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Salmon Interactions Working Group Report

Letter to the Convener from the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs and Islands, Mairi Gougeon, 6 October 2021

Dear Finlay,

The Scottish Government response to the Salmon Interactions Working Group Report

The Minister for Environment and Land Reform, Mairi McAllan MSP and I are pleased to be able to provide you with a copy of the Scottish Government’s response to the Salmon Interactions Working Group (SIWG) Report, meeting a Programme for Government and Scottish Government and Scottish Green Party shared policy programme commitment.

The Salmon Interactions Working Group was established in 2018 to provide advice on the interactions between wild and farmed salmon and to consider the conclusions from two Scottish Parliament Fish Farming Inquiries (“Salmon Farming in Scotland” and “Environmental impacts of salmon farming”).

The final SIWG Report, published in May 2020, contains over 40 recommendations on a future approach for managing interactions between wild and farmed salmon in Scotland. We are grateful to the SIWG Chair, John Goodlad and members of the Group for progressing this crucial work.

The Government committed to moving beyond the status quo.

We have today published the Scottish Government's response to the SIWG report which sets out the actions which we will take to address the jointly agreed SIWG recommendations. The response can be read in full here: Scottish Government's response to the SIWG report 

The priority areas for action are outlined as follows:

• The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) will become the lead body responsible for managing the risk to wild salmonids from sea lice from fish farms.
• SEPA will consult on proposals for an adaptive spatially-based risk assessment framework for managing sea lice interactions between wild and farmed salmon, which will be applied through the Water Environment (Controlled Activities) (Scotland) Regulations 2011.
• We will take forward a programme of work to make fish farm containment measures and regulation more robust, including the introduction of penalties for fish farm escapes with the ultimate aim of ring-fencing or redistributing this money to support wild salmonid conservation and research.
• A Wild Salmon Strategy will be published by the end of 2021 which will provide an overarching framework to tackle the pressures on wild salmon.

Today, Marine Scotland Science also publishes its first assessment of genetic introgression in wild salmon in Scotland. This work was funded by the Scottish Government and samples were collected as part of National Electrofishing Programme for Scotland, supported by Crown Estate Scotland. I was pleased to be able to announce additional funding of around £650,000 to extend the salmon counter network which will lead to improvements in salmon population monitoring.

The measures which we have announced today follow the recent launch of an independent review of fish farming regulatory processes being led by Professor Russel Griggs.

We are working to improve the policy and regulatory framework progressively to reduce environmental impacts and ensure a sustainable future for Scottish aquaculture – a sector that is absolutely vital to Scotland’s rural communities and supports many more jobs across its supply chain.

We look forward to progressing this programme of work in collaboration with the fish farming and recreational fisheries sectors, in addition to making progress towards a Scottish Government led Vision for aquaculture with an enhanced emphasis on environmental protection and community benefits in 2022.

I hope that the Committee will find this update helpful.

Yours sincerely,

Mairi Gougeon