation of a public resource.  There are several problems with this:

• Future governments would lose much of their ability to adapt fisheries management as circumstances change.  This is already an issue with small-scale fishers wanting more fishing opportunities, but the Government’s hand being tied by current quota allocations.
  
• What would happen if stock levels decline? Recreational fishers would likely be pushed out of fisheries in favour of the commercial owners of perpetual fishing rights.  We have already seen a zero recreational bass bag limit in 2018, whilst commercial bass fishing continued.
  
• Where governments allocate valuable access to scarce public resources, the public should receive a fair return. Countries around the world already recover resource rents or charge fees for access to publicly owned natural resources. Rather than giving away fishing rights in perpetuity for free, we should instead be asking whether access to publicly owned fish stocks should require an ongoing rental payment to the public whose resource is being exploited.
  
• It would compound the original error the Government made of allocating quota for free, providing windfall gains for that generation of fishers who were given a valuable asset for free that they can now sell or lease.
  
• It would increase the barriers for young people to enter the sector, since it would increase the
  value of quota.
  
• tradeable quota systems typically result in fishing rights becoming concentrated in a few hands: large operators and financial investors, weakening the social fabric of coastal communities.

Fishing rights should exist to serve society, not the other way around. They should provide enough certainty for responsible fishing businesses to invest and prosper, while ensuring that governments retain the democratic authority to manage fisheries in the public interest.

The fundamental question is not whether commercial fishermen deserve certainty—they do. The question is whether any government has the right to give away a public resource in perpetuity, especially one that must serve many competing public interests and future generations. The answer should surely be no.

The UK’s fish stocks are part of our natural heritage. They should remain under public stewardship, with access granted on terms that balance economic prosperity with environmental sustainability, recreational opportunity and the interests of future generations—not permanently transferred into private ownership.