News story

Latent capacity fishing licence monitoring update

Update for fishermen whose licences were monitored as part of the 2015 capping exercise

red and white fishing boat at sea

In 2015 Defra carried out an exercise to address latent capacity in the under 10m English fishing fleet.

This process a resulted in a number of fishermen having their finfish licence capped at 350kgs and/or had their shellfish permit temporarily suspended. This exercise included an appeals process and a number of appeals were successful but subject to a monitoring period for 2 years. During this period those individuals were required to demonstrate evidence that fishing activity was above the capping/suspension limits.

As the monitoring period has ended for all those licences and permits the MMO will be notifying all relevant individuals on the outcome of this exercise in due course.

Published 22 July 2019